Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (48 page)

Tesla, of course, did not inject ozone into people; however, he did construct an electrotherapeutic device for Scherff’s wife, who was suffering from an ailment at that time. “I believe that it will do you and Mrs. Scherff a lot of good,” Tesla wrote, adding for the sally, “unless you have no electric
supply circuit in your home, in which case, it will be necessary to move into other quarters.”
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Throughout 1909 and 1910 the inventor shuffled back and forth between Providence, Bridgeport, and New York City, where he had installed various renditions of his turbines. Most of the development work was at Bridgeport.

“I am now at work on new ideas of an automobile, locomotive and lathe in which these inventions of mine are embodied and which cannot help [but] prove a colossal success,” he wrote Scherff. “The only trouble is to get the cash, but it cannot last very long before my money will come in a torrent and then you can call on me for anything you like.” He added optimistically in another letter, “Things are developing very favorably, and it seems that my wireless dream will be realized before next summer.”
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In March 1910, Owen’s wife gave birth to their first son, Robert Underwood Johnson Jr., but in the spring a potential disaster of foreboding invaded the Tesla circle when it was announced that John Jacob Astor and his son Vincent were lost at sea. The inventor was one of the many who rejoiced when the news arrived that one of the ten richest men in the world (and his son) emerged unscathed. It is uncertain to what extent Astor contributed to Tesla’s work with the turbine, however, there is some evidence that the inventor installed a hydrofoil jet engine in a “mysterious craft” Astor had docked in the Harlem River. The
New York Times
reported that the vehicle “seemed to embody an airship with a practical water craft.”
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If this was a radical flying machine which Tesla was working on, both he and Astor made sure that the reporters were kept away. One of the advantages of such a prototype was that the danger of death resulting from experimental flights could be minimized, since the craft was theoretically set up to hover only above water.

Feeling well on the way to success, Tesla wrote his friend Charles Scott at the Westinghouse Corporation for an order of a million induction motors to drive his turbines. “But as I have learned to go slow,” he added to the letter, “I shall take only one at first.”
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In November 1910, with his newfound tidal wave of momentum, he moved his headquarters to the prestigious forty-eight-story Metropolitan Towers, located at 1 Madison Avenue, just across the way from the Garden. With an office suite on the twentieth floor, right beneath the skyscraper’s famous tower clock, the inventor could look out on the burgeoning metropolis from the tallest building in the world to plan his next move for the recapture of his holy grail, his world-telegraphy scheme.

November 8, 1910

My dear Mr. Hammond [Jr.],

I was glad to read the enclosed newspaper reports. This is water on my mill. Just go ahead and make a lot of money and I will sue for infringement and we will divide.

Yours sincerely,
N. Tesla
¹

I
t is unclear as to exactly when, and in what capacity, John Hays Hammond Sr. became involved financially with Nikola Tesla. John O’Neill, who knew the inventor for nearly forty years, wrote in his biography that Hammond Senior gave Tesla a gift of $10,000 for the development of the telautomaton, which was unveiled in 1898.
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John Hays Hammond Jr., or “Jack” Hammond, contradicted this assertion, writing twelve years after the book’s publication, “My father was financing one of his later inventions and in this way, I had the opportunity of meeting him even while I was at Yale (1907-1910).”
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Thus, based on Jack’s letter, Hammond Senior most likely helped finance Tesla’s bladeless turbine, although he may have invested in Wardenclyffe or some other enterprise.

In either case, it is unlikely that Hammond presented Tesla with an outright “gift,” so it is clear that at least part of O’Neill’s statement is incorrect. One of Hammond Senior’s oldest friends stemming from childhood was Darius Ogden Mills. Both men grew up as California gold miners.
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Mills, a long-standing friend of Stanford White’s, became a principal in the Edison Illuminating Company back in 1883, along with J. Pierpont Morgan.
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As a business associate of John Jacob Astor in the late 1890s, Mills was involved in the financing of the Niagara Falls enterprise
and probably invested in Tesla’s company as well. Tesla also knew Hammond’s brother Richard, who had been to Niagara Falls to hear the inventor’s invocation.

Having correctly anticipated a “depression” resulting from Grover Cleveland’s 1892 election, Hammond had traveled with his wife and family to South Africa to run the Bernarto Brothers’ gold and diamond mines. Thus, he was on the other side of the globe at the time of Tesla’s work in telautomatics. Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that through Mills, Hammond participated in the venture. Jack Hammond, who would have been ten years old in 1898, would have therefore learned about this technology at an impressionable age. As the focus of Jack’s extraordinary career revolved around his work in radio-guided weaponry systems, this early Tesla connection would help explain his ardent interest. Although Jack made no secret of crediting Tesla as being the primary inventor of telautomatics, he may still have wished to suppress Tesla’s ultimate role in influencing so greatly the direction his life would take.

According to Jack Hammond’s research, “Prof. Ernest Wilson in 1897 controlled a torpedo on the Thames by Hertzian waves. He is the pioneer inventor in this art.”
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John Hays Hammond Sr., whose life became fictionalized as the “heroic Clay in
Soldiers of Fortune,
”
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was the ultimate daredevil. Born in 1855, Hammond’s maternal grandfather, Col. John Coffee Hays, was a Texas Ranger and the first sheriff of the “wickedest city in the world,” the seaport and bonanza town of San Francisco. Raised in California during the gold rush, Hammond’s father, Richard Pindell Hammond, was a West Point graduate and a friend of Robert E. Lee’s and also Franklin Pierce. Hammond was also a gold miner and federal tax collector for the port of San Francisco.

Schooled at Yale University with a major in mining, Hammond continued his studies in the mid-1870s in Europe. After his return, the energetic adventurer set out for the Sierra Madre in his search for silver and gold. Traveling with his family and brother Richard, Hammond encountered Apache Indians on the warpath and Mexican desperadoes in his quest for buried treasure. “By way of encouragement,” Hammond stated, “my wife frequently declared that in case Dick and I should be killed, she would faithfully promise to shoot: first the women,…then her child and then herself, rather than have them fall into the hands of the Indians.”
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Other excursions included travel through alligator-infested swamps in Central America and “the cannibal country of Columbia.”
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Successful in
finding gold in Guatemala, Hammond also opened up lead and silver mines throughout Mexico and the Midwest. In 1891, with a six-gun strapped to each hip, he helped quell a violent mining strike in Montana; but in 1893, unhappy with the new Democratic administration, he decided to leave America, taking his family with him, to fulfill his childhood dream of searching for diamonds in the depths of the Dark Continent.

Placed in charge of the British Consolidated Gold Fields, Hammond made his fortune when he realized that searching for diamonds twenty-five hundred feet under the ground would be much more lucrative when this type of land was selling for $10 per acre, whereas shallow mining stakes were going for $40,000 per acre.
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Among his children, the most precocious was a five-year-old named John Hays Hammond Jr., or Jack. There was also Harris, six years Jack’s elder, Richard, a younger brother, and Nathalie, a little sister.

Swept into the Boer War in 1896, Hammond was arrested by the Transvaal government. Captured with Cecil Rhodes and the infamous Dr. Jameson, who had led a revolt against the Dutch, the elite members of the mining syndicate were sentenced to death by firing squad. With a plea from the U.S. secretary of state and perhaps a nudge from Mark Twain, who was in South Africa at the time, they were finally able to buy their way out. According to Hammond, Twain had informed the Dutch that they had captured “some of the wealthiest bugs in the world.” President Krueger placed the ransom at $600,000, or $125,000 a piece. With Rhodes fronting the booty, the deal was struck, and they were released. Hammond, with his wife and family, were free to return to the States. He would pay back his share with future profits from new mining ventures.

Considered one of the wealthiest industrialists in the world, with a list of friends that included three presidents and former Yale classmate William Howard Taft, John Hays Hammond Sr. became a natural choice for vice president. Resigning from the Guggenheim copper coalition, Hammond sought the position as Taft’s running mate with full vigor in 1908,
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during the initial years of Tesla’s partnership with his son Jack.

After a short stay in England in 1900, the Hammond family returned to the States and took up residence in Washington, D.C. Hammond Senior also had an office on Wall Street and a summer home in New Jersey. Having a keen interest in inventors, the mining engineer invited many of them to his home. Included on the list were Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Tom Edison, Nikola Tesla, and the Wright brothers.
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In 1901, when Jack was just twelve years old, he was invited with his father to Menlo Park. There Edison, who was working on “a new process to extract gold
from South African ore, showed Jack models of his first phonograph, and gave the youth some original sketches. It may have been this contact,” Hammond speculated, “that stimulated my son’s interest in the study of electricity.”
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Shortly after Jack entered Yale in 1906, he began to study Tesla’s inventions. He also worked for Alexander Graham Bell. Thus, it was during his college years that his interest in remote control became (re)awakened. “Tesla and Bell were, so to speak, my scientific god-fathers,” Jack wrote in his diary. “I found them deeply inspiring.”
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Jack’s “experiments started in early 1908, when he developed an electric steering and [also an] engine control for a boat…[finding] that he could control this mechanism over short distances with a radio impulse.”
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It was at this time that the Hammonds set up permanent residence on the harbor at the fishing village of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and it was there that the enthusiastic engineering student performed most of his investigations. Destined to have more patents than any American inventor except Tom Edison, Jack began his interest in inventing during his New Jersey prep-school years. His first significant creation, at age sixteen, was a reverse switch which automatically turned off his night light when the headmaster opened his dorm door to check to see if he was reading after curfew.
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After this, the floodgates were opened, and by the end of his career, John Hays Hammond Jr. had amassed an astounding array of over eight hundred patents, including inventions in the fields of military warfare, music and sound (no relation to W. H. Hammond of electricorgan fame), and home appliances. Some of Jack’s most unique contributions include a cigarette case which “popped out a lit cigarette when opened,” a microwave oven, a push-button radio, a superheterodyne (which greatly amplified radio waves and was coincident with Edwin Armstrong), aircraft guidance systems, a time-controlled gas bomb, a magnetic bottle cap, a combination piano-radio-phonograph, a windshield washer, a mobile housing unit, and a “telestereographer,” or “mechanism for projecting three-dimensional images via wireless.”
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In September 1909, during his senior year, the budding wunderkind wrote to his father to arrange for a meeting with the “Serbian High Priest of Telautomatics.”
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“Father, I have some important information that I desire to get from Mr. Tesla.”
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Hammond Senior, who had just lost his bid for the vice-presidential slot, made the arrangements. Jack met the fifty-three-year-old inventor at his Metropolitan Towers office in New York the week of September 26, and it is most likely that Tesla reciprocated by visiting Gloucester shortly thereafter. Hammond requested that Tesla send his patent information on wireless control of machinery, and Tesla did so before the end of the month.
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Moonlighting at the patent office in Washington D.C., Jack had already rigged, by this time, a forty-foot vessel to be maneuvered by means of wireless. His broadcasting system, in part based on a Marconi design, also utilized Tesla oscillators and contained “two 360-foot radio control towers near the laboratory overlooking Freshwater Cove…With these devices, a man standing at a shore lookout station could steer an empty boat in the water.”
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Jack also asked Tesla to speak at his Yale graduation.
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This period in Tesla’s life was marked by extreme bitterness because Marconi was rewarded for his piracy with the Nobel Prize in December. Tesla informed Jack that the Italian tinkerer had “abandoned the old devices of Hertz and Lodge and substituted mine instead. In this manner the transmission across the Atlantic was effected.”
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Jack, however, held no ill will toward Marconi and included him prominently in the four-volume compendium he was writing on the history of wireless communication. He also invited Marconi to the Gloucester compound and formed a friendship that would last well into the 1930s.
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Having returned from a European excursion, where he had visited electrical engineers (and psychic researchers) in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, Jack was able to complete his master’s dissertation:

Mr. Tesla in 1892 showed that the true Hertzian effect was not a means by which it was possible for a sending station to communicate with a receiving station at any great distance. He demonstrated furthermore, that waves propagated at a transmitting station travelled along the ground as a conductor. Today [1912] it is acknowledged that these views are correct. It was, however, left to the splendid enterprise of Marconi to crystallize the results of previous investigators into a complete and practical system of space telegraphy…In 1897 Mr. Marconi transmitted messages to a distance of 8.7 miles. Today Mr. Marconi says that the maximum effective distance of transmission is 6,000 miles.
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Perturbed with Hammond’s decision to highlight Marconi’s dubious achievements and proceed in his field of remote control, Tesla sought compensation. Working with Fritz Lowenstein and Alexander Graham Bell, Jack invented a “mechanical dog” which followed its “master” when a lantern was beamed at it. Created in the shape of a milk carton on wheels, the “critter” made use of selenium cells for “eyes” to receive the glimmering command signal. Hammond assured Tesla that he was not infringing upon his work in telautomatics, but Tesla remained unconvinced, especially after an article in the newspapers reported that Hammond was in the midst of displaying remote controlled torpedoes to the military.

My dear Mr. Hammond,

Judging from the enclosed, I think that you are playing a
wireless possum. Notwithstanding your assurances, I will watch your progress and bring a friendly suit for infringement as soon as I ascertain that you are in funds.
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Jack wrote back to reconfirm that he would give proper credit, but Tesla wanted a contract and a percentage of any profits.

“My dear Mr. Tesla,” the twenty-two-year-old wrote back, “I am very agreeable to share the profits with you, but I shall only on the condition that you share our liabilities also.”
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“As I naturally surmise that your Papa would pay all our liabilities,” Tesla replied, “I am willing to share in these.”
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Aside from the banter, Tesla was hoping that Hammond would succeed in his interface with the military, for now he would have a market for selling his new bladeless engines. Soon a partnership was formed, Hammond Senior footing the bill.

“Go in on this with your brother Harris,” Jack’s father cautioned. “He is older than you and more experienced. And be careful with Mr. Tesla. He tends to spend gold as if it were copper.”

Having studied Tesla’s method of selective tuning, Jack came to call it the “1903 prophetic genius patent.”
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Tesla had created this invention due to a recurrent problem which he had noticed in 1894-95, namely, that he had been having difficulty illuminating particular bulbs in his laboratory without illuminating others. After studying the work of Herbert Spencer on the combined action of two or more nerves in the human body, the inventor came upon a plan whereby bulbs would illuminate only when a combination of more than one frequency was transmitted. Jack noted that “Mr. Tesla resembles his system to a combination lock.”
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Explaining the particulars to the initiate, Tesla showed that devices could be made to respond not only to one frequency but to two, three, or even more. This combined arrangement, analogous to today’s TV and telephone scramblers, would not only ensure privacy, it would also allow for a system with a virtually unlimited number of separate channels.
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