Niagara: A History of the Falls (27 page)

Thomson and his four fellow commissioners spent an exhausting six days examining the submissions. They awarded four prizes for pneumatic projects, four more for electrical, but no first prize for a combined project that would involve the hydraulic development and electrical distribution of power. In short, the main purpose of the competition had not succeeded. As hordes of workmen blasted away at the rock far below the village, no feasible method of getting power beyond Niagara Falls had yet been discovered.

What was needed was a visionary: neither Edison nor Thomson, both of whom were committed with near missionary zeal to the concept of direct current, but somebody who could free himself from that scientific strait jacket and work out a way by which electric current could be transported over hundreds of miles. Only then could the Falls be made to release its power.

In fact, just such a man existed. Indeed, he had already worked out the principle of an alternating-current motor, a system that would, in the end, be universally adopted. The son of a Greek Orthodox priest from the little village of Smiljan, Croatia, on the Austro-Hungarian border, he was, without doubt, the most extraordinary scientist in the world.

His name was Nikola Tesla.

2
Tesla

He was almost too good to be true. No Baron Munchausen would have dared to imprison his saga within the limits of a tall tale. By the nineties, he was for a brief time the most celebrated scientist in the world. The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is still widely used in radio and television sets. The tesla, a unit of magnetic induction, honours his memory. He stands at the very threshold of the age of electrical power – the Slavic genius who made it possible. Yet his name is hardly known outside the scientific community.

There is something uncanny about Tesla, something almost mystical. His senses, according to his own account, were all amazingly acute. While he was under strain, his hearing was so sensitive that he could note a thunderclap 550 miles away. During one nervous breakdown, he was able to hear a watch ticking three rooms away. When a fly lit on a table beside him, the thud it produced caused him agony. A carriage rumbling down a street seven miles distant seemed to shake his entire body. He could feel the vibrations caused by a train whistle twenty miles off so powerfully that they caused him to tremble. He needed little sleep – no more than two hours a night – but during one illness he could not rest unless his bed was anchored in rubber cushions.

There were times when the sun’s rays seemed to strike with such force on his brain that they would stun him. He had to summon all his willpower to pass under a bridge because he would experience a crushing pressure on the skull. In the dark, he was like a bat, detecting the presence of an object or a person at a distance of twelve feet by a sensation in his forehead.

He was incredibly restless, unable to sit still for more than a few moments, his brain never at ease. In his younger days, when he went for a stroll he counted every step; when he sat down to a meal, he could not enjoy it until he had calculated the cubic contents of every plate, cup, and piece of food set before him. He preferred to do things in threes because he favoured numbers divisible by three.

Bom in 1856, destined by his father for the church, he became a scientist who was also a poet and a philosopher. He loved music, food, and wine and spoke eight languages, including English, without an accent. He dressed like a dandy in a Prince Albert coat, derby hat, and stiff collar. His handkerchiefs were always of silk, never linen. He was so fastidious that he invariably wiped his cutlery with eighteen linen napkins before every meal. He threw away each pair of gloves after a few wearings. But he wore no jewellery – couldn’t stand it. In childhood, he had had a violent aversion to earrings on women, and the sight of a pearl would almost give him a fit. “I would not touch the hair of other people,” he recalled, “except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever from looking at a peach, and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house, it caused me the keenest discomfort.” When he was twenty-eight he wrote, “Even now, I am not insensible to some of these upsetting impulses.”

At six foot six, Tesla was a commanding figure, clean-cut and wiry, his jet-black hair parted in the middle. With his intense blue eyes and Slavic profile, he was a magnet for women, whose interest was perhaps piqued by his supreme indifference to the opposite sex. The great Sarah Bernhardt once deliberately dropped her handkerchief in his presence. Tesla picked it up absently and returned it without bothering to look at her. Not even the Divine Sarah, apparently, could be allowed to interrupt his train of thought. Marriage, Tesla once said, would take him away from his work.

He was a voracious reader with a compulsion to finish everything he started. Once he set out to read the works of Voltaire, without knowing that they had been published in close to one hundred volumes, available only in small print. As one biographer reports, it almost killed him, but he found no peace until he had finished every last one.

He was blessed with a photographic memory. As a youth, he had learned the entire body of logarithmic tables by heart. He could memorize a page of type or a visual pattern almost in an instant. In dangerous situations or in moments of elation he was subject to inexplicable flashes of light over which he had no control. There were times when he felt hot and the air about him seemed filled with tongues of living flame.

Tesla was obsessed by water wheels and turbines. As a child of four, with the help of his older brother, Dane, he devised a unique wheel, smooth and without paddles, that spun evenly in a stream’s current, with a twig serving as an axle. That was the genesis of an idea that returned to him years later when he invented a smooth disc turbine without buckets.

Neither his incurable curiosity nor his exotic imagination knew any bounds. He experimented ceaselessly. He took his grandfather’s clocks apart to see what made them tick. He tried to build a motor using sixteen June bugs to power it through the rapid fluttering of their wings. He once tried to fly by hyperventilating himself until he was convinced he was lighter than air. He used the family umbrella as a parachute, fell on his head, and knocked himself out. But he did fly, in his imagination, on make-believe journeys to far-off realms.

He had difficulty distinguishing the real from the imagined. He saw objects and scenes before his eyes that others could not see. Often these were accompanied by strong flashes of light. As he later recalled, “when a word was spoken to me, the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not.”

If he witnessed a funeral or some other nerve-racking spectacle, “inevitably, in the stillness of the night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself
before
my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it. Sometimes it would even remain fixt in space, tho I pushed my hand through it.” To rid himself of these hallucinations he would try to concentrate on something else: visiting cities, fancied or real, and making friends with the people of his imagination who were “just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.”

As an inventor he had no need of models, blueprints, or drawings of experiments. He pictured everything, in detail, in his mind. He claimed to be able to perfect a conception without touching anything. “It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop,” he said. “I even note if it is out of balance.”

By his own account he was accident prone. “I got into all sorts of difficulties, dangerous scrapes from which I was extricated as by enchantment,” he wrote. “I was almost drowned a dozen times; was nearly boiled alive and just missed being cremated. I was entombed, lost and frozen. I had hair breadth escapes from mad dogs, hogs, and other wild animals. I passed thru dreadful diseases and met all kinds of odd mishaps and that I am hale and hearty today seems like a miracle.” On three occasions doctors despaired of his life. He caught malaria at fifteen. A year or so later he was bedridden for nine months with cholera. At twenty, in Budapest, he suffered a complete nervous breakdown, which he conquered through a gruelling program of callisthenics.

His concentration and self-discipline were awesome. He tried to see how long he could stop his heartbeat by willpower (a test halted by the family doctor). He learned to force himself, when he was eight, to put aside anything that gave him pleasure – mouth-watering cake, say, or a piece of fruit. He would give it to a friend, and, as a result, “go through the tortures of Tantalus, pained but satisfied.” If he was faced with a difficult and exhausting task, he would attack it again and again until it was done.

Ideas chased each other at breakneck speed through Tesla’s fevered brain. Niagara Falls, which perhaps owes more to him than to any other scientist, took hold of his imagination at an early age. At fifteen he began to experiment with various water turbines. During his bout of malaria, when he read voraciously, he opened an old book and found a steel engraving of the Falls. It fascinated him. In his mind he saw how a great wheel might be made to turn under the cataract’s tremendous power. He told his uncle of his daydream – that some day he would go to America and harness the runaway waters of the Falls. Years later he remarked, “I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and I marvelled at the mystery of the mind.”

In his teens he had begun to fiddle with the concept of a substitute for direct current. Examining a new direct-current dynamo that could be turned into a motor by reversing the current, he experienced a thrill of excitement. The design could be improved, he declared, by switching to alternating current. Nobody took him seriously, and the practical method eluded him at the time; but he filed the problem in the back of his mind.

Several years later, in 1882, during a walk with a friend through a park in Budapest and while in the midst of reciting Goethe’s
Faust
, the full solution came to him in a flash. He seized a stick and drew a diagram in the dust. “See my motor,” he said. “Watch me reverse it.” To him, the image of the motor was “wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone.” It was an emotional moment: “Pygmalion seeing a statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved.” In one breathtaking flash of intuition, Nikola Tesla had not only devised a motor but had also arrived at the principle of the rotating magnetic field produced by two asynchronous alternating currents, out of step with each other. In that instant he had changed the course of science and paved the way for the exploitation of Niagara Falls power.

The time would come when almost all the electricity in the world would be generated, transmitted, distributed, and turned into mechanical power by the Tesla Polyphase System. For the first time it would be possible to send high voltages on slender wires for hundreds of miles. Thanks to this obscure Croatian, a new age of electric light and power was about to dawn.

But the new age had not yet arrived. In 1882, Tesla went to work for Continental Edison in Paris, determined to push his new discoveries. In this he was bitterly disappointed. Thomas Edison believed in direct current the way Billy Sunday believed in God. Tesla was told firmly that he must never so much as mention the subject of alternating current. In spite of this, when he left Paris for North America he carried with him a glowing recommendation from the manager of the French plant. All the material possessions he brought to the United States were four cents, a book of his own poems, a scientific treatise, and a package of calculations outlining his plans for a flying machine. As one of his biographers, Margaret Cheney, has noted, “at twenty-eight he was already one of the world’s great inventors. But not another soul knew it.”

The rumpled Edison hired him but refused to discuss Tesla’s views on alternating current. “Spare me that nonsense,” he said. “It’s dangerous. We’re set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it’s all I’ll ever fool with.” As Edison was to admit, many years later, that was a monumental error.

Edison knew nothing of Tesla’s background and cared less. Apparently he believed the young immigrant came from some savage corner of the globe, for he once shocked Tesla by asking if he had ever eaten human flesh. The robust and practical American had little in common with his poetic and intuitive new employee. Edison worked him hard, often until five in the morning. When Tesla offered to improve one of Edison’s direct-current motors to lower the cost and save on maintenance, the older inventor said casually, “There’s fifty thousand dollars in it for you – if you can do it.” Tesla succeeded, but Edison didn’t pay up. “You don’t understand our American humour,” he explained.

Disappointed, Tesla quit and set up his own company in New Jersey to manufacture the new arc lights. Within a year he was bankrupt. The man who had made a quantum leap in electrical progress was reduced to eking out a living by digging New York sewers at two dollars a day.

Then, a year later, his fortunes changed. Tesla, it developed, was exactly the kind of inventive genius that George Westing-house was seeking. Next to Edison, Westinghouse was the best-known inventor in America, a powerful six-footer of commanding presence, unfailing courtesy, and lively imagination. His crowning achievement was his invention of the railroad air brake.

Unlike Edison, Westinghouse was a convert to alternating current. He bought up forty patents from Tesla for $60,000 plus a royalty of $2.50 for every horsepower generated under the Tesla system. He also made him a consultant at two thousand dollars a month, a princely sum that enraged Edison and set the stage for a titanic struggle between the two inventors. Thus was launched “the battle of the currents.”

Edison, who had invested a good deal of time and money in the development of direct current, attacked savagely, mounting a scare campaign designed to give the impression that alternating current was incalculably dangerous. He issued pamphlets with the headline “WARNING!” in red letters, alleging that dangers lurked for anyone who tried to use the Westinghouse system. He paid schoolboys twenty-five cents apiece for stray cats and dogs, which he proceeded to electrocute with alternating current before groups of reporters. The anti-nuclear campaign of a later century seems almost placid when compared with Edison’s hard-driving attack. He lobbied the legislature at Albany to pass a law limiting electric currents to eight hundred volts. He even managed to persuade the warden of Sing Sing prison to “westinghouse” a condemned murderer using alternating current. The electric charge that had killed the dogs and cats was too weak; the condemned man survived and had to be electrocuted a second time – a grisly spectacle that one reporter said was worse than a hanging.