Wizard Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Title Page

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  PREFACE

  1 HERITAGE

  2 CHILDHOOD (1856-74)

  3 COLLEGE YEARS (1875-82)

  4 TESLA MEETS THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK (1882-85)

  5 LIBERTY STREET (1886-88)

  6 INDUCTION AT PITTSBURGH (1889)

  7 BOGUS INVENTORS (1889-90)

  8 SOUTH FIFTH AVENUE (1890-91)

  9 REVISING THE PAST (1891)

  10 THE ROYAL SOCIETY (1892)

  11 FATHER OF THE WIRELESS (1893)

  12 ELECTRIC SORCERER (1893)

  13 THE FILIPOVS (1894)

  14 NIAGARA POWER (1894)

  15 EFFULGENT GLORY (1894)

  16 FIRE AT THE LAB (1895)

  17 MARTIAN FEVER (1895-96)

  18 HIGH SOCIETY (1894-97)

  19 SHADOWGRAPHS (1896)

  20 FALLS SPEECH (1897)

  21 LUMINARIES (1896-98)

  22 SORCERER’S APPRENTICE (1896-97)

  23 VRIL POWER (1898)

  24 WALDORF-ASTORIA (1898)

  25 COLORADO SPRINGS (1899)

  26 CONTACT (1899)

  27 THOR’S EMISSARY (1899)

  28 THE HERO’S RETURN (1900)

  29 THE HOUSE OF MORGAN (1901)

  30 WORLD TELEGRAPHY CENTER (1901)

  31 CLASH OF THE TITANS (1901)

  32 THE PASSING OF THE TORCH (1902)

  33 WARDENCLYFFE (1902-1903)

  34 THE WEB (1903-1904)

  35 DISSOLUTION (1904-1906)

  36 THE CHILD OF HIS DREAMS (1907-1908)

  37 BLADELESS TURBINES (1909-10)

  38 THE HAMMOND CONNECTION (1909-13)

  39 J. P. MORGAN JR. (1912-14)

  40 FIFTH COLUMN (1914-16)

  41 THE INVISIBLE AUDIENCE (1915-21)

  42 TRANSMUTATION (1918-21)

  43 THE ROARING TWENTIES (1918-27)

  44 FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT (1927-40)

  45 LIVING ON CREDIT (1925-40)

  46 LOOSE ENDS (1931-43)

  47 THE FBI AND THE TESLA PAPERS (1943-56)

  48 THE WIZARD’S LEGACY

  APPENDIX A THE MAGNIFYING TRANSMITTER: A TECHNICAL DISCUSSION

  APPENDIX B

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright

  What the Critics Say About Wizard

  It was Seifer’s…intention to bring…Tesla’s…major scientific and technological contributions…together. He has done a very impressive job collecting a massive amount of documentation of original and secondary sources…The letters in the J.P. Morgan collection, in particular, shed considerable new light on Tesla’s connection with Morgan and his contemporaries.

  —Nature

  The best chapter in Seifer’s book describes late 19th century science fiction and locates Tesla’s projects among other predictions of the future…Seifer is [also] good at describing Tesla’s lack of practical, economic and personal judgment and the way his enormous ego invited unscrupulous partners…

  —Washington Post Book World

  Seifer paints a picture of Tesla that anyone familiar with the life of someone such as Orson Welles will recognize. Here was a man who peaked early, traveled in famous company…and started believing his own press hype. That made him spend the rest of his life trying to score another universe-changing coup…Wizard does a pretty good job of placing Tesla within the firmament of inventors, thinkers, and futurists. With Seifer’s scholarship to build on, anyone reconstructing those dizzy years of invention and litigation at the turn of the century would be foolish to try and leave out Nikola Tesla.

  —Winston-Salem NC Journal

  Despite Tesla’s impact on electricity, history does not regard him as highly as many of his inventive contemporaries…As Seifer shows in great detail…Tesla’s story is complicated and tests our definition of science…Where does someone like Tesla fit it?

  —MIT’s Technology Review

  Wizard…presents a much more accurate…picture of Tesla…[It] is thorough, informative, entertaining and a valuable addition to electrotechnological history, past and future.

  —Electronic Engineering Times

  Here is a deep and comprehensive biography of a great engineer of early electrical science. Indeed, it is likely to become the definitive biography of the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla. The book brings together, into a cohesive whole, the many complex facets of the personal and technical life of the “wizard” who stands alongside Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse as another great implementor and inventor…Highly recommended.

  —American Academy for the Advancement of Science

  In modern times, Tesla may be enjoying a comeback thanks to books like “Wizard.”

  —New York Times

  The next time you dial your cellular phone, there’s a guy you should think of. If you don’t use a cell phone, then look at the light by which you’re reading this newspaper. He helped make it brighter…WIZARD chronicles Tesla’s contributions to alternating current, or AC, the electrical system used in most homes today. Though today he is almost forgotten, written out of history by the people he once worked for, Tesla lived in New York’s Waldorf Astoria and was world famous…“His notebooks are filled with mathematics,” said Seifer. “He predates Einstein and Bohr with his description of the atom. He was one of the forefathers of quantum physics.”

  —Narragansett Times

  [Wizard] brings the many complex facets of [Tesla’s] personal and technical life together into a cohesive whole…The book contains excellent discussions of the controversies, fury of activity, and lawsuits surrounding the development of new hardware technology. In many ways, they are similar to the later legal battles in the development of computers…I highly recommend this biography of a great technologist. A.A. Mullin, U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command.

  —Computing Reviews

  Rare insight on a great mind.

  —New Bedford Standard Times

  Wizard

  The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla

  Biography of a Genius

  Marc J. Seifer

  In memory of my Dad, Stanley Seifer

  FOREWORD

  Nikola Tesla was my father’s uncle, and as such he was treated by our family much as any uncle might have been who lived at a considerable distance and was advanced in years. But there were stronger bonds between my father and Tesla than might otherwise have been the case. They came from identical social backgrounds, sons of Serbian Orthodox priests, born and raised a few miles apart in the Austro-Hungarian military frontier district county of Lika in the Province of Croatia (my grandmother was Tesla’s sister Angelina); they were the only members of a relatively limited extended family to emigrate to America; and they were the only members to undertake science and technology as their life’s work.

  My father, Nicholas J. (John) Terbo (Nikola Jovo Trbojevich), was thirty years younger than his uncle, came to America thirty years after him, and died thirty years after Tesla. Tesla was already famous as my father was growing up, and he became a model for my father’s technical career. Father held about 175 U.S. and foreign patents, the most important of which was his 1923 basic patent on the Hypoid gear, used on the vast majority of the world’s cars since 1930. The Hypoid gear introduced advanced mathematics to the art of gear design, much as Tesla’s work united electrical theory and electrical engineering. Tesla henceforth proudly referred to my father as “my nephew, the mathematician.” (That these patents brought considerable financial as well as professional recognition to my father was also not lost on the often cash-po
or Tesla.)

  Because the ethnic and professional similarities between Nikola Tesla and my father were so striking, I feel that I have been granted a special privilege through this comparison in understanding Tesla’s private personality, including his well-developed sense of humor and his often cavalier disregard for money. Once, when Tesla was visiting us in the early 1930s, my father took him to lunch at the Book Cadillac Hotel, then the finest in Detroit. They arrived late, only a few minutes before a cover charge of $2 or $3 would end. (This was equivalent to $20 or $30 by today’s standards.) My father suggested waiting, but Tesla would hear none of it. They sat down amid a flurry of waiters and Tesla ordered a chafing dish, bread, and milk and proceeded to prepare his own lunch to his own specifications (to my father’s amusement and the unease of the maître d’).

  I had not yet reached thirteen when Tesla died in January 1943, and I did not have the sense of the ending of an epoch marked by his passing, both for our family and for an era of individualism in scientific discovery.

  I may have reflected with some uneasiness that I had had the opportunity to meet Tesla some three or four years earlier and that no further meetings would ever happen again. I remembered my reluctance to be dragged to the meeting in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker when my mother and I were spending a few days in New York before returning to Detroit after our summer vacation at the Jersey shore. (I would have preferred spending more time at Radio City Music Hall or at the docks, watching the ocean liners.)

  I was shy (rather, overwhelmed) and spoke hardly a word to this very tall, very gaunt old man. I would have been repelled—as any young “all-American boy” should have been—to be hugged and kissed by this stranger if my father hadn’t often done the same. (This is the way my mother’s women friends often acted, but my American mother’s brother would have only given me a firm handshake.) Little did I realize that Tesla’s hugging, kissing, and patting my head would belie his famous idiosyncrasy of an overriding phobia of germs. Surely, a young boy would have been teeming with “germs”! One could therefore speculate that this “idiosyncrasy” was possibly an affectation designed to preserve his “space.”

  While Tesla lived, some considerable degree of his fame endured—in no small measure because of his ability to stimulate the media. However, after his death the nation and the world were occupied with other more pressing matters—war and reconstruction, international political realignments, an unmatched explosion of new technology, a new consumer society—and Tesla’s fame and recognition nearly evaporated. Only a few in the U.S. and international scientific communities and the abiding respect and admiration of Serbs and all Yugoslavs worldwide kept his name alive.

  My awareness of a resurgence of interest in the life and works of Nikola Tesla began in the early 1970s, when I moved from Los Angeles (where it seemed no one had ever heard of Tesla) to Washington, D.C., where at least the name was recognized. In February 1975 my mother phoned to tell me that she had read in the Los Angeles Times that Uncle Nikola was to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and that I should look into it. I chanced to notice on a local TV news program that evening a short segment monitoring the Hall of Fame and an interview with a girl of ten or twelve who had invented a new can opener or some such. I dismissed the Hall as a commercial promotion and went on to something else.

  Only later did I read a newspaper account about the induction of Tesla (along with Orville and Wilbur Wright, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Tesla’s nemesis, Guglielmo Marconi) and citing the Hall’s sponsorship by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Patent and Trademark Office. The closest living relative of each honoree was to receive the induction diploma at an elaborate ceremony. Lacking any “Tesla” (or even any “Trbojevich”) to represent the family, an officer of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) accepted the Tesla diploma. (The IEEE considers Tesla one of the twelve “apostles” of electrical science and continues to offer an annual prize in the field of Power Engineering in his name.) When I presented myself at the Patent Office a few weeks later, they were delighted and made arrangements to make a second presentation to me at the 1976 awards ceremony held that year at Congress Hall in Philadelphia as part of the U.S. Bicentennial Year celebration.

  Since then, there has been an earnest revival of interest in the technological accomplishments of Nikola Tesla and in his personality, philosophy, and culture as well. Part of the drama of his life is that he was a man who not only revolutionized the generation and distribution of electrical energy and made basic contributions to many other facets of modern technology but that he did so without the specific aim of amassing great wealth. This altruism, which is often criticized as “poor business sense,” imposed a monetary limitation on future experimentation to test his new innovations. Who knows what advances might have been possible if he had been able to validate them through rigorous experimentation. New science is an expensive endeavor, and finding financial support is a frustrating task for even those as focused as Tesla.

  Among the associations that have supported the Tesla renaissance are: the Tesla Memorial Society, which I helped found in 1979, and of which I am pleased to be its Honorary Chairman and Chairman of its Executive Board, and the International Tesla Society, founded in 1983, and of which I am a Life Member. It was while speaking at the first ITS biannual Tesla Symposium in 1984 that I first met a fellow speaker, Dr. Marc J. Seifer, in person. His paper “The Lost Wizard” was the seed from which his new Tesla biography has sprung. I have been impressed with Dr. Seifer’s dedication and scholarship in developing his early theories into a well-rounded examination of the mystery of Tesla’s great genius.

  One of the things that has most intrigued me about a new work on this topic is how much new information keeps surfacing. Dr. Seifer has researched minor characters in Tesla’s life as well as the many major ones. This has given him additional insight into Tesla’s life and allowed the development of new and different interpretations of many important events, such as the failure of the Wardenclyffe tower project.

  Dr. Seifer provides a new look at Tesla’s college years, the time when many of his epochal ideas were forming. He has uncovered new information on Tesla’s relationship with a number of key individuals, such as his editor, Thomas Commerford Martin, and financial backers John Jacob Astor and John Hays Hammond. A great strength of Wizard is its adherence, chapter by chapter, to a rather strict chronology, which makes it easy to follow the breadth and scope of Tesla’s life and achievements in an orderly fashion.

  I congratulate Dr. Seifer on a decade’s journey with Nikola Tesla and am pleased to introduce to you Wizard.

  William H. Terbo

  Honorary Chairman Tesla Memorial Society

  PREFACE

  In 1976, while involved in research at the New York Public Library, I stumbled upon a strange text entitled Return of the Dove which claimed that there was a man not born of this planet who landed as a baby in the mountains of Croatia in 1856. Raised by “earth parents,” an avatar had arrived for the sole purpose of inaugurating the New Age. By providing humans with a veritable cornucopia of inventions, he had created, in essence, the technological backbone of the modern era.1

  His name was Nikola Tesla, and his inventions included the induction motor, the electrical-power distribution system, fluorescent and neon lights, wireless communication, remote control, and robotics.

  Tesla—who’s he? I said to myself. Because my father had been a TV repairman for several years in the early 1950s and I had spent part of my childhood accompanying him on house calls, helping put up antennas, test and buy radio tubes, play with oscilloscopes, and watch him build TVs, I was amazed that I had never heard of this man.

  I remember vividly an event from my grade-school years on Long Island that prepared me for my latter-day interest. It was a Saturday, circa 1959, and I was working on a Boy Scout assignment when I came upon a design for a crystal radio set. My father and I gathered a glass jar and a set of headphon
es, a crystal detector for changing the ambient AC radio waves into audio DC pulses, some thin copper wire to be wrapped around the jar, a metal switch that was scraped across this coil for the “dial,” a small plank to hold the contraption together, and a hundred feet of normal rubbercoated wire for the antenna, which we strung out a second-story window. There was no plug; all energy was derived from the broadcast signals from the nearby radio stations. However, after hooking it all together, the reception was faint; I became discouraged.

  My father paced the room, considering the problem, muttering, “Something’s wrong.” After a few moments of deep thought, he made a motion which said, “I’ve got it.” Walking over to our radiator and dragging another wire, which he had hooked up to the jar, Dad attached a ground connection. Suddenly, all the stations began to come in loud and clear, and I marked each of them on the jar along the coil. It was apparent to me then that electrical power was being transmitted from these stations by wireless means and that the earth somehow was intrinsically linked to this system.

  And now, here I was, nearly twenty years later, two years out of graduate school with a master’s degree, well-read and somewhat knowledgeable about electronics, yet I had never heard of the principal inventor of the very device I had spent endless hours with as a kid. This astonished me in a way difficult to describe. Moreover, when I asked my father about Tesla, he barely knew of him.

  Because I believe in seeking original sources, I began to research Tesla’s life, starting with the two existing biographies, John O’Neill’s classic Prodigal Genius and Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper’s Lightning in His Hand. Soon after, I began tracking down numerous turn-of-the-century references and also the weighty Nikola Tesla: Lectures, Patents, Articles, produced by the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Thus, I was able to ascertain, by following his actual patents, that indeed Tesla existed and that his work was fundamental to all these creations.

  That Tesla’s name was so little known puzzled me, so in 1980, three years after writing my first article on him, I began a doctoral dissertation on his life. My major purpose was to address the question of name obscurity.