Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (20 page)

Then there was a diagram of the open-ended vacuum where, he said:

It will be observed that in this tube I do away with the solid wall or window indispensable in all types heretofore employed, producing the high vacuum required and preventing the inrush of the air by a gaseous jet of high velocity. Evidently, to secure this result, the dynamic pressure of the jet must be at least equal to the external static pressure.

The high-potential generator, creating a charge of up to 100 million volts, worked on the principle of a Van de Graaf generator – with the belt replaced by a high-speed stream of ionized air. The charges would be stored in specially shaped bulbs around the top of a 100 ft (30 m) tower. In the super-gun itself, tungsten wire would be fed into the high-vacuum firing chamber. Under the huge electrostatic forces generated, tiny droplets of metal would be sheared off and projected out of the chamber at over 400,000 feet per second (120 km per second).

John Trump also went to the Hotel Governor Clinton to examine the working model that Tesla had said he left there. Tesla had told the management that the box containing a secret weapon that was rigged to detonate if it was opened by an unauthorized person. Trump approached with trepidation. All he found inside was ‘a multi-decade resistance box of the type used for Wheatstone bridge resistance measurements – a common standard item to be found in every electrical laboratory before the turn of the century'. Trump took no further interest.

 

The Vanishing Death Ray

In 1937, Tesla had claimed that he had built his death beam, saying: ‘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.' At the time, he did have two secret labs where journalists were not allowed.

Mrs Czito, whose husband's father and grandfather both worked for Tesla, said that her father-in-law said Tesla had a device that could bounce a beam off the Moon. There is also a story that the deBobula design was taken to Alcoa Aluminium who said they would furnish the material required once the capital had been raised.

There is, of course, a conspiracy theory to account for the missing model. When the safe in Tesla's room was opened, the locksmith was asked to change the combination. Inside the safe, when it was locked again, was a set of keys and Tesla's 1917 Edison Medal. The new combination was given to Kosanovic and no one else. When the safe was finally shipped to Belgrade and opened some 10 years later, the medal and the keys were missing. The medal has never been found, but the keys were found in one of the numerous cases of documents that accompanied the safe in the shipment.

According to the Office of Alien Property, the two representatives of the hotel management who were present were Mr L.O. Doty, credit manager, and Mr L.A. Fitzgerald, assistant credit manager. We have already met Bloyce Fitzgerald in connection with Tesla, but Tesla's biographer Marc Seifer has also unearthed a letter from a Colonel Ralph E. Doty, chief of the Washington Branch of the Military Intelligence Service. Dated 22 January 1946, it is addressed to the Alien Property Custodian and reads:

Dear Sir: This office is in receipt of a communication from Headquarters, Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, requesting that we ascertain the whereabouts of the files of the late scientist, Dr Nikola Tesla, which may contain data of great value to the above Headquarters. It has been indicated that your office might have these files in custody. If this is true, we would like to request your consent for a representative of the Air Technical Service Command to review them. In view of the extreme importance of these files to the above command, we would like to request that we be advised of any attempt by any other agency to obtain them. Because of the urgency of this matter, this communication will be delivered to you by a Liaison Officer of this office in the hope of expediting the solicited information.

If the Fitzgerald and Doty at the opening of the safe were government agents, they might easily have got hold of the combination and the keys. It seems that Spanel was already under surveillance by the FBI for his pro-Communist sympathies. In November 1942, he met Fitzgerald at an engineering meeting, shortly before Tesla's death. At the time Fitzgerald was an army private at Wright Field. The FBI report later describes him as ‘a brilliant 20-year-old scientist who spent hours with Tesla before his death … Fitzgerald had developed some sort of anti-tank gun'. Spanel tried to form a partnership with Fitzgerald to sell the weapon to the Remington Arms Company, but the deal fell through when a more lucrative offer came from the Eiogens Ship Building Company.

Fitzgerald was fired by Eiogens in November 1943 and returned to Wright Field as a private. According to his FBI file, in 1945, he was ‘engaged in a highly secret experimental project at Wright Field … In spite of his rank as private, Fitzgerald is actually director of this research and is working with many top young scientists … on the perfection of Tesla's ‘death ray' which in Fitzgerald's opinion is the only defence against the offensive use by another nation of the atomic bomb.'

The files that Colonel Doty requested did find their way to Wright Field because, on 24 October 1947, the Director of the Office of Alien Property wrote to the commanding officer of the Air Technical Service Command, asking for them back. The following month, a Colonel Duffy wrote back, saying: ‘These reports are now in the possession of the Electronic Subdivision and are being evaluated. This should be completed by January 1, 1948. At that time your office will be contacted with respect to final disposition of these papers.'

 

Belgrade Bound

In 1946, Sava Kosanovic had become Yugoslavian ambassador to the US after the US recognized Tito's Communist government. But by 1950, he was still not allowed access to Tesla's effects. He made official representations and in 1952, 80 trunks containing Tesla's papers, equipment and other belongings were shipped to Belgrade. Five years later, Tesla's ashes followed. In the Tesla Museum they were placed in a spherical urn as this was Tesla's favourite shape.

This did not stop
American Scientist
being interested in Tesla's papers. Regularly individuals contacted the FBI who were thought to have made microfilm copies of everything sent to Yugoslavia. In the 1970s, it was thought that Tesla's fireballs might be a way of containing nuclear fusion. During the Cold War, both sides again investigated the possibility of making a particle beam to disable incoming nuclear missiles. Naturally Tesla's work would have been a starting point.

In 1977,
Aviation Week & Space Technology
published an article called
Soviets Push for Beam Weapon
. In it, the retired head of Air Force Intelligence, General George J. Keegan said that the Soviet Union was attempting to develop a charge-particle beam at the test facility near the city of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. The editor of
Aviation Week,
Robert Holtz said:

The Soviet Union has achieved a technical breakthrough in high-energy physics applications that may soon provide it with a directed-energy beam weapon capable of neutralizing the entire United States ballistic missile force and checkmating this country's strategic doctrine … The race to perfect directed-energy weapons is a reality. Despite initial skepticism, the US scientific community is now pressuring for accelerated efforts in this area.

The news got through to the White House, but President Jimmy Carter (1924 – ) said: ‘We do not see any likelihood at all, based on our constant monitoring of the Soviet Union, that they have any prospective breakthrough in a new weapons system that would endanger our country.'

Nevertheless, under the Carter administration, work began on a major space-based laser programme. Under the direction of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the ALPHA chemical laser project was begun in 1978. Contracts for the TALON GOLD targeting system were awarded in 1979, and the Large Optics Demonstration Experiment (LODE) started in 1980. These programmes formed the basis for the Strategic Defense Initiative – aka ‘Star Wars' – announced by President Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004) in 1983. SDI added X-ray lasers and neutral particle beams, all of which were reminiscent of Tesla's ‘Chinese wall'. While this work was going on, fresh applications were made to the FBI to release any copies of the Tesla files they had, if only to know what the Soviets may had learned about beam weapons in Belgrade.

However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union it was discovered that the test site outside Semipalatinsk was not working on a beam weapon at all, but rather on nuclear-powered rockets. John Pike, defence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said that the misidentification of the Semipalatinsk test site ‘must rank as one of the major intelligence failures of the Cold War'.

Chapter 16 – Posthumous Recognition

 

I misunderstood Tesla. I think we all misunderstood Tesla. We thought he was a dreamer and visionary. He did dream and his dreams came true, he did have visions but they were of a real future, not an imaginary one
.

John Stone Stone

 

In 1943 – a few months after Tesla's death – the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's radio patent number 645,576. The Court had a selfish reason for doing so. The Marconi Company was suing the United States Government for use of its patents in World War I. The Court simply avoided the action by restoring the priority of Tesla's patent over Marconi. Nevertheless, it re-established the situation that had applied 40 years earlier when Tesla was recognized as the inventor of radio whose patents had been infringed by Marconi.

In 1956, the Nobel laureate Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962), father of quantum physics, spoke at a centennial congress held in Tesla's honour. In Yugoslavia, a commemorative stamp was issued. Tesla appeared on the 100 dinar note and the ‘Tesla' became the unit of magnetic flux density. The asteroid
2244 Tesla
was named by Serbian astronomer Milorad Protic in Belgrade when he discovered it on 22 October 1952. The Tesla Crater on the far side of the Moon was named after him when five Lunar Orbiters photographed the other side in 1966 and 1967. The IEEE has presented the Nikola Tesla Award for outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power annually since 1976. Nikola Tesla Corner is located in the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of West 40th Street and 6th Avenue reminding New Yorkers that the great man used to roam those very streets. Niagara Falls also celebrates the legendary inventor with two monuments, one on Goat Island was unveiled in 1976, while in 2006 a statue of Tesla standing on an AC motor was erected in Queen Victoria Park on the Canadian side of the falls. Finally, back in Serbia, Belgrade International Airport was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in 2006.

During the second half of the 20th century Tesla was overlooked by the history books. Unlike Marconi and Edison, he did not have large companies named after him. Westinghouse could have honoured him, but not unnaturally they give their plaudits to George Westinghouse himself. Also unlike Westinghouse, Edison and the Wright Brothers, Tesla was not born in America so he could not be seen as a shining example of ‘Yankee ingenuity'. Those great Americans were also seen as practical men who made things that ordinary people could understand. Few people in the general populace understand what AC is, how an induction motor works or what the principles behind the propagation of radio waves are.

With Tesla's seemingly science-fiction ideas towards the end of his life, he was seen as a mystic and, more than anything, the ultimate mad scientist with his middle-European accent and his eccentric personal habits. However, in the 1950s, Tesla's fame grew in the burgeoning counter-culture. An electrical engineer name Arthur H. Matthews claimed to have made a Teslascope to communicate with the inhabitants of other planets. He said that Tesla was a Venusian born on a spaceship travelling from Venus to Earth in July 1856, revealing all in
Wall of Light: Nikola Tesla and the Venusian Spaceship
. In 1959, Margaret Storm published the occult biography of Tesla,
Return of the Dove
. Her story also involved flying saucers which were very much in vogue.

In the 1970s, Ralph Bergstresser, who had known Tesla for the last 6 months of his life, produced ‘Tesla Plates' which are marketed by the Swiss Tesla Institute. These, in some fashion, are supposed to tap into the energy of the universe. As Tesla's ideas, especially in later life, drew on thinking from both the East and the West, he became of interest to New Age thinkers. His striking, dark, middle-European looks and his development of willpower also appealed.

With the energy crisis of the 1970s, Tesla's idea of free energy had renewed appeal and a researcher named Robert Golka tried to recreate Tesla's Colorado experiments. In 1984, the first International Tesla Symposium was held in Colorado Springs. The group met annually for the next 14 years. It spawned the International Tesla Society whose membership grew to 7,000 worldwide, but it went bust in 1998. Devotees have found new homes in the Tesla Memorial Society of New York, the Tesla Engine Builders Association and the Tesla Universe website. Tesla and his inventions still fascinate fans of science fiction and computer games, and he has been celebrated in documentaries on his life and the
War of the Currents
on America's PBS and the BBC.

In 2003, Tesla Motors began producing electric vehicles in California, using engines based on Tesla's designs. They are now quoted on the NASDAQ stock exchange and have a European Headquarters at Maidenhead in the UK.

Tesla Magazine
was launched on 10 July 2013. At the same time, the Tesla Science Foundation joined forces with Belgrade's Nikola Tesla Museum to create a travelling exhibition called
Tesla's Wonderful World of Electricity
which toured the United States and Canada. Its aim was to get Tesla the recognition he deserves in America. With new movies being made about his life, it is possible that it is not too late – this goal may still be achieved.