Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (71 page)

Meanwhile, the power monopolists were poised to grab as much money as possible. When Tesla's inventions made it possible to send electrical power from huge waterfalls across the states, tycoons prepared to make fortunes in utility companies. These captains of industry wanted the 60-cycle-per- second AC power system to continue to grow and cover the earth with power poles, transformers and wires. Transmission towers would march up and down mountainsides and across deserts. Power companies would dam rivers for hydro power and make the people pay for every watt sent over the companies' copper wires. The power magnates did not want the inventor to uproot this growing forest of money trees. J. Pierpont Morgan pulled the strings that formed the huge company General Electric, for example, and had already bought up copper mines knowing that transmission wires would eventually crisscross every industrialized continent.

But Tesla was a discoverer, not a business shark. His new plan was wireless transmission of energy—free energy for anyone who sticks a tuned receiver into the ground while Tesla's tuned transmitter was resonating frequencies!

The financiers on Wall Street didn't catch the drift of Tesla's "wireless" talk right away. The plan was so futuristic that it was literally over everyone's head. But he was giving enough clues for anyone who had been ready to catch his vision. In the same year that the lighting of the World's Fair dazzled society, he talked about "earth resonance" at a lecture to the prestigious Franklin Institute. Earth resonance was part of his vision for wireless power. The secret is sending out the correct frequency—speed of vibration—with electrical pulses. Just as a piano string will vibrate when another instrument at a distance hits the same note as its tuned frequency, wireless receivers would resonate with the transmitter frequencies. The power would be tuned in just like you tune in a radio station. Some Tesla researchers also believe that he could have resonated the cavity between the ionosphere and the ground. Just like the cavity within a violin, this spherical Schumann cavity has its own resonant frequency.
Disregarding the danger of making his own previous inventions obsolete, in the next few years he thought up the processes necessary for futuristic wireless transmission. While the business community assumed he was talking about wireless communications signals only, he had a far grander plan—sending power wirelessly in order that anyone at any place on the planet could plug into freely-available electricity. Before his financiers figured out where Tesla's research was leading, it was briefly funded by men such as Colonel John Jacob Astor as well as Morgan.

The same year that Tesla's generator turned on the power from Niagara Falls, he suffered a major setback. One night in March of 1895 his laboratory burned down, with all files and apparatus destroyed. When he returned from a meeting, he discovered the smoking mess of twisted metal that had fallen through two floors to the foundations of the building. Afterward he wandered through the streets in a daze for hours. The loss of his papers meant that he could not document what he had been working on. For example, later that year the discovery of X-rays by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was made public. Tesla's papers could have proven that he had been the first to take pictures by X-ray.

GOD OF LIGHTNING

Next Tesla concentrated on patenting his methods for sending power and messages wirelessly. In 1889 to 1890, Tesla moved his operations to the high country of Colorado Springs, Colorado, to test his new ideas and develop the art of tuned radio frequency. He built a high-voltage laboratory on a hillside cow pasture. Inside his lab was the world's largest Tesla coil, and the building was topped by a flagpole-like structure. While experimenting on a massive scale, toward his new goal of sending electromagnetic vibrations throughout Earth, he predicted that Tesla coils could also be pocket-size message receiving devices.

Tesla's God of Lightning experiments in Colorado Springs were truly dramatic. Thunder reverberated for at least 15 miles when he fired up the electrical discharges. His massive 52-foot diameter Tesla coils discharged more than 12 million volts at a burst, and threw electric sparks of more than a hundred feet in length from the copper ball on top of his pole. The townspeople sometimes thought his laboratory was on fire. The ground under their feet was so highly charged that spectators at a distance from the laboratory would see tiny sparks between their heels and the sandy soil when they walked, according to biographer Margaret Cheney. Half a mile away, horses would get a shock from their metal horseshoes and would bolt in panic.

The inventor did start a fire one day, when his "magnifying transmitter" experiment accidentally burned out the power plant for the town of Colorado Springs. The town went dark and the overloaded dynamo was in flames. It took Tesla's team of technicians a week to repair the town's generator. WARDENCLYFFE

Satisfied that he knew enough to carry out his magnificent vision of a world telegraphy system and wireless power, Tesla returned to New York. He hired an architect to design a building with a 154 foot high wooden tower, to be used as a huge transmitter. The tower was topped with a doughnut-shaped copper electrode. As the design changed, the structure evolved to the shape of a giant mushroom sprouting above the low hills of Long Island. Tesla named the project Wardenclyffe, envisioning a station to send out power as well as to broadcast communication channels of all radio wavelengths. The tower was nearly finished in 1902, along with the square brick building, 100 feet on each side, built below it for a powerhouse and laboratory.

Tesla predicted that when people experience wireless transmission of electrical power affecting their everyday lives, "humanity will be like an ant heap stirred up with a stick." The excitement that he anticipated never had a chance to develop, however. Work on the structure halted in 1906 after J. Pierpont Morgan stopped funding it.

Some historians believe that Morgan had been sincerely interested in wireless broadcasting. Others argue that Morgan's motivation for briefly funding Tesla's tower was to gain control over Tesla. As long as Tesla was an uncontrolled loner, a wild card in the industrial world, his inventions could threaten Morgan's investments in the electrical industry. If wireless transmission of power worked, of course, the value of power utilities and copper mines would plummet. Morgan's companies such as General Electric could have toppled.

While Tesla's fortunes went downhill starting in 1906, Morgan would not reply to Tesla's letters, and other financiers on Wall Street also turned their backs on Tesla for the remainder of his life. In a letter begging an associate for financial help, Tesla mentioned one of the tactics used to discredit him. "My enemies have been so successful in representing me as a poet and a visionary . .."

One of Tesla's biographers is Dr. Marc Seifer, a psychology professor who researched a psycho-biography of Tesla for his doctoral thesis. Seifer believes that Tesla sowed the seeds of his own financial ruin by not making clear to J. P. Morgan, Sr. his intention to broadcast power from Wardenclyffe as well as to send communications. However, Seifer also thinks that Morgan could have transcended his own limitations and given Tesla the money to complete at least the radio portion of the tower "and the world would have evolved in a totally different way."

MORGAN SABOTAGED TESLA DEALS

Instead, from that time onward Tesla was unable to build the technologies which he believed would help humanity. Seifer mentions the influential men whom Morgan paid a visit when they were ready to close a deal with Tesla. "Morgan purposefully scuttled any future ways Tesla could raise money."

He was deeply in debt, having plowed all his resources into his experiments and Wardenclyffe. Having a strong taste for the elegant life, he had run up an outrageous tab in his more than twenty years of living at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The hotel took the deed for Wardenclyffe in lieu of payment. Seifer feels that one reason for Tesla handing over the property to the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria is that he thought he could eventually resurrect the project. His plan was to develop an invention that would be a big money-maker, and his hopes were pinned onto his bladeless turbine/pump. Tesla expected the bladeless turbine to replace the gasoline engine in automobiles, ocean liners and airplanes and then he would use the subsequent wealth to complete his project for world-wide wireless power.

Seifer concludes that one of Tesla's motivations for another invention, a beam weapon which was also called a death ray, was to convince his government that the Wardenclyffe tower should be saved for military use. By attaching a beam weapon to it, he could have claimed that the tower was a strategic property for shooting down incoming aircraft or submarines during World War I.

His efforts were further scattered during this time by a lawsuit against Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian who had hung around his laboratory before the fire of March 13, 1885. In 1901 Marconi sent a signal across the Atlantic which in the eyes of the public secured Marconi's claim to be the inventor of radio. When Tesla had heard the news of the transatlantic wireless signal, he reportedly said, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He's using seventeen of my patents."

By the time Tesla tried to collect the hundreds of thousands of dollars owed him so he could rescue Wardenclyffe, most of his patents had elapsed. He did resurrect his main radio patent in 1914, Seifer said. Tesla did not win his suit against Marconi, not because of the legal strength of his case but because World War I interfered. The assistant attorney general of the time, Franklin Roosevelt, and President Woodrow Wilson pushed for a law saying there could be no patent disputes during the war. Seifer added that by the time the war was over it was much more difficult for Tesla to sue. (Eight months after his death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Tesla's radio-related patents preceded Marconi's. Even after the court's decision, school history books continue to credit Marconi for in venting radio.)
Tesla was squeezed out of the picture by the force of corporate interests. "David Sarnoff was Marconi's front man, and Sarnoff created RCA and NBC and purposely kept Tesla's patents out of the loop," Seifer said. "So when people like Hammond and Marconi were getting $500,000 at a clip for their wireless patents, Tesla got nothing."

RADIO CORPORATION ELBOWS HIM OUT

The picture of corporate ruthlessness is reinforced by the experience of the late Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of television. In Philo's biography, Elma G. Farnsworth told about Sarnoff's treatment of her husband, and about the early 1930s when RCA dominated the radio industry to the point where no one could make broadcasting or receiving equipment without paying patent royalties to RCA. "RCA's policy regarding patents, licenses, and royalties was very simple: the company was formed to collect patent royalties. It never paid them." Elma Farnsworth added that corporations have always been ambivalent toward inventors and patents. "Although they regard patents as a huge bulwark when protecting their own monopolies, they see the patent system as a great nuisance when it upholds the rights of an individual." She gives the example of two pioneers of radio who battled RCA for their rights unsuccessfully. Dr. Lee DeForest died bankrupt and Major Howard Armstrong put on his coat, hat and gloves and walked out the high window of his New York Apartment.

Tesla never threatened suicide, but he did admit to despairing. Before he could make much progress with the bladeless turbine, his dream of saving the Wardenclyffe structure began to crumble. For one thing, the new owner saw no value in the project and did not post guards on the property. Since the businessman believed that Tesla was just a vain dreamer, he did not try to protect the contents of the laboratory and it was vandalized and stripped.

The Wardenclyffe tower was dynamited in 1917, but not by the government as some legends would have it. Instead it was torn down to be sold as scrap metal. After this dramatic turning point in Tesla's career, he began to disappear from public view.

HOPES PINNED ON TURBINE

Perhaps partly to run away from the sight of the ruined Wardenclyffe structure, the inventor travelled to Chicago. That city held memories of earlier, more triumphant, times such as the World's Fair of 1893 which showcased his AC technologies. Now he spent time with biographer Hugo Gernsback as well as worked on technical problems with the round disks in his bladeless turbine. In his day the available steel was not strong enough far anything moving at such a high speed. (Again, he was ahead of his time and in the 1990s engineers are begi n ni n g to catch up and even improve on his designs. The Tesla Engine Builders' Association is a cooperative network of researchers doing just what their name says. This is perhaps the most practical Tesla invention at this time, and could be extensively replacing fossil fuel or nuclear power generation.)

From Chicago he moved again, living alternately in Milwaukee and New York for a few years. During this time he sold a speedometer which he invented to a watch company. It was installed in the luxury cars of the day and provided him some income. Among other inventions which earlier had fleetingly provided income was a fountain which he designed in 1915. He figured out how to power a decorative fountain to get aesthetically-pleasing effects with little water.

DESPERATELY SEEKING FUNDS

Was Tesla also a would-be defense contractor? Tesla had a liaison in Germany before World War I and in 1916 to 1917 they planned to put the bladeless turbine in tanks and other war vehicles. This was the reason that J. P. Morgan, Jr. doled out more than $20,000 to Tesla to develop the turbine, Seifer notes.

In a recent book, Dr. Seifer chronicles Tesla's "lost years," from 1915 onward, when the inventor tried unsuccessfully to raise money for resurrecting his wireless project. Seifer encountered correspondence and articles linking Tesla to such shadowy figures as a Nazi propagandist and a German munitions manufacturer from whom the desperate inventor was trying to get funding by selling his death ray concepts. Those attempts ended when war was declared between their two countries. About Tesla's links to warlords during the 1930s, Seifer says "There's a whole secret side here that needs to be explored further. I did the best I could."