Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (22 page)

Investing in railroads, by 1902, he controlled some 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of track. In 1891, he arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. In the depression that followed the panic of 1893, he formed a syndicate to resupply the US government's depleted gold reserve. Having financed the creation of the Federal Steel Company in 1898, he merged it with the giant Carnegie Steel Company in 1901 to form US Steel Corporation. The following year, he formed the International Harvester Company and the International Merchantile Marine, which dominated transatlantic shipping. He led the attempt to avert a general financial collapse following the stock market panic of 1907. Then he began amassing banks and insurance companies. This gave him control over the nation's leading corporations and financial institutions.

 

Lee De Forest (1873 – 1961)

Like Tesla, De Forest was the son of a church minister who hoped his son would follow him into the ministry. Lee spent much of his youth at Talladega College, traditionally an African-American school where his father was president. In 1893, he enrolled at the Sheffield Scientific at Yale where he studied engineering. Six years later he was awarded a PhD for a thesis entitled
Reflections of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires
.

Experimenting in radio-telegraphy, he managed to interest the US Army and Navy in his apparatus. His equipment was used by European reporters to send despatches during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 – 05. In 1906, De Forest filed a patent for a vacuum tube diode to detect radio waves. The following year, he patented the triode or Audion valve. This placed a grid between the electrodes which allowed it amplify feeble electric currents. While others developed its full potential, it was the mainstay of amplification until the invention of the transistor. In 1912, De Forest was indicted, and subsequently acquitted, of mail fraud by seeking to promote this ‘worthless device'. His triode made transcontinental wireless telephony possible.

Seeking to promote radio as a new medium, in 1910, De Forest broadcast a live performance by Italian opera star Enrico Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera House. Two years later De Forest found he could boost a weak signal further by feeding the output of one tube to the grid of the next, and so on. He also found that by feeding the output of an Audion tube back to its own grid, he could produce a stable oscillator whose signal could be modulated to carry speech and music.

In the face of a storm of infringement suits, he sold his patents to others to exploit. He went on to invent a system for recording sound on film, making the talkies possible.

 

Reginald Fessenden (1866 – 1932)

Born in Quebec, Fessenden studied mathematics, but left university without a degree. In 1886, he moved to the US and went to work for Thomas Edison. He worked on a series of projects, but in 1890, when Edison suffered a financial set back, he was laid off. After working in various manufacturing companies, he became professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University, moving onto the Western University of Pennsylvania – now Pittsburgh University – the following year.

From 1900 to 1902, he worked for the Weather Bureau, adapting wireless telegraphy for weather forecasting and storm warnings. In 1900 he was granted a patent for a sensitive detector that made wireless telephone possible and invented the heterodyne receiver which combines two high-frequencies to produce an audible tone. With two Pittsburgh financiers, he formed the National Electric Signaling Company in 1902, which transmitted the first voice signals over a distance. In 1906, he made the first two-way transatlantic transmission. But he fell out with his backers and the company ended up bankrupt.

During his career Fessenden filed some 300 patents, many were subject to litigation. He sued RCA for $60 million, settling out of court in 1928 for a large cash payment. Among his admirers was Elihu Thomson who called Fessenden ‘the greatest wireless inventor of the age – greater than Marconi'.

 

Fritz Lowenstein (1874 – 1922)

Born in Carlsbad in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), Lowenstein studied engineering in Europe before emigrating to the US in 1899 where he went to work for Tesla. He helped build and operate the magnifying transmitter in Colorado Springs. ‘Possessed of the highest technical training,' Tesla said, he became a close confidant, discussing the project with him every day over lunch and dinner at the Alta Vista Hotel. They parted when Lowenstein returned to Germany to marry, but Tesla re-employed Lowenstein in 1902 to work at Wardenclyffe. He also worked with Jack Hammond and Alexander Graham Bell, and subsequently began a company making radio sets for the US Navy during World War I, paying royalties to Tesla for the use of his patents.

 

Benjamin Franklin Miessner (1890 – 1976)

Miessner studied electrical engineering at Purdue University and worked for the US Navy in 1908 before becoming chief assistant in the Tesla-Hammond lab at Gloucester. He worked on the development of the electric dog and superheterodyne reception. This improved the amplification in a wireless set fifty-fold and allowed them to work without a long aerial, essentially turning the wireless receiver from an experimental apparatus into a domestic appliance. He is also credited with inventing the ‘cat's whisker' detector in early crystal sets, which he sold for $200, and the electric organ. A pioneer in aircraft radio and directional microphones in submarines, he sold more than two hundred patents, making over $2 million.

 

Sir Oliver Lodge (1851 – 1940)

Lodge entered his father's clay business in Staffordshire, England when he was 14. Then on a visit to London he heard prominent physicist John Tyndall (1820 – 93) lecture at the Royal Institution. This piqued his interest in science and, at the age of 22, he resumed his education. In 1890, the French scientist Édouard Branly (1844 – 1940) showed that iron filings in a glass tube coalesced – or ‘cohered' – under the influence of electromagnetic waves. Lodge added a ‘trembler' that shook up the filings between waves and made other improvements, making an effective detector.

Following in the footsteps of Hertz, he studied standing waves in conducting wires. After Hertz's untimely death in 1894, he gave a lecture at the Royal Institution called
The Work of Hertz
. When this was published, it had a widespread influence across Europe. He also filed a number of important patents. When his son Raymond was killed in World War I, he became interested in spiritualism and served as president of the Society for Psychical Research.

 

Michael Pupin (1858 – 1935)

Born in Banat, a buffer zone between the Ottoman and the Austrian Empires, Pupin was a Serb like Tesla. His parents were illiterate and sent him to Prague. After a year, not yet 16, he went alone to America, arriving in New York in 1874. For 5 years, he took a series of odd jobs, while studying at night for admission to Columbia College, now Columbia University. He went on to study in Cambridge and Berlin, where he worked under Helmholtz. He returned to New York to teach mathematical physics at the newly formed department of electrical engineering. In 1901, he was made Professor of Electromechanics, a position he held until he retired in 1931.

In 1896, he discovered that atoms struck by X-rays emit secondary X-ray radiation and worked on X-ray fluoroscopy. Five years later, the Bell Telephone Company bought the patents for his method of extending the range of telephone communication by placing loading coils at specific distances along the line. In 1924, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling autobiography
From Immigrant to Inventor.

Pupin sided with Elihu Thomson in the controversy over who invented the AC polyphase system and Tesla accused Pupin of stealing his work. In the long passages on the development of AC in
From Immigrant to Inventor
, Tesla is hardly mentioned. When working with X-rays, Pupin again ignored Tesla's contribution. It was Pupin who introduced Marconi to Tesla in 1900, but he also helped facilitate Marconi's cooperation with Edison, earning him, once more, the enmity of Tesla.

When Pupin was on his deathbed in 1935, he got his secretary to visit Yugoslav diplomat Stanko Stoilkovic and ask him to plead with Tesla to visit Pupin who wanted to make peace with him before he died. Tesla said that he would have to think about Pupin's request overnight. The following day, Tesla turned up at the hospital. In Pupin's room he approached the bed with his hand extended and said: ‘How are you old friend?'

Pupin was overcome with emotion. They were left alone to talk. Tesla said they had agreed they would meet up again, but Pupin died immediately after Tesla's visit. Reconciled at last, Tesla attended his funeral.

 

Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850 – 1918)

Born in Germany, Braun received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1872 and held a number of academic posts before becoming director of the Physical Institute and Professor of Physics at the University of Strasbourg in 1895. In 1897, he developed the first oscilloscope, or Braun tube, to study alternating currents using a beam of electrons in a cathode ray. From this, television tubes were developed. He went on to study why early wireless transmission was limited to 9.5 miles (15 km), concluding that the limiting factor was the length of the spark. The solution was to introduce a sparkless antenna circuit, which he patented in 1899. He also developed an antenna that directed the transmission in one direction. The Nobel Committee recognized that he had made considerable improvements to Marconi's apparatus and awarded the Nobel Prize to them jointly in 1909.

Braun travelled to New York in 1915. When the US joined the Allies in World War I in 1917, he was detained as an enemy alien and died before the war ended.

 

John Stone Stone (1869 – 1943)

Born in America, but brought up in Egypt and Europe, Stone, who was fluent in Arabic, French and English, was brought home to the US to study in the school of mines at Columbia and Johns Hopkins University, before entering the Bell Labs in Boston. In 1899, he set up the Stone Telegraph and Telephone Company. Lecturing on electrical oscillations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he filed a patent on tuning in 1902. He also developed a wireless direction finder, worked on the use of loading coils on telephone lines before Pupin and became president of the Institute of Radio Engineers and the AIEE. He holds many ‘space telegraphy' patents.

 

Bernard A. Behrend (1875 – 1932)

Born in Villeneuve, Switzerland, Behrend studied engineering in Berlin before emigrating to the US in 1894. He was one of the first to understand Tesla's work with alternating currents and began publishing articles on the applications of AC in 1896. His treatise
The Induction Motor
was published by
Electrical World & Engineer
in 1901. It was expanded and published as a book,
The Induction Motor and Other Alternating Current Motors
in 1921. Behrend met Tesla in 1901 when he was assigned to design a motor for Wardenclyffe. In Behrend, Tesla found a like-mind. Behrend was the inventor of numerous electrical devices and took out over 70 patents. After a period of ill-health he committed suicide at his home in Massachusetts.

 

Arthur E. Kennelly (1861 – 1939)

Born in India of Irish parents, Kennelly studied in London before going to work for Edison in New Jersey as a mathematician. With Harold P. Brown, he worked on the development of the electric chair. He also developed the use of complex numbers in analyzing AC circuits. In 1901, he noticed that Marconi's signals arrived in Newfoundland in greater strength than expected and postulated that they had been reflected from an ionized layer in the upper reaches of the atmosphere predicted by English electrical-engineer Oliver Heaviside (1850 – 1925). This became known as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard, Kennelly served as president of the AIEE (1898 – 1900) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (1916). He was awarded the Edison Medal in 1933.

 

Hugo Gernsback (1884 – 1967)

Born Hugo Gernsbacher in Luxembourg, Gernsback had heard of Tesla as a child. He studied electronics in Bingen Technicum in Germany, before emigrating to the US in 1903. He imported electronic components from Europe and, in 1908, founded the magazine
Modern Electrics
. The
Electrical Experimenter
followed in 1913 and
Science and Invention
in 1920. These magazines began to carry science-fiction stories, starting with his own
RALPH 124C41+
set in the year 2660, which was serialized in
Modern Electronics
in 1911.

He began the first dedicated science-fiction magazine,
Amazing Stories
, in 1926. Despite his reputation for dubious business practices, he continued to write and publish. The Hugo Awards, presented annually by the World Science Fiction Convention, were named after him and, in 1960, he received a special Hugo Award as the ‘Father of Magazine Science Fiction'.

 

Frank R. Paul (1884 – 1963)

One of the most influential science fiction illustrators of his time, Frank Paul was born in Austria and studied art in Vienna, Paris and New York. He was working as an illustrator on a rural newspaper when Gernsback employed him to work on
Electrical Experimenter
. He produced the cover illustration for Gernsback's
RALPH 124C41+
when it appeared in book form in 1925. He also worked for
Amazing Stories
,
Science Wonder Stories
,
Planet Stories
,
Superworld Comics
,
Science Fiction
magazine and
Marvel Comics
. Paul is credited with the first depiction of a flying saucer, a space ship and a space station.