Nikola Tesla

In 1946 Parsons [discussed earlier in the book], a great believer in UFOs, claimed to have met a Venusian in the Mohave Desert. Venusians were very much in fashion at the time and it was only a couple of years since the death of the Serbian engineer Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who some believed had been sent from Venus to modernize earthly technology. Tesla was one of the great innovators of the modern age, often so far ahead of his time that he might as well have been from another planet. Honored as “the man who invented the twentieth century” and nicknamed “the patron saint of electricity” for developing the alternating current system that underpins all today’s electrical networks, he held more than seven hundred patents in his lifetime, for innovations in electromagnetic, robotics, remote control, radar, ballistics, and nuclear physics. He invented the Tesla coil, which gave us radio, X-ray tubes, and fluorescent light. Some of his ideas were so advanced that science has still not caught up with them, and his almost extraterrestrial gifts as a scientist were matched by a strange and other worldly personality. If John Dee and Jack Parsons [discussed earlier in the book] fall into the category of madly brilliant eccentrics, Nikola Tesla is in a class of his own.

Were he born today he would be diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, with a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But those labels weren’t available in the mid-nineteenth century. Mental illness was put down to “nerves” or “hysteria,” and real oddities were either tolerated or committed to the asylum. Tesla’s peculiarities meant that the scientific community would never truly come to accept him, nor did he receive either the acclaim or the financial rewards his work should have commanded.

He was born into a Serbian family in Smiljan, then part of Austro-Hungary, now in Croatia: It was his proud boast to be both Serbian and Croatian. The fourth of five children, he recalled his early years as exceptionally happy, growing up in the country surrounded by farm animals. Later in life he would tell how it was witnessing the sparks generated by stroking the family cat that made him want to understand what electricity was. “Eighty years have gone by since,” he wrote, “and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.” The Teslas were a clever family, blessed with exceptional memories, and Tesla’s father, Milutin, a Serbian Orthodox priest and poet, devised mental exercises to keep his children’s minds supple and alert. He had an impressive library of books but said it wouldn’t matter if he lost them because he had memorized the classics by heart. Tesla’s mother Duka was barely able to read but could recite thousands of verses of Serb sagas and long passage from the Bible. Her needlework was famously intricate- using only her fingers, Tesla claimed, she could tie three knots in an eyelash. She also improvised ingenious labor-saving devices, even constructing her own mechanical eggbeater. “I must trace to my mother’s influence,” Tesla wrote, “whatever inventiveness I possess.”

The great tragedy of Tesla’s youth was the death of his older brother, Dane, in a riding accident. Nikola was only five, but he had vivid nightmares about it for the rest of his childhood. A conscientious, sensitive boy, he felt his parents’ grief keenly, and no matter how hard he worked, he was conscious that he could never make up for the loss of his brilliant sibling. Dane and Nikola shared at least one outstanding talent: the ability to visualize things in precise, three- dimensional detail. Vivid images of memorable or traumatic events would return to Tesla at any time of night or day, often accompanied by flashes of light, and refuse to disappear. “Sometimes they would remain fixed in space even though I pushed my hand through them,” he recalled. Though distressing for a child, this pictorial clarity would be very useful to him as an inventor.

Young Nikola was hopelessly accident- prone and had several brushes with death. He fell headlong into a kettle of boiling milk, nearly drowned after swimming under a raft, was almost swept over a waterfall at one of the nearby dams, and suffered serious bouts of both malaria and cholera. These shocks provoked a general sense that the world was out to get him, and worsened the long list of obsessions he suffered from:

I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver, I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of my soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food, otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again even if it took hours.

At nineteen Tesla went to study electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz. He was an astonishing student, able to solve mathematical problems almost before his teachers had finished writing the formulas on the blackboard. In his spare time, he taught himself five languages, committed large chunks of Goethe and Shakespeare to memory, and plowed his way through the complete works of Voltaire. “I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem.” Like Johan Dee, he set himself a punishing work schedule, studying for up to twenty hours a day and sleeping less than three hours a night. He also indulged in more traditional student pursuits: drinking, smoking, gambling to excess, and, briefly, falling in love with a girl called Anna. This period of his life came to an abrupt end when he lost all the money his father had sent him for his studies in a card game. Deeply ashamed at what he had done, he gave up gambling and smoking for good and forswore all further contact with women.

While at Graz, Tesla encountered the Gramme dynamo, the cutting edge of electrical engineering at the time. It was a dual- purpose machine that when supplied with mechanical energy generated electricity, and when supplied with electrical energy could be used as a motor to drive things. Tesla was enchanted by it but puzzled by its constant sparking. The basic principle of generating electricity by “induction”- introducing a rotating wire into a magnetic field- had first been described by Michael Faraday forty years earlier. The electricity Faraday had produced was called “alternating current,” because it continually switched direction as the electrons in the rotating wire swept past first the north and then the south pole of the magnet. In order to produce useful electricity, this alternating current had to be converted into direct current, similar to the electricity produced by a battery, where the electrons all flow in one direction, from the positive to the negative terminal. To achieve this, a switch, called a commutator, short- circuited the generator at each half spin so that the current continued its flow in the same direction. This shorting was what caused the dynamo to spark. Tesla thought this an overly complex, even clumsy solution. Why not find a way of harnessing the alternating current, he asked? His professors laughed at him, pointing out that it would be tantamount to producing a perpetual motion machine. Early attempts to produce motors with alternating current had been dismal failures.

Tesla never completed his degree. In 1881 he moved to Budapest and found work as a telephone engineer. This suited him much better than academia, and it was during this time that he came up with his first invention, a kind of early loudspeaker. Toward the middle of that year, Tesla began to suffer from a peculiar condition: a multiple sensory overload where sunlight blinded him, the ticking of a watch sounded like the blows of a hammer, vibrations from traffic made him lose his balance, and his pulse spiked and plummeted wildly. His doctors were baffled and at one point thought they would lose him, but then it stopped, as suddenly as it had started. Soon afterward, walking in the park as he was convalescing, and reciting a passage from Goethe’s Faust to a friend, he had an epiphany:

As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick in the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Engineers. The images were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal.

What he had seen that afternoon was to change the world. It was a detailed vision of the electrical Holy Grail, the alternating current motor. His solution was brilliantly simple: to rotate the magnetic field as well as the coil and instead of a single circuit, to have two, but each timed differently so that like the firing of pistons in a combustion engine, when one was down the other would be up, and the forward momentum of the motor would be maintained. No sparks, no loud vibrations- and the motor’s motion was reversible. Tesla had literally “seen” the future. But his vision went even deeper. His recent illness had made him sensitive to both light and vibration. Now he saw the connection between the two. Alternating current produced a frequency, a wave, as the electrons whizzed backward and forward. It was a relatively low-frequency wave, but light was also a wave, a vibration, though at a vast symphony of electrical vibration. And if this alternating current could be transformed into usable power, what might be achieved if he harnessed the potential of those higher frequencies? Exploring the implications of this insight would dominate the rest of his life.

In 1884 the twenty-eight-year-old Tesla turned up at Thomas Edison’s office in New York with four cents and some Serbian poems in his pocket. He had spent the previous two years working for Edison’s company in Paris, and built his first alternating current (AC) motor there in his spare time. Now he was to share it with the world. He handed over a letter from his employer in Paris, Charles Batchelor. Addressed to Edison, it said, simply: “I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.”

Edison wasn’t interested in Tesla’s ideas about AC power; he was building direct current (DC) generators. These were proven to work and his customers liked them. It was Tesla himself who intrigued him. He was an exotic figure: 6 feet 4 inches tall, a cultured, poetry-loving European, always immaculately dressed in morning coat, spats, and gloves. Edison was a shambolic mess of a man who cut his own hair and wore the same food-spattered black clothing every day. About the only thing they had in common was the capacity to survive on virtually no sleep. Tesla’s spooky ability to know the answer to mathematical problems halfway through the question and to conjure phantom engineering diagrams from thin air were in marked contrast to Edison’s “99 percent perspiration” approach. As Tesla would later remark: “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.” But Edison was a shrewd judge of people and had had plenty of practice in turning their ideas into his own money. He hired Tesla for the miserly sum of $18 a week, promising a $50,000 bonus if the young Serb could find a way to make the company’s temperamental DC generator system more efficient.

Tesla sent to the task with his customary application. At first, he was in awe of his new boss. When Edison told him he ate Welsh rarebit every day to increase his IQ, Tesla took the joke to heart and ate barely anything else for weeks. He found Edison’s sense of humor a lot less amusing when, almost a year later, having solved the problem of the DC generator, Edison refused to pay his bonus: “When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American Joke.” He offered him a raise to regret. Tesla was incandescent with rage and resigned, spending the next year earning his living as a laborer (ironically at one point digging ditches for Edison’s expanding network of DC cables) and working on his inventions at night.

By early 1887 Tesla had saved enough money to register seven patents covering the full range of AC generators, transformers, transmissions lines, motors, and lighting. These were awarded unopposed and would become the most valuable patents registered since the telephone. At a stroke, they solved the thorny problem of long-range power distribution. Direct current required a generator to be located within a mile of where the electricity was being used and was inconveniently inflexible: electricity from the same DC generator couldn’t be used to run machines requiring different voltages. To increase the voltage in a direct current circuit meant also increasing the amperage, which meant thicker copper wire and greater loss of energy through heat. With Tesla’s AC solution, power could be generated at a low voltage, then, using a simple device called a transformer, it could be “stepped up” for transmission and “stepped down” again at the customer’s house or business premises. Taking the analogy of a water pipe- the higher the pressure (voltage), the farther and faster the same amount of water (electrical energy) will travel, but the hose attachments (transformers) will determine how that water is used at the other end. The elegant simplicity of Tesla’s system attracted the attention of Pittsburgh industrialist George Westinghouse. He hired Tesla, purchased his patents for $60,000, and agreed to pay him royalties of $2.50 for every horsepower of AC electricity sold.

Whether or not Edison saw the writing on the wall, he knew that Tesla and Westinghouse had to be stopped. His war machine rumbled into action. His line of attack was that AC was dangerous. While direct current was “like a river flowing peacefully to the sea,” he alleged, alternating current was “a torrent rushing violently over a precipice.” To make his point in the most brutal way, he began using AC to electrocute animals in public. Twenty-four dogs (bought from local children for 25 cents each), two calves, a horse, and Topsy- a zoo elephant that had killed its keeper- were all “Westinghoused.” Scenting blood, Edison developed the electric chair, secretly acquiring three Tesla generators to make it happen. The first person to die by legal electrocution was messily dispatched using AC at Auburn, New York, in 1890. “They could have done better using an ax,” commented Westinghouse dryly. But Tesla and Westinghouse got their revenge by underbidding Edison for the contract to light the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, the world’s first major “all-electric” event. Thanks to Tesla’s AC system, Westinghouse could quote a price that was less than half of Edison’s, because so much less copper wire was needed. Edison retaliated by refusing to supply them with Edison lightbulbs, but the game was up. Twenty-seven million people visited the Fair, and from that moment on, 80 percent of all electrical devices bought in the United States were AC. In 1898 the final nail was hammered into DC’s coffin when Westinghouse and Tesla built the world’s first hydroelectric plant, harnessing the power of Niagara falls to generate alternating current and piping it the seventeen miles to their new power station in Buffalo, New York.

Tesla had used the money Westinghouse had paid him for his patents to set up a lab on West Houston Street in New York City, and the 1890s were a decade of creative overdrive for him. He discovered X-rays three years before Wilhelm Roentgen and was the first to point out their biological risks. He devised the first radio-wave transmitter two years before Marconi and he invented and patented radio control, demonstrating the first radio- controlled boat in Madison Square Garden in 1898. Having mastered the transmission of AC by wire, by the end of the decade he was sending it through space without wires. Showing unexpected talents as a showman, he would enthrall and horrify audiences at public demonstrations by running hundreds of thousands of volts through his own body, lighting electric bulbs from a distance while flames shot from his head and his hands sparked. In 1899 he moved his lab to Colorado Springs to unveil his piece de resistance. This, he believed, of all of his inventions, would prove the “most important and valuable to future generations.” It was a massive “magnifying transmitter” able to send radio waves and electricity through the air over long distances. At 51 feet in diameter it could generate 4 million volts, and light two hundred lamps, without wires, from twenty-five miles away. Even more astounding, he used it to make artificial lightning, generating electrical flashes more than 130 feet long. In 1900 the banker J.P. Morgan agreed to invest $150,000 in an even bigger wireless transmitter, the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. Tesla’s plan was global: to unite telephone and telegraph systems in a single wireless network, transmitting pictures and text from one side of the globe to the other in minutes, and delivering mail between special terminals, using electronic messaging. He had, in effect envisioned the World Wide Web a hundred years early, not only with universal wi-fi, but one where computers could operate without batteries and would never need to be plugged in.

Tesla was forty-four at this point and almost exactly half way through his life, when, at the peak of his fame and influence, things began to unravel. In 1903 Morgan pulled out of Wardenclyffe, claiming Tesla sold it to him as a radio transmitter, and betraying a complete lack of understanding of the potential of Tesla’s vision. In 1904 the U.S. Patent Office incorrectly awarded Marconi the patent for radio, even though Marconi’s work had all been achieved after Tesla, actually using Tesla’s own patented instruments. The insult was made worse by the award of the Nobel Prize to Marconi in 1909, just as Roentgen had been awarded his in 1901. Tesla never received one. By 1905 he had run out of funds and was forced to close his lab. Two years later George Westinghouse was almost wiped out by a stock market crash and by the long and expensive turf war with Edison. In desperation, he asked Tesla’s permission to amend their contract. In one of the noblest gestures in modern business, Tesla released Westinghouse completely, saying:

You have been my friend, you believed in me when others had no faith; you were brave enough to go ahead… when others lacked courage; you supported me when even your own engineers lacked vision… you have stood by me as a friend…. Here is your contract, and here is my contract. I will tear both of them to pieces, and you will no longer have any troubles from my royalties. Is that sufficient?

Westinghouse paid Tesla a one-off fee of $216,000. At that time, the value of Tesla’s royalty stood at more than $12 million, enough to make him one of the richest men in the world. If he had kept that royalty until today, even if no more electricity had been generated than the relatively tiny amount that existed in 1890, he would now be worth $40 billion. In 1914, however, the outbreak of World War I cut off the remaining income he had been earning from his European patents, and two years later, he was forced to file for bankruptcy. He never recovered financially, living out the last ten years of his life in room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, his bills settled by his friends.

This falling apart of his financial affairs was matched by increasingly unstable personal behavior. His fetish for cleanliness grew to Howard Hughes-like proportions. He went to great lengths to avoid shaking hands, placing his own behind his back when meeting people. At the dining table, he asked that each item of silverware be heat-sterilized before being brought to him. He would then pick up each items with a napkin, clean it with another napkin, and then drop both napkins onto the floor (he got through fifteen napkins a meal on average). If a fly landed on his table, he had to move to another seat and make an entirely fresh start. He gradually abandoned the two-steaks-a-night supper he had once enjoyed, becoming a vegetarian and eating exactly the same food in the same restaurant every night: warm milk, bread, and a concoction made from a dozen vegetables. But he continued to dress nattily. (In 1910 he had announced to a secretary that he was the best-dressed man on Fifth Avenue and intended to maintain that standard.) He wouldn’t go out without his gray suede gloves, which he wore for a week and then discarded. He bought a new red or black tie each week and would wear only white silk shirts. Collars and handkerchiefs were used only once, and he developed an aversion to jewelry. He could not sit near a woman who was wearing pearls. Most poetic of all, he was sure the hours he’d spent thinking were draining the color from his eyes.

His work became similarly unhinged. He claimed to be getting radio messages from Mars and Venus. He talked about using electricity to control the weather. He proposed a form of eugenics leading to women becoming dominant, so that human society would more closely resemble that of the honeybee. In his late seventies, he announced he was working on a device with which to end all wars, a weapon that

Would send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.

Inevitably, the media dubbed this Tesla’s “death ray,” and it confirmed his passage in the public mind from revered genius to mad scientist.

He died in 1943, aged eighty-six, heavily in debt, alone in his hotel room. In 1943 the U.S. courts finally found in his favor and confirmed that it was Tesla and not Marconi who was the inventor of radio. Much has been done since to restore his reputation, but Edison and Marconi are still the names everyone remembers. Tesla, like Dee and Parsons and even poor Emma Hamilton [discussed earlier in the book], was too absorbed in his own passions to be bothered with mere accountancy. He lived with the burden and the joy of having glimpsed a much deeper reality than most people ever see, and that sense of his special destiny never deserted him. Marriage was not for him, not because he was homosexual or afraid of women, but because nothing could be allowed to interfere with his mission: “I have planned to devote my whole life to my work and for that reason I am denied the love and companionship of a good woman; and more, too.”

Weeks before his death, he had a final feminine visitation. He had befriended a pigeon that came every day to his windowsill in room 3327. She had become his favorite, “a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings.” He had always loved birds, but this one “he loved as a man loves a woman…. She understood me and I understood her.”

Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her. As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me- she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes- powerful beams of light. It was real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by my most powerful lamps in my laboratory.

When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life’s work was finished.

Copied directly from "The Book of the Dead" by John Lloyd and John Hitchinson; Published in 2009 Pages 343-356