Tesla
03/19/2009 19:45
“Eighteen clean linen napkins were stacked as usual at his place. Nikola Tesla could no more have said why he favored numbers divisible by three than why he had a morbid fear of germs or, for that matter, why he was beset by any of the multitude of other obsessions tht plagued his life.” (Margaret Cheney, Tesla, Man Out of Time (New York: Dorset Press, 1981), 1) Cheney identifies Tesla pretty clearly as what we’d call obsessive-compulsive. Is this accurate? She tends to skirt over many of the main elements of her story. Could be from lack of conclusive evidence – maybe she’s doing the best she can with scant documentation. Or maybe she feels this adds to the drama of the story.
“The strange thing about this tube lighting was that it had no connection to the loops of electrical wiring around the ceiling. Indeed, it had no connections at all, drawing all its energy from an ambient force field. He could pick up an unattached light and move it freely to any part of the workshop.” (2) Another frustrating element of the story. It’s unclear to me when Tesla developed this technology, and a complete mystery how it worked. I find it hard to believe that NO ONE has figured it out in over a century. I suspect the technique requires excessive amounts of electricity to work – which would make it practical for Tesla’s lab but not for commercial or residential applications.
In many cases, I wonder if this is the key to Tesla’s ambiguous position in science. His ideas were revolutionary, and most of them worked. But many were ridiculously impractical. The later competition with Marconi could be seen in this light too: the worldwide broadcasting capability was conceptually meaningless to people who didn’t see a market. If you’re looking for the ability to send a simple message point to point, then the worldwide web and 500 channels of TV aren’t worth paying for. Modern readers prefer Tesla’s solution, because we know where communications technology led.
One of Cheney’s main sources is Tesla’s short book My Inventions. It seems to be a promotional pamphlet, and Tesla probably exaggerates a little. He says “If memory serves me right, it was in November, 1890, that I performed a laboratory experiment which was one of the most extraordinary and spectacular ever recorded in the annals of science. In investigating the behavior of high frequency currents I had satisfied myself that an electric field of sufficient intensity could be produced in a room to light up electrodeless vacuum tubes. Accordingly, a transformer was built to test the theory and the first trial proved a marvelous success.” (55) Again, what might be a marvelous success in Tesla’s lab might also be completely impractical for lighting the apartment next door.
Some of Tesla’s ideas found there way into science fiction. As a young man, he had the idea for a “gargantuan elevated ring around the equator. At first it would have scaffolding. Once this was knocked away the ring would rotate freely at the same speed as the Earth.” (17) It’s a visionary idea, but Cheney seems uninterested in the fact that a vision isn’t the same as an invention. This may be the problem with many of Tesla’s other ideas.
In his 1891 Columbia lectures, Tesla showed a “button lamp” (55) which was a forerunner of the electron microscope. It might be interesting to speculate what might have happened if people (if Tesla) had understood what he had, and used it! Tesla’s European contemporaries were Henri Becquerel, the Curies, J. A. Fleming, Sir James Dewar and Lord Kelvin. These people could have taken his ideas farther into their own fields.
Cheney seems to suspect Tesla was gay, but she doesn’t want to come out and say it. She is adamant that he never had a sexual relationship with any of the women known to be his friends. But he did “at one period maintain an apartment at the luxurious Hotel Marguery on the west side of Park Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets at the same time that his residence was at another hotel; and he once told Kenneth Swezey that he used it for meeting ‘special’ friends and acquaintances.” (84)
Tesla apparently believed in the therapeutic effects of electricity. He told a reporter “I don’t believe I could have borne up but for the regular electric treatment which I administered to myself. You see, electricity puts into the tired body just what it most needs—life force, nerve force. It’s a great doctor, I can tell you, perhaps the greatest of all doctors.” (107) Tesla also believed in the power of oscillating vibrations, as a way of boosting electrical power as well as doing physical work. He boasted to reporters that he had a pocket-sized oscillator that he could use to destroy the Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge (116, the ESB was built in 1939 – like many of Cheney’s statements, these lack a specific time and place. So it’s hard to know when he made these claims, or whether he continued making them for decades).
Chauncey McGovern of Pearson’s Magazine in London wrote a May 1899 article called “The New Wizard of the West.” He wrote regular sci/tech articles for Pearson’s, and seems like an interesting character in his own right. A more recent writer, Leland Anderson (1977), suggested “Tesla’s 1903 patents 723,188 and 725,605 contain the basic principles of the logical AND circuit element.” (131) These patents, although they were devoted to preventing interference of radio-controlled weapons, have made it difficult for later applicants to receive patents on AND gates. This is an interesting element of intellectual property law that I was completely unaware of. Cheney later says Tesla’s 1901 patents “in which he describes the supercooling of conductors to appreciably lower their resistance…is yet another instance in which his pioneer work has gone unacknowledged—possibly because it might open a door for the U.S. Patent Office to invalidate later claims.” (153)
“World Telegraphy [Tesla elsewhere calls this the World System] constitutes, I believe, in its principles of operation, means employed and capacities of application, a radical and fruitful departure from what has been done heretofore. I have no doubt that it will prove very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries and less accessible regions, and that it will add materially to the general safety, comfort, and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization, and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one’s pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horse-power can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence.” (179, same text found in 1904 Public Opinion article.
Bibliography:
“Nikola Tesla,” T. C. Martin, The Century, 1894.
“Tesla’s Oscillator and Other Inventions,” T. C. Martin, The Century, 1894.
“Nikola Tesla and the electrical Outlook,” The Review of Reviews, 1895.
Cochrane, Charles Henry. The Wonders of Modern Mechanism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1896) Just past the article on Tesla is a longer article on Electric Locomotives.
Routledge, Robert. Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1896)
Tesla, Nikola and Thomas Commerford Martin. The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla (New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894) Includes the Columbia, London and Paris lectures.
Tesla, Nikola. Electrical Communication with the Planets, 1902
Tesla, Nikola. Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires, 1904
Tesla, Nikola. “The Future of the Wireless Art,” Massie, Walter W. amd Charles R. Underhill, Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1909)
“Home Workshop: Simplified Tesla Coil,” Kenneth M. Swezey, Popular Science, Dec. 1934.
“Cigar-Box Tesla Coil Works Weird Wonders,” Tracy Diers, Popular Science, Jan 1946.
