The Rise & Fall of Nikola Tesla
By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian
physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a
small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the
creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working
over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit
would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His
inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination.
Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t
above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who once hired him.
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack,” Tesla once wrote, “he would
proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw
until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doing
that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his
labor.”
But what his contemporaries may have been lacking in scientific
talent (by Tesla’s estimation), men like Edison and George Westinghouse clearly
possessed the one trait that Tesla did not—a mind for business. And in the last
days of America’s Gilded Age, Nikola Tesla made a dramatic attempt to change
the future of communications and power transmission around the world. He managed to convince J.P. Morgan that he
was on the verge of a breakthrough, and the financier gave Tesla more than
$150,000 to fund what would become a gigantic, futuristic and startling tower
in the middle of Long Island, New York. In 1898, as Tesla’s plans to create a
worldwide wireless transmission system became known, Wardenclyffe Tower would
be Tesla’s last chance to claim the recognition and wealth that had always
escaped him.
Nikola Tesla was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856; his
father, Milutin, was a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church. From an early
age, he demonstrated the obsessiveness that would puzzle and amuse those around
him. He could memorize entire books and store logarithmic tables in his brain.
He picked up languages easily, and he could work through days and nights on
only a few hours sleep.
At the age of 19, he was studying electrical engineering at
the Polytechnic Institute at Graz in Austria, where he quickly established
himself as a star student. He found himself in an ongoing debate with a
professor over perceived design flaws in the direct-current (DC) motors that
were being demonstrated in class. “In attacking the problem again I almost
regretted that the struggle was soon to end,” Tesla later wrote. “I had so much
energy to spare. When I undertook the task it was not with a resolve such as
men often make. With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life and death. I
knew that I would perish if I failed. Now I felt that the battle was won. Back
in the deep recesses of the brain was the solution, but I could not yet give it
outward expression.”
He would spend the next six years of his life “thinking”
about electromagnetic fields and a hypothetical motor powered by
alternate-current that would and should work. The thoughts obsessed him, and he
was unable to focus on his schoolwork. Professors at the university warned
Tesla’s father that the young scholar’s working and sleeping habits were
killing him. But rather than finish his studies, Tesla became a gambling
addict, lost all his tuition money, dropped out of school and suffered a
nervous breakdown. It would not be his last.
In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest, after recovering from his
breakdown, and he was walking through a park with a friend, reciting poetry,
when a vision came to him. There in the park, with a stick, Tesla drew a crude
diagram in the dirt—a motor using the principle of rotating magnetic fields
created by two or more alternating currents. While AC electrification had been
employed before, there would never be a practical, working motor run on
alternating current until he invented his induction motor several years later.
In June 1884, Tesla sailed for New York City and arrived
with four cents in his pocket and a letter of recommendation from Charles
Batchelor—a former employer—to Thomas Edison, which was purported to say, “My
Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them. The other is this
young man!
A meeting was arranged, and once Tesla described the
engineering work he was doing, Edison, though skeptical, hired him. According
to Tesla, Edison offered him $50,000 if he could improve upon the DC generation
plants Edison favored. Within a few months, Tesla informed the American
inventor that he had indeed improved upon Edison’s motors. Edison, Tesla noted,
refused to pay up. “When you become a full-fledged American, you will
appreciate an American joke,” Edison told him.
Tesla promptly quit and took a job digging ditches. But it
wasn’t long before word got out that Tesla’s AC motor was worth investing in,
and the Western Union Company put Tesla to work in a lab not far from Edison’s
office, where he designed AC power systems that are still used around the
world. “The motors I built there,” Tesla said, “were exactly as I imagined
them. I made no attempt to improve the design, but merely reproduced the
pictures as they appeared to my vision, and the operation was always as I
expected.”
Tesla patented his AC motors and power systems, which were
said to be the most valuable inventions since the telephone. Soon, George
Westinghouse, recognizing that Tesla’s designs might be just what he needed in
his efforts to unseat Edison’s DC current, licensed his patents for $60,000 in
stocks and cash and royalties based on how much electricity Westinghouse could
sell. Ultimately, he won the “War of the Currents,” but at a steep cost in
litigation and competition for both Westinghouse and Edison’s General Electric
Company.
Fearing ruin, Westinghouse begged Tesla for relief from the
royalties Westinghouse agreed to. “Your decision determines the fate of the
Westinghouse Company,” he said. Tesla, grateful to the man who had never tried
to swindle him, tore up the royalty contract, walking away from millions in
royalties that he was already owed and billions that would have accrued in the
future. He would have been one of the wealthiest men in the world—a titan of
the Gilded Age.
His work with electricity reflected just one facet of his
fertile mind. Before the turn of the 20th century, Tesla had invented a
powerful coil that was capable of generating high voltages and frequencies,
leading to new forms of light, such as neon and fluorescent, as well as X-rays.
Tesla also discovered that these coils, soon to be called “Tesla Coils,” made
it possible to send and receive radio signals. He quickly filed for American
patents in 1897, beating the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi to the punch.
Tesla continued to work on his ideas for wireless transmissions
when he proposed to J.P. Morgan his idea of a wireless globe. After Morgan put
up the $150,000 to build the giant transmission tower, Tesla promptly hired the
noted architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead, and White in New York. White,
too, was smitten with Tesla’s idea. After all, Tesla was the highly acclaimed
man behind Westinghouse’s success with alternating current, and when Tesla
talked, he was persuasive.
“As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business
man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type
at his office in London or elsewhere,” Tesla said at the time. “He will be able
to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe,
without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive
instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere,
on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of
an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in
some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character,
drawing or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such
instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind.”
White quickly got to work designing Wardenclyffe Tower in
1901, but soon after construction began it became apparent that Tesla was going
to run out of money before it was finished. An appeal to Morgan for more money
proved fruitless, and in the meantime investors were rushing to throw their
money behind Marconi. In December 1901, Marconi successfully sent a signal from
England to Newfoundland. Tesla grumbled that the Italian was using 17 of his
patents, but litigation eventually favored Marconi and the commercial damage
was done. (The U.S. Supreme Court
ultimately upheld Tesla’s claims, clarifying Tesla’s role in the invention of
the radio—but not until 1943, after he died.) Thus the Italian inventor was
credited as the inventor of radio and became rich. Wardenclyffe Tower became a
186-foot-tall relic (it would be razed in 1917), and the defeat—Tesla’s
worst—led to another of his breakdowns. ”It is not a dream,” Tesla said, “it is
a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive—blind,
faint-hearted, doubting world!”
By 1912, Tesla began to withdraw from that doubting world.
He was clearly showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was
potentially a high-functioning autistic. He became obsessed with cleanliness
and fixated on the number three; he began shaking hands with people and washing
his hands—all done in sets of three. He had to have 18 napkins on his table
during meals, and would count his steps whenever he walked anywhere. He claimed
to have an abnormal sensitivity to sounds, as well as an acute sense of sight,
and he later wrote that he had “a violent aversion against the earrings of
women,” and “the sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit.”
Near the end of his life, Tesla became fixated on pigeons,
especially a specific white female, which he claimed to love almost as one
would love a human being. One night, Tesla claimed the white pigeon visited him
through an open window at his hotel, and he believed the bird had come to tell
him she was dying. He saw “two powerful beans of light” in the bird’s eyes, he
later said. “Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a
light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my
laboratory.” The pigeon died in his arms, and the inventor claimed that in that
moment, he knew that he had finished his life’s work.
Nikola Tesla would go on to make news from time to time
while living on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel. In 1931 he made the
cover of Time magazine, which featured his inventions on his 75th birthday. And
in 1934, the New York Times reported that Tesla was working on a “Death Beam”
capable of knocking 10,000 enemy airplanes out of the sky. He hoped to fund a
prototypical defensive weapon in the interest of world peace, but his appeals
to J.P. Morgan Jr. and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went nowhere.
Tesla did, however, receive a $25,000 check from the Soviet Union, but the
project languished. He died in 1943, in
debt, although Westinghouse had been paying his room and board at the hotel for
years.
See you all tomorrow.
Buh-bye.
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