Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future

NIKOLA TESLA

AND THE

ELECTRICAL

FUTURE

IWAN RHYS MORUS

‘There have been other Tesla biographies, but this is the one I have been waiting for. Neither hagiographic nor hatchet-job, it sets its mercurial subject in his cultural and historical context: a visionary and showman, part genius and part crank, totally a product of his age. Tesla cannot be understood without a clear view of the (uniquely American) legend he embedded himself within, and Iwan Rhys Morus expounds that view brilliantly. Tesla, he shows us, was – like his one-time boss and rival Thomas Edison – inventing nothing less than the electrified future.’

—Philip Ball, author of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen

‘Nikola Tesla saw himself as a rebel, a free-thinker, a disruptor and the sworn enemy of scientific mediocrity. Brilliant in his experimentation, chaotic in his methodology, Tesla was the twentieth century’s first visionary tech entrepreneur.’

—Thomas Dolby, musician and sound tech pioneer

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1: The Electrical Century

Chapter 1: A Child of the Storm

Chapter 2: Electric Power

Chapter 3: Working Electricity

Part 2: Battle of the Systems

Chapter 4: A New World

Chapter 5: The Wizard of Menlo Park

Chapter 6: AC/DC

Chapter 7: Building Tomorrow

Part 3: Scientific Showman

Chapter 8: The Business of Invention

Chapter 9: Electrical Landscapes

Chapter 10: Harnessing Nature

Chapter 11: The Greatest Show on Earth

Part 4: Selling the Future

Chapter 12: In the Ether

Chapter 13: The Pursuit of Power

Chapter 14: Other Worlds

Chapter 15: Wardenclyffe

Part 5: Visions of Tomorrow

Chapter 16: Inventing the Future

Chapter 17: Projections

Chapter 18: The Afterlives of Nikola Tesla

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

Copyright

Prologue

Nikola Tesla is in many ways one of the most enigmatic, curious, and controversial figures in the history of science. He was controversial during his own lifetime too, with opinion divided between those who thought he was either a visionary, a charlatan, or a fool. Whatever he was, he was full of apparent contradiction. Tesla was a consummate showman and a very private recluse – a man of science who seemed to be addicted to self-promotion and sensationalism. He was a prolific inventor of technologies that sometimes helped make other men’s fortunes, but failed completely to make one for himself. Tesla embodied the aspirations and the paradoxes of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Looking back now at the future that Tesla imagined, it still seems very familiar. It is no coincidence that Elon Musk named the company making his electrical car of the future ‘Tesla’. Tesla’s fin-de-siècle invocation of an electrical future still casts its shadow over the ways we understand our future now.

The final decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth century were a time of unprecedented technological transformation. Tesla was one of the key innovators of that innovative age. He was a key figure in developing new ways of generating and transmitting electrical power. He played a vital role in establishing the networks of power that still run our economies more than a century later. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the global spread of the telegraph network, the invention of the telephone, and the beginnings of wireless telegraphy. The discovery of X-rays and radioactivity seemed to open up new vistas for the future. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the beginnings of powered flight. This was the world that produced Tesla, and that he helped produce. His restless speculations and experiments about the way tomorrow would be also helped inaugurate new ways of trying to understand the future – the ways we still turn to as we try to make sense of the future now, and imagine how to get there.

Tesla is often described (and some of his promoters described him in this way during his own lifetime) as a man ahead of his time. It is a relatively common way of talking about great innovators – Leonardo da Vinci is another example of someone often talked about in this way. In Tesla’s case, however, the suggestion could not be more wrong. He was in all ways the product of the scientific and technological turmoil of those final decades of the nineteenth century during which the future seemed to be coming closer on an almost daily basis. That is why this book will not be just a biography of Nikola Tesla. It will take the inventor as its guide and follow him through the cut-throat entrepreneurial culture of late Victorian and Edwardian electrical invention. I want to explore the electrical future that Tesla saw himself creating, and the raw materials from which that future was being forged.

The decades during which Tesla completed his education, came to America and made himself as an inventor were characterized by a near-addiction to innovation. Both the Old World that Tesla left, and the New World where he lived for most of his adult life were undergoing rapid technological change. Electricity was no longer just a thing of lecture theatres and exhibitions, but was leaking everywhere into everyday life. Cityscapes and townscapes across Europe and America were now festooned with the paraphernalia of electrical technology. Cables criss-crossed the sky, carrying power to homes and businesses, or buzzing with information from telegraphs and telephones. Electric tramcars trundled down the streets. At night, public buildings and shopfronts dazzled the eye with spectacular displays of electric lighting. To many people, it looked as if tomorrow’s world had already arrived, and people like Tesla were the ones who had delivered it.

This was a time when engineers and inventors could be heroes. They were held up and celebrated as examples of what discipline and perseverance could achieve. As we shall see, even on the far frontiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire it was possible for a young man like Tesla to dream of a life of invention. Invention offered a road to fame and fortune. More importantly, it seemed to offer an opportunity to change the world. The prevailing image of invention and inventors was one of determined individualism. Tesla, of course, fashioned himself carefully to fit that image, as did others like Thomas Edison. To be an inventor Tesla had to be a showman too. Electricity seemed made for spectacle and Tesla turned himself into a consummate performer of electrical spectacle. He quite literally made himself part of the display, making it seem as if he held the electrical future in his hands.

Electricity and invention at the beginning of the twentieth century were bound up with imagining the future. The nineteenth century was in many ways the century that saw the invention of the future. The nineteenth-century future was imagined as a place that would be different from the present and generated by technological progress and innovation. This was particularly the case with electricity. Electricity was understood as the stuff from which the future would be made, to such a degree that it was almost impossible to discuss electricity at all without invoking its future. To most people, electricity simply was instantaneous communication, with or without wires; new sources of power; locomotion; improved agriculture and control of the weather; weapons and flying machines – and electrically generated health. This was a future extrapolated from bits and pieces of present technology. One of the things that made Tesla so successful was that he was very good at offering compelling images of the future his inventions would deliver.

The stories that Tesla told about the future of wireless communication and wireless power that he was trying to build at Wardenclyffe during the first few years of the twentieth century were very much part of a wider culture of speculating about the future – both in fact and in fiction. The magazines and newspapers that reported on Tesla’s activities and relayed the visions of the future that he promised were filled with such stuff. They published scientific romances by the likes of H.G. Wells as well – and sometimes the scientific romance and the scientific facts were hard to disentangle. It was no coincidence that Tesla’s speculations about wireless communication with Mars, for example, were aired at the same time as everyone was reading The War of the Worlds. Telling tales about the future was integral to the business of invention. Inventors like Tesla needed to excite the public’s imagination to sell them their vision of the future – and to attract the attention of the money men whose cash would be needed to make those visions real.

One of the reasons, I think, why Tesla remains such a fascinating and seductive figure is that the image of invention he wrapped around himself remains a very familiar one. That image – which Tesla helped create – of the inventor as an exceptional kind of individual is still the way we tend to think about inventors and innovation today. Just as people in the nineteenth century associated invention with individuals, so do we. Where they made Brunel, or Edison, or Tesla into heroes, we do the same with their contemporary equivalents – though maybe we are a little more inclined than our great-grandparents to make them villains instead. Whether we think of them as heroes or as villains though, the image of invention that we have inherited from the nineteenth century is one that portrays innovation as something that is produced through the exertions and talents of remarkable individuals. Tesla’s self-portrait as the uniquely gifted, asocial, daydreaming obsessive is one that still resonates for us today.

That notion of invention as belonging to exceptional individuals like Tesla has its impact too on the way we tend to think about the future and how – and by whom – it gets made. As far as Tesla was concerned, the future was going to be made by him. Tesla’s future seems familiar to us, not because we are living in it, but because we still imagine the future in the same sort of way and using the same sorts of ingredients as he did. We make our futures out of bits and pieces of the present. That is one reason, at least, why we should take Tesla seriously still. In the rest of this book I use Tesla as a way in to the future as it looked from the end of the nineteenth century. Understanding that future is important in my view, because it helps us understand why we now imagine the future as we do. Understanding Tesla can tell us not just about how we got to where we are, it can help show us why we think as we do about where we are going, too.

PART 1

THE ELECTRICAL CENTURY

CHAPTER 1

A Child of the Storm

What did the future look like in 1856? For Milutin and Djuka Tesla, living in the village of Smiljan in the province of Lika in Croatia it must have appeared quite uncertain in many ways. They were Serbs, living in Croatian lands, and members of the Orthodox Church in a predominantly Catholic Austrian Empire. Until a few years previously, Milutin had been an Orthodox priest in the town of Senj on the Adriatic coast. The family had moved to Smiljan in 1852, hoping to make a better living in a more prosperous place and with a larger population of co-religionists to support their priest. The times must have seemed precarious, nevertheless. It was only a few years since the Empire had been convulsed by the wave of revolutions that had swept across Europe in 1848. The little town of Smiljan had certainly not been immune to those convulsions, and the unstable frontier with the Ottoman Empire was not far away.¹

According to family legend, when Nikola Tesla was born at midnight on 9 July by the old Julian calendar, a thunderstorm was raging over the village. The midwife reputedly worried that the infant Tesla would be ‘a child of the storm’. Djuka apparently responded, ‘No, of light.’² It is a powerful image, and one that Tesla himself made much of in later life. The story certainly fits in well with the image Tesla wanted to convey of his own unique genius. His special link with electricity had been forged at the moment of his birth.

Whether or not a storm really raged over Smiljan that night, it seems that Tesla was a sickly child. He was baptised immediately, which suggests some concern that he might not survive. Like all male children born in the military frontier, the young Tesla was promptly enlisted in the local regiment, with the expectation that he would commence service at the age of fifteen.

Though Milutin had broken with family tradition by joining the priesthood, the Teslas were a military clan. Nikola’s grandfather had served first in Napoleon’s army in the Illyrian provinces that had been ceded by Austria to France, then, following Napoleon’s defeat, in the Austrian imperial army. Milutin and his brother Josif had both been enrolled as students in the Austrian Military Officers’ School until Milutin had rebelled and decided to join the church instead. Tesla’s uncle Josif remained in the army and became a mathematics professor at the military academy.

Djuka Mandić on the other hand came from a line of priests. Her father and her grandfather had both entered the church, and her brother Nikolai became the Archbishop of Sarajevo. There were military men on the Mandić side of the family too, with Nikola’s uncle Pajo becoming a colonel in the Austrian army. Both families were Serbs, and committed both to the Orthodox Church and to a vision of a future independent Serbian state.

The Tesla household – and the wider family – within which the young Nikola grew up was clearly one that valued the life of the mind. His uncle Josif was not just a professor of mathematics but the author of a number of mathematical works. His father Milutin was prosperous enough to be able to collect a growing library of books, including works in science and mathematics as well as the theological tomes that might be expected in a priest’s study. He also wrote regularly for a number of Serbian journals and magazines on a variety of topics, particularly on the need for education in the Serbian language. There were clearly plenty of opportunities for an eager and inquisitive young child. Tesla remembered his mother Djuka as ‘an inventor of the first order’ who would ‘have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities’.³

Tesla was exaggerating the remoteness. Smiljan might have been in a relatively obscure corner of the Austrian Empire, but it was still part of a modern European state, and one that during his childhood was changing rapidly in the wake of the 1848 revolution. The political and ethnic geography of this eastern frontier of the empire was certainly complex. Tesla’s ancestors would have settled in the area having fled Ottoman encroachments a few centuries earlier. Their settlement on the precarious border was a deliberate imperial policy designed to provide a ready supply of local soldiery to defend against possible Ottoman invasion. Croats, Serbs and other ethnic groups, Catholic, Orthodox, and even Muslim, lived cheek by jowl along the border. When Tesla was ten years old, the old Austrian Empire became the new Austro-Hungarian Empire with the incorporation of the Kingdom of Hungary on 30 March 1867. The world in which he was growing up was rapidly changing, and those changes would create new opportunities and new possible futures for ambitious young men.

Milutin Tesla’s own activities as a writer show how fully engaged the family were with the world around them. Milutin contributed regularly to the Novi Sad Diary and other Serbian publications. He mainly wrote about the need for Serbian language education, complaining that ‘except for the clergy and merchants or tradesmen, here and there, hardly anyone knows how to sign his name in Serbian.’ He complained that ‘Serbs in Croatia do not have High Schools, Teachers’ Colleges, or any other public places of learning.’⁴ As well as his journalism, he was involved in campaigns to establish schools for the local population. Smiljan might have been a long way from the empire’s centre of political, economic, and technological power in Vienna, but it was not remote from it. The empire’s political leaders were busily embracing a technological future and the tentacles of progress were spreading out across its territories.

Throughout the 1840s the empire’s railway networks were spreading rapidly. This was the result of a determined effort by the state to industrialize and innovate. By the 1850s there were railway lines running south from Vienna to Ljubljana in Slovenia and onwards towards Trieste. By the 1860s the railways were encroaching on Croatian territory too, although it would be a long time before they arrived at Smiljan. The railways were a deliberate effort to consolidate the empire. As contemporary commentators noted, railways made the world smaller and more manageable. As the English commentator Dionysius Lardner put it, with the advent of the railways ‘the whole population of the country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two-thirds of the time which now separates them from it; they would also sit nearer to one another by two-thirds of the time which now respectively alienates them.’⁵ In the Austrian Empire, they were an equally deliberate effort to improve industry.

The Austrian Empire’s adoption of the electromagnetic telegraph during the 1840s was as calculated and strategic as the enthusiasm for the railways. Telegraphy in the empire was an imperial monopoly – the Telegraphenregal – and its adoption was a deliberate attempt to acquire the trappings of a progressive and modern state. Like the railways, the electromagnetic telegraph made the world seem smaller. It annihilated time and space, said its promoters. It certainly revolutionized the speed at which information could travel. For the empire’s political leaders, it was another tool in their efforts to subjugate the various ethnic groups that lived within its borders and to create a homogenous and culturally united state. In 1865 the Austrian Empire was one of the signatories of the International Telegraph Convention in Paris. A few years later the International Telegraph Conference assembled in Vienna. The Austrian Empire was ready to embrace the future, and that electrical future was coming closer to Smiljan and to Nikola Tesla.

Tesla himself recalled his own first encounter with electricity from a very early age. As a very young boy he remembered playing with the family cat, Macak. Stroking the animal on a particularly cold and dry evening, he ‘saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement’. The cat’s back ‘was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house’. His father told him that ‘this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.’ Tesla found himself wondering if nature was like the cat, and whether God was the one who stroked it to generate lightning. Looking back at the event decades later, Tesla supposed that it must have been the first time that he started thinking about the nature of electricity.⁶

He certainly saw himself as having inherited his mother’s gift for invention. He traced his inventiveness to a very early age, describing how he had made his own fish hook to catch frogs. In another experiment, he ‘acted under the first instinctive impulse which later dominated me – to harness the energies of nature to the service of man’. He made a machine powered by ‘May-bugs’ – which seems to have worked well until one of his friends ate the insects. He remembered disassembling – and failing to reassemble – his grandfather’s clocks. He also ‘went into the manufacture of a kind of pop-gun which comprised a hollow tube, a piston, and two plugs of hemp’.⁷ Along with inventiveness came introspection. Tesla said of his own inventive gifts