Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (18 page)

 

Manifestations of Energy

The production of the death beam involved four new inventions of Tesla's, though he would not provide details of these until they had been submitted to the proper scientific authorities. However, he said, the first invention was an apparatus for producing rays and ‘other manifestations of energy in free air', eliminating the high vacuum necessary at present for the production of such rays and beams. The second was a new method for producing a very great electrical force. The third was a method for amplifying this and the fourth, he said, was ‘a new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force'. Again Tesla was looking at a potential of 50 million volts which would catapult microscopic particles of matter towards the target. He reckoned that it would cost no more than $2 million and take only three months to build.

‘All my inventions are at the service of the United States government,' he said.

Should the government take him up on his offer, he said he would go to work at once and keep on going until he collapsed. However, he added: ‘I would have to insist on one condition – I would not suffer interference from any experts. They would have to trust me.'

In the
New York Herald
journalist Joseph Alsop described the progress Tesla was making developing his death ray:

He illustrated the sort of thing that the particles will be by recalling an incident that occurred often enough when he was experimenting with a cathode tube. Then, sometimes, a particle larger than an electron, but still very tiny, would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube and hit him. He said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out. The particles in the beam of force, ammunition which the operators of the generating machine will have to supply, will travel far faster than such particles as broke off from the cathode, and they will travel in concentrations, he said.

As Dr Tesla explained it, the tremendous speed of the particles will give them their destruction-dealing qualities. All but the thickest armoured surfaces confronting them would be melted through in an instant by the heat generated in the concussion. Such beams or rays of particles now known to science are composed always of fragments of atoms, whereas, according to Dr Tesla, his would be of microscopic dust of a suitable sort.

The chief differentiation between his and the present rays would appear to be, however, that his are produced in free air instead of in a vacuum tube. The vacuum tube rays have been projected out into the air, but there they travel only a few inches, and they are capable only of causing burns or slight disintegration of objects which they strike.

Tesla tried to get Jack Morgan to finance a prototype of his invention, but Morgan was unconvinced. He tried to deal directly with the British, to no avail. Frustrated, he sent an elaborate technical paper, including diagrams, to a number of nations including the US, Canada, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Called ‘The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media', the paper provided the first technical description of a charged particle beam weapon. And it was not just fantasy. Tesla had solved one of the key problems of a death ray – how to operate a vacuum chamber with one end open to the atmosphere. He achieved this by directing a high-velocity stream of air at the tip of his gun to maintain ‘dynamic seal'. This would be provided by a large Tesla turbine.

Interest came from the Soviet Union and, in 1937, Tesla presented a plan to the Amtorg Trading Corporation, in New York City, which handled trade with the Soviet Union. Two years later, in 1939, part of the prototype was tested in the USSR and Tesla received a payment of $25,000. But by then, the Soviet Union had allied itself with Nazi Germany.

While Tesla's death beam did not see the light of day in World War II, during the Cold War both the US and the Soviet Union worked on charged particle beams.

 

Resembling Dr Frankenstein

Tesla made a further move into science fiction when the 1931 horror classic
Frankenstein
used Tesla Coils to make lightning flashes. Much of the equipment used by Dr Frankenstein bears an uncanny resemblance to the apparatus Tesla invented for his experiments. Indeed, Tesla favoured the movie's producer Carl Laemmle as he fought patent battles with Edison when establishing Universal Pictures.

In 1935, one of Tesla's electrical extravaganzas was filmed by a newsreel camera man and offered to Paramount, but they found the subject too technical. Nevertheless Hugo Gernsback and Frank Paul continued to use Tesla's ideas in their sci-fi comics.

Meanwhile Tesla went about work on his death ray in a secret laboratory under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. One of his other inventions of the period was a wooden birdcage, complete with birdbath. Western Union boys were despatched with these to rescue injured pigeons from around New York Public Library, Bryant Park and St Patrick's Cathedral.

 

Tainted with Anti-Semitism

Tesla also had ties with a Hungarian architect named Titus deBobula, possibly through the Puskás brothers. deBobula borrowed money from the inventor as early as 1900. In 1908, he married the niece of Pittsburgh steel magnate Charles Schwab (1862 – 1939). deBobula then designed and built Schwab's new mansion and borrowed money from him for a number of real estate ventures. He offered to find the backing to rebuild Wardenclyffe, but deBobula's ventures turned sour. He fell out with Schwab and became an anarchist. Back in Budapest, he joined a pro-Hitler group and wrote a paper denouncing ‘Jewish physics' as the Nazis dubbed the new departures into relativity and quantum physics. Echoes of anti-Semitism can be found in Tesla's attacks on Einstein.

Returning to the US, deBobula designed a 120-ft (36-m) tower for Tesla's death beam. However, his involvement with a munitions company run by a German-American brought him to the attention of the IRS and the FBI. When his apartment was searched it was found to be full of grenades, tear-gas bombs and dynamite. Tesla was furious when deBobula used his name in an arms deal with Paraguay. Questioned by the authorities, deBobula denied any ties to the Communist Party or the German-American Bund which supported Hitler. The FBI monitored his activities throughout World War II. Nothing was ever proved against him. However, Tesla was tainted by association.

 

Reviewing His Greatest Inventions

The following year Tesla was still full of wild and abstruse pronouncements. He invited some 30 journalists to a gourmet luncheon to celebrate his 79th birthday in the private dining room of the Hotel New Yorker, where he was then staying. He had been thrown out of the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930, owing $2,000, when other patrons complained of the pigeon droppings. While the reporters feasted at his expense, Tesla did not even touch a glass of water. However, towards the end of the meal, he went and got a small bottle of pasteurized milk which he poured into a silver dish and heated on a small oil stove beside the table. The Hotel New Yorker then supplied a birthday cake with one candle for their honoured guest.

Asked what was his greatest feat in the field of engineering, he said: ‘An apparatus by which mechanical energy can be transmitted to any part of the terrestrial globe.'

He called this discovery ‘tele-geo-dynamics' and admitted that it would ‘appear almost preposterous'. However, it would give the world a new means of unfailing communication, provide a new and by far the safest means for guiding ships at sea and into port, furnish a ‘divining rod' for locating any type of ore beneath the surface of the Earth, and give scientists a means of ‘laying bare the physical conditions of the Earth and enable them to determine all the Earth's physical constants'.

The apparatus needed to do this, he said, was simple. It consisted of a stationary part and a cylinder of fine steel ‘floating' in the air. He had, he said, discovered a means of ‘impressing on the floating part powerful impulses which react on the stationary part, and through the latter to transmit energy through the Earth'. To do this he had ‘found a new amplifier for a known type of energy'. The purpose was ‘to produce impulses through the Earth and then pick them up whenever needed'.

His second greatest invention, he said, ‘will be considered absolutely impossible by any competent electrical engineer'. It was a new method of producing direct current without a commutator – something, he said, ‘that has been considered impossible since the days of Faraday'.

‘Incredible as it seems,' he said, ‘I have found a solution for this old problem.'

Next he came to cosmic rays which, he said, were produced by the force of electrostatic repulsion and consisted of powerfully charged positive particles that come to Earth from the Sun and other stars. ‘After experimentation,' he said, ‘the Sun is charged with an electrical potential of 215 billion volts, while the electric charge stored in the Sun amounted to around 50 billion billion electrostatic units.'

Again he dismissed the theory of relativity, describing it as ‘a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science and even to common sense'.

The theory, wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.

One of Tesla's great bugbears with relativity was its prohibition of anything travelling faster than the speed of light, which upset his theories about standing waves and the wireless transmission of energy. He was adamant that, in his observations of cosmic rays, he had already discovered particles that travelled faster than light.

In 1899, I obtained mathematical and experimental proofs that the Sun, and other heavenly bodies similarly conditioned, emit rays of great energy which consist of inconceivably small particles animated by velocities vastly exceeding that of light. So great is the penetrative power of these rays that they can traverse thousands of miles of solid matter with but slight diminution of velocity. In passing through space, which is filled with cosmic dust, they generated a secondary radiation of constant intensity, day and night, and pouring upon the earth equally from all directions. As the primary rays projected from the suns and stars can pass through distances measured in light-years without great diminution of velocity, it follows that whether a secondary ray is generated near a sun or at any distance from it, however great, its intensity is the same.

As of yet, no one else has found particles that travel faster than light. However, neutrinos generated by the fusion reactions in the Sun do have the penetrative power Tesla mentioned. They were predicted by the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi (1901 – 54) in 1934, but not detected experimentally for another 20 years. Nevertheless in 1932, Tesla said that he had ‘harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device'. Cosmic rays, he said, struck the atmosphere, ionizing the air and creating charged particles – ions and electrons. ‘These charges are captured in a condenser which is made to discharge through the circuit of a motor,' he said. He also said that he had ‘hopes of building such a motor on a large scale'. However, by 1935, he was also telling the
New York Herald Tribune
that some day the Sun would explode.

 

The Tesla Institute

In 1936, the Tesla Institute was opened in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia. A fully equipped research centre, it was funded by the Yugoslav government and private sources. A week of celebrations commemorating the great man's 80th birthday followed. They occurred in Belgrade on 26, 27 and 28 May, in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, on 30 May and in his native village of Smiljan on 2 June, and again on 12 July 1936.

Chapter 15 – The Final Days

 

What has the future in store for this strange being, born of a breath, of perishable tissue, yet Immortal, with his powers fearful and Divine? What magic will be wrought by him in the end? What is to be his greatest deed, his crowning achievement?

Nikola Tesla

 

At 81, Tesla was honoured by both the Yugoslav and Czechoslovakian governments. He was awarded the Grand Cordon of the White Eagle, Yugoslavia's highest honour bestowed by King Peter through his regent Prince Paul, and Czechoslovakia's Order of the White Lion. These were presented at his birthday luncheon at the Hotel New Yorker. Meanwhile he was still making his birthday announcements of new discoveries to newspapermen.

In 1937, he told them that he had perfected the principle of a new tube that would make it possible to smash atoms and produce cheap radium. He would give a demonstration of it in ‘only a little time'. He was expecting to put his discovery forward for France's Pierre Guzman Prize of 100,000 francs (around €50,000). It was awarded by the
Académie des Sciences
to ‘the person of whatever nation who will find the means … of communicating with a star and of receiving a response'.

The money, of course, is a trifling consideration, but for the great historical honour of being the first to achieve this miracle I would be almost willing to give my life. I am just as sure that prize will be awarded to me as if I already had it in my pocket. They have got to do it. It means it will be possible to convey several thousand units of horsepower to other planets, regardless of distance. This discovery of mine will be remembered when everything else I have done is covered in dust.

[The Guzman Prize was finally awarded to the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969 after the first Moon landing.]

His apparatus, Tesla said, employed more than three dozen of his own inventions. ‘It is absolutely developed,' he said. ‘I wouldn't be surer that I can transmit energy a hundred miles than I am of the fact that I can transmit energy a million miles up.'

It used a different kind of energy than was commonly employed which travels through a channel of ‘less than one-half of one-millionth of a centimetre'. ‘I could undertake a contract to manufacture the apparatus,' he said.

While he was certain that there was life on other planets, the problem with his equipment, he said, was hitting other moving planets with a needle-point of tremendous energy. But he thought that astronomers could help solve this problem. First they should aim this Tesla Ray at the Moon where they could easily see its effects – ‘the splash and the volatilization of matter'. He also imagined advanced thinkers living on other planets were experimenting in this field, mistaking Tesla energy rays for cosmic rays.

On the practical front, he announced a new type of tube. His experiments had been rewarded with ‘complete success' and he had ‘produced a tube which it will be hard to improve further'.

It is of ideal simplicity, not subject to wear and can be operated at any potential, however high – even 100 million volts – that can be produced. It will carry heavy currents, transform any amount of energy within practical limits and it permits easy control and regulation of the same. I expect that this invention, when it becomes known, will be universally adopted in preference to other forms of tubes and that it will be the means of obtaining results undreamed of before. Among others, it will enable the production of cheap radium substitutes in any desired quantity and will be, in general, immediately more effective in the smashing of atoms and the transmutation of matter. However, this tube will not open up a way to utilize atomic or subatomic energy for power purposes. It will cheapen radium so that it will be just as cheap – well, it will get down to $1 a pound – in any quantity.

Tesla was annoyed that some newspapers said he would be giving a full description of his invention at his birthday lunch. He could not release the information, he said, because he was bound by financial obligations involving ‘vast sums of money'. And this was not an idle boast, he insisted: ‘It is not an experiment. I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.'

The New York Times
, perhaps with tongue in cheek, went on to report that Dr Tesla entertained his guests with colourful personal reminiscences and observations including his opinions on dieting and immortality.

 

More Money Worries

Although Tesla's mind was as fertile as ever, his financial situation continued to decline. When Hugo Gernsback showed him Westinghouse's latest radio set, Tesla saw immediately that they were flagrantly infringing his wireless patents. He protested, but was in no position to fight a large corporation.

Unable to pay his hotel bill, again, Tesla handed over the ‘working model' of his death beam as collateral. It was worth, he said, $10,000. He also told Jack Morgan that the Russians were keen to buy his death beam to defend themselves against the Japanese. However, he already owed Morgan a great deal of money over his bladeless turbines and, despite filling his letters with attacks on Franklin Roosevelt's ‘New Deal' with Astor who Morgan hated, no money was forthcoming.

Eventually, Westinghouse acknowledged Tesla's contribution to the company and paid him $125 a month as a consulting engineer. They also came to an agreement with the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lived rent free for the rest of his life. In his last years, the Yugoslav government also gave him an honorarium of $7,200 a year. This allowed him to give generous tips to those who had rendered him the slightest assistance and hand-outs, that he could ill-afford, to anyone he thought was in need.

 

Tesla's Last Interviews

Tesla gave some of his last interviews to Nazi apologist
George S. Viereck
. Again he explained that he was not a believer in God in the conventional sense. Perhaps under Viereck's influence, Tesla espoused eugenics – the forced sterilization of those thought to be mentally unfit – which were then being practised in the US as well as Nazi Germany.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Although at the time, the environment was hardly on the agenda, Tesla told Viereck:

Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War. The pollution of our beaches such as exists today around New York City will seem as unthinkable to our children and grandchildren as life without plumbing seems to us. Our water supply will be far more carefully supervised, and only a lunatic will drink unsterilized water.

He looked forward to a time where science and education would be more important than war:

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The 21st century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the 21st century will give a mere ‘stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

Now gaunt from his meagre diet, he had clear views on the future of food:

More people die or grow sick from polluted water than from coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants. I myself eschew all stimulants. I also practically abstain from meat. I am convinced that within a century, coffee, tea, and tobacco will no longer be in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life. The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly. It will simply be no longer fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients. [Bodybuilder] Bernarr Macfadden has shown how it is possible to provide palatable food based upon natural products such as milk, honey, and wheat. I believe that the food which is served today in his penny restaurants will be the basis of epicurean meals in the smartest banquet halls of the 21st century.

There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India, now chronically on the verge of starvation. The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected 14 years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

After subsisting on a diet of bread, warm milk and what he called ‘Factor Actus', Tesla gave up solid food altogether, living on thin gruel of cauliflower, leeks, cabbage, turnips and lettuce. But he was still strong enough to make predictions. Then, in his last days, he lived on milk and honey, believing them to be the purest foods. Nevertheless, the future looked bright:

Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.

What's more, the work would be done by robots, something Tesla had been working on for nearly 40 years.

At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.

Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a ‘thinking machine'. I anticipated this development.

I actually constructed ‘robots'. Today the robot is an accepted fact, but the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the 21st century the robot will take the place which slave labour occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations.

 

Fragments of Olympian Gossip

Under the influence of Viereck, Tesla, who was always competitive, wrote a poem call
Fragments of Olympian Gossip
, poking fun at the scientific establishment:

While listening on my cosmic phone

I caught words from the Olympus blown.

A newcomer was shown around;

That much I could guess, aided by sound.

There's Archimedes with his lever

Still busy on problems as ever.

Says: matter and force are transmutable

And wrong the laws you thought immutable.

Below, on Earth, they work at full blast

And news are coming in thick and fast.

The latest tells of a cosmic gun.

To be pelted is very poor fun.

We are wary with so much at stake,

Those beggars are a pest – no mistake.

Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown

And turned your great science upside down.

Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,

Puts on your high teaching all the blame.

Says: matter and force are transmutable

And wrong the laws you thought immutable.

I am much too ignorant, my son,

For grasping schemes so finely spun.

My followers are of stronger mind

And I am content to stay behind,

Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,

These masters of mine may do the rest.

Come, Kelvin, I have finished my cup.

When is your friend Tesla coming up.

Oh, quoth Kelvin, he is always late,

It would be useless to remonstrate.

Then silence – shuffle of soft slippered feet –

I knock and – the bedlam of the street.

 

World War II

Tesla was growing feeble, but with the help of his nephew Sava Kosanovic he wrote a foreword to a Serbo-Croat edition of
The Future of the Common Man
by the then Vice-President Henry Wallace (1888 – 1965). In it, he said: ‘Out of this war, the greatest since the beginning of history, a new world must be born that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity, where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall be a world of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect.'