Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (32 page)

For the next series of experiments, Lowenstein was in charge of the transmitter, and Tesla attended to his numerous receivers. Lowenstein recalled, “I handled myself the big transmitter sending two vibrations through the ground by two separate secondary circuits…Mr. Tesla would then…go outside of the building leaving me instructions for continuously switching the oscillator on and off in certain intervals…I don’t know how far he went, but by the time he came back again…[in] the afternoon, you may easily build an idea how far Mr. Tesla could have gone at the time I was standing at the switch.”
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In 1916, Tesla stated that he occasionally conducted experiments as far as ten miles from the station.

On the eve of July 4, one of the most stupendous electrical storms ever recorded in the region rocked Pikes Peak. “Observations made last night. They were not to be easily forgotten for more than one reason. First of all a magnificent sight was afforded by the extraordinary display of lightning, no less than 10,000-12,000 discharges being witnessed inside of two hours…Some…were of a wonderful brilliancy and showed often 10 or twice as many branches.”
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While tracking the storm with his sensitive receiving apparatus, Tesla noticed that even though the storm had passed out of sight, the instruments “began to play periodically.” This was experimental verification of “stationary waves,” periodic electronic vibrations impressed upon the earth itself. Also troughs and nodal points were detected. “It is now certain that they can be produced with an oscillator,” Tesla wrote in his notebook, and then added in brackets, “[This is of immense importance.]”
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Tesla wrote to his secretary the same day: “Dear Mr. Scherff, I have received messages from the clouds 100 miles away.” And two days later: “We have just about finished all [the] details; my work is really to begin in earnest right now.”
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My dear Luka,

Everybody is after me since I was favored by the “Martians.”…My friend J. Collier…has persuaded me to make a short statement regarding the subject of interplanetary communication.

Yours sincerely,
Nikola Tesla
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T
he Colorado notebook is virtually a daily record of Tesla’s work at the time. Nowhere in the notes can there be found a distinct passage of the pivotal moment when he received unidentified impulses that he came to attribute to extraterrestrials; however, he does refer, on December 8, to this event, writing to friend and columnist Julian Hawthorne: “The art of transmitting electrical energy through the natural media…will…perhaps make it possible for [man] to produce…wonderful changes and transformation on the surface of our globe as are, to all evidence, now being wrought by intelligent beings on a neighboring planet.”
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And just a few weeks later, during the holiday season, while still in Colorado, Tesla, in a Christmas message to the local Red Cross Society “when it asked me to indicate one of the great possible achievements of the next hundred years,”
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wrote: “I have observed electrical actions, which have appeared inexplicable. Faint and uncertain though they were, they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge, that ere long all human beings on this globe, as one, will turn [their] eyes to the firmament above, with the feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news: ‘Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one…two…three…’”
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Throughout July, Tesla was carefully monitoring the electrical activity
of the earth, verifying that it had a specific geomagnetic pulse and harmonics off of that pulse. On the twenty-eighth, he worked on increasing the sensitivity of his receivers by “magnifying the effects of feeble disturbances.” The inventor had tuned his equipment so carefully that “in one instance the devices recorded effects of lightning discharges fully 500 miles away, judging from the periodical action of the discharges as the storm moved away.”
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Thus, he reasoned, he did not have to test transmitted oscillations by installing a receiver fifty, two hundred, or five hundred miles away, as he was already proving that this could be accomplished simply by monitoring these distant electrical storms. This was one way Tesla rationalized his decision not to conduct long-distance experiments; he had verification that they would work.
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Three days later, on August 1, the inventor departed from writing out his growing file of complex equations to compose a discourse of four thousand words on the atmosphere and the climate. In these passages, he describes the “baffling power of the moonlight” for taking night photographs, the “amazing brilliancy of the stars,” magnificent sunsets and shooting stars, the peculiar ability of voices to travel several miles from the center of town to his laboratory, the “curious phenomena of the rapid formation and disappearance of cloud formations,” and the numerous unusual shapes that appeared therein.

“The days were clear with just enough clouds in the sky to break the monotony of the blue,” he wrote. “No wonder…people in feeble health are getting on here so well…I soon learned there were thousands of consumptives in the place…and concluded that while this climate is certainly in a wonderful degree healthful and invigorating, only two kinds of people should come here: Those
who have
the consumption and those
who want to get it
…” Placing himself back into the mood of scientific observations, he ended the essay with the following line: “But the most interesting of all are the electrical observations which will be described presently.”
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It appears likely that this sudden burst of poetic reverie could be attributed to the mystical moment he had encountered three nights earlier while monitoring his equipment alone at the lab.

This event, which was to alter his destiny in many ways, as we have seen, did not come out of the blue. Tesla had been planning for nearly a decade to make contact.

Talking With the Planets

Nikola Tesla

The idea of communicating with other worlds…has been regarded as a poet’s dream forever unrealizable…

[Having] perfected the apparatus…for the observation of feeble effects [from] approaching thunderstorms…so far from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains, I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical charge that occurred in a radius of eleven hundred miles.

I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth…There was present something mysterious, not to say supernatural, but at the time the idea of those disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me…

It was sometime afterward when the thought dashed upon my mind that th[ose] disturbances might be due to intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning…the feeling is constantly growing on me that I have been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.
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As the inventor admits, the night he received the signals he did not attribute them to extraterrestrials. Most likely he first thought that they were periodic oscillations stemming from the thunderstorms that he was monitoring. A few days later, it began to dawn upon him that the metronome nature of the beats did not correlate with the supposition that they were linked to lightning discharges. The article also speculated that they may have stemmed from Venus or Mars. Two decades later, in 1921, Tesla wrote:

Others may scoff at this suggestion…[of] communicat[ing] with one of our heavenly neighbors, as Mars…or treat it as a practical joke, but I have been in deep earnest about it ever since I made my first observations in Colorado Springs…

At the time, there existed no wireless plant other than mine that could produce a disturbance perceptible in a radius of more than a few miles. Furthermore, the conditions under which I operated were ideal, and I was well trained for the work. The character of the disturbances recorded precluded the possibility of their being of terrestrial origin, and I also eliminated the influence of the sun, moon and Venus. As I then announced, the signals consisted in a regular repetition of numbers, and subsequent study convinced me that they must have emanated from Mars, the planet having just then been close to the earth.
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Note slight alterations from the original article and letter to the Red
Cross. In the 1901 article Tesla does not single out Mars as the only possible source of the impulses. Venus or other planets are also mentioned. In the 1921 article he says that Venus had been ruled out. Clearly this had to occur over two years after the event, that is, some time
after
the 1901 article which still included Venus as a possibility. “After mature thought and study,” Tesla himself dates his “positive conclusion that they must [have] emanate[d] from Mars” to the year 1907.
¹⁰
In the Red Cross letter and the 1901 article Tesla is very specific in mentioning three beats. In the 1921 article the number of beats is obscured. Julian Hawthorne, who had written to Tesla while he was in Colorado Springs and who met with Tesla in New York upon his return, also refers to “three fairy taps.” Tesla also alters the facts with regard to competing wireless operators. While Tesla was in Colorado, he received a number of letters from George Scherff concerning competitors. For example on August 1, 1899:

Dear Mr. Tesla,

Mr. Clark, the experimenter in wireless telegraphy called this morning seeking a powerful oscillator or information on how to build one.
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In August and September 1899, Scherff continued to inform Tesla about Clark, who could send messages three miles, thereby obtaining employment by a New York newspaper to report yacht races. Other wireless operators at this time included Professor D’Azar in Rome, Professor Marble in Connecticut, and Dr. Riccia in France.
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And, of course, there was Guglielmo Marconi, who captured the imagination of the media during the America’s Cup races that autumn. Although Scherff wrote, “The
New York Times
continues to boom Marconi,”
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Tesla confidently replied, on September 22, 1899, to Scherff, “Do not worry about me. I am about a century ahead of the other fellows.”
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Tesla, as one of numerous adherents to the group-fantasy belief that Mars was inhabited, assumed that the impulses stemmed from there. In 1899 it was frankly inconceivable to him that he could have intercepted a competitor’s message. However, the fact of the matter is that Marconi was transmitting messages hundreds of miles across Europe and the English Channel during the summer of 1899 and was using as a signal the Morse-code letter S (dot-dot-dot), which precisely corresponds to the three beats Tesla said he intercepted while he was in Colorado.
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On July 28, the very date it has been hypothesized that Tesla received the signals, Marconi was with the British Admiralty and the French Navy in the English Channel, demonstrating his wireless apparatus between ships in mock battle maneuvers over distances of thirty miles, fifty-five miles, and eighty-six miles. “On 28 July, Marconi had inspected [the ship]
Alexandra’s
equipment in preparation for hostilities.”
¹⁶
Most likely he
transmitted the letter S at that time to see if it was picked up by the other warcraft. If Tesla was monitoring his equipment at twelve midnight, it would have been about 8:00 A.M. in England, so the times correlate as well.

At first, Tesla must have sincerely believed that the source of the impulses were extraterrestrial, for he boldly stated as much in a series of published articles.
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A few years later, the awful truth dawned upon him. Worse, Tesla may have intercepted Marconi’s impulses and made a fool of himself by claiming they had derived from superior intelligences. Marconi for Tesla was anathema. In 1921, ironically, while Marconi was making headlines by trying himself to intercept messages from nearby planets, Tesla wrote: “I was naturally very much interested in [recent] reports that these supposed planetary signals were nothing else than interfering undertones of wireless transmitters. These disturbances I observed for the first time from 1906-1907 occurred rarely, but subsequently they increased in frequency. Every transmitter emits undertones, and these give by interference long beats, the wavelength being anything from 50 miles to 300 or 400 miles.”
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This statement supports the hypothesis that the 1899 impulses also stemmed from some competitor. Furthermore Tesla suggests the actual mechanism for his encounter: an undertone effect; and it appears that he unfortunately also provided, through Marconi’s piracy, the very oscillators used to transmit the signals! The transmitter on the high seas in England, therefore, was attuned to the receiving equipment in Colorado. Coincidentally, this realization in 1906-1907 occurred, as we shall see, during a time of great emotional stress. Rather than face the truth, the mystical Serb clung to a supernatural explanation.

The most ardent proponent of the outer-space scenario was undoubtedly the journalist Julian Hawthorne. The son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julian authored a series of elaborate treatises on Tesla’s philosophy, laboratory work, experiments in interplanetary communication, and place in history. Perhaps because he had engaged in a spectacular duel of articles with his brother-in-law George Lathrop, who wrote science-fiction tales about Tom Edison battling invaders from Mars in Arthur Brisbane’s
New York Journal,
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Hawthorne took up Tesla’s extraterrestrial cause.

The competition between Edison and Tesla would never abate, and it continued even into the realm of science fiction. Like many creative individuals, Edison had an interest in the occult. With Charles Batchelor, he had studied telepathy,
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and he had worked with spiritualists on a “telephone” to communicate with departed souls. Edison was interested in space travel and interplanetary communication. Lathrop, who had married Julian’s sister, had worked with Edison since the mid-1890s in cowriting a number of articles that became the precursors to latter-day fantastic tales.
In Lathrop’s story “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” when the Red Planet warriors invaded the earth, the Wizard of Menlo Park “invented a disintegrating ray…and it was ‘Edison to the Rescue of the Universe.’”
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The son of Nathaniel Hawthorne would not be outdone.

And How Will Tesla Reply to Those Signals From Mars?

Julian Hawthorne

The other day, there happened to Mr. Tesla the most momentous experience that has ever visited a human being of this earth—three fairy taps, one after the other, at a fixed interval travelling with the speed of light were received by Tesla in Colorado from some Tesla on the planet Mars!

No thoughtful man can have much doubt then, that little as we are aware of it, we must for ages have been subjected to the direct inspection of the men of Mars and of the older planets. They visit us and look us over year after year; and report at home: “They’re not ready yet!” But at length a Tesla is born, and the starry men are on the watch for developments. Possibly they guide his development; who can tell?
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Perhaps more than any other writer, Hawthorne elevated Tesla to the order of an interplanetary Adonis whose mystical destiny upon the earth was to give its inhabitants electrical power, instrumentation, and enlightenment. Note the overblown yet elegant description Hawthorne pens in meeting with the sorcerer: “Ever and anon there appears a man who is both scientist and poet [who] walks with feet on the ground but with head among the stars. Men of this mark are rare. Pythagoras was one; Newton must have had a touch of the inspirational; in our own times Tesla is the man…He was born in Herzogovina, of Greek stock, one of the oldest families there. I believe he is a prince at home.”
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