Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (70 page)

In contrast, Trombly said, a more advanced cosmology sees everything as a modification of an energy-rich background field. Our physical bodies are relatively insignificant modifications of that field. The field itself has a potential energy equivalence, in grams, of 10-to-the-94th power grams per cubic centimetre. The human body, in comparison, has a gram equivalent of only about one gram per cubic centimeter. That means that the background energy is 10 (wish 94 zeros after the ten) times more energyrich than our physical bodies.

THE PLAN: TELL ROOSEVELT

It's a lot of energy, Trombly said. Why not invent a pocket size device which could tap a kilowatt of this space energy? It could "just kind of scrape the surface, ever so slightly" of the 10-to-the-94th-power grams per cubic centimeter supply of energy.

"That's what Nikola Tesla was scheduled to tell Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943. In 1943 he proposed to FDR that perhaps we should look carefully at the fact that we can get all the energy we need from any space we happen to be in.

"He didn't show up for the meeting; he was found dead in his apartment— 'natural causes.'"
The speaker added quietly that despite the official statement on the cause of death, then is some suspicion that Tesla's paranoia about what he ate was more premonition than paranoia. Trombly then related an incident which fueled this suspicion. He had given a speech at the University of Toronto, Canada, for the 1981 conference on Non-Conventional Energy. Afterward, an older gentleman with a heavy New York accent came up to Trombly and said he had been a detective at the time Nikola Tesla was found dead, and had been involved in the investigation. The old man had produced vintage credentials to show Trombly that he had indeed been a detective. The man appeared to be old enough to have been an adult in 1943.

In a soft voice Trombly said that the old man had said that "for national security reasons no one was to know that the coroner's report showed that Tesla was poisoned."

A shocked silence descended on the Colorado Springs meeting room when the Tesla Society heard this, coming from a physicist who would not lightly risk his reputation by relating such a story. The silence lifted as the audience honored Trombly with applause at the end of his speech.

To understand why Tesla's story—the life of a dead inventor—can so grip the emotions of yet another generation of technophiles, we need to look at some highlights.

TESLA'S LEGACY

Tesla was a witty, elegantly-dressed loner, at the height of his fame in the late 1800s when the world knew he had invented the whole system of alternating current (AC) electrical generation and distribution which lit up the cities. But that was barely the beginning of his productivity.

Born in 1856 in the rural village of Smiljan in what became Yugoslavia, Nikola Tesla in his boyhood went from the highs of mystical communion with nature to the lows of suffering with cholera and the loss of his older brother. His father was a minister who wrote poetry and his mother a storyteller with a photographic memory. She was also an inventor of domestic laborsaving devices.

Nikola showed his true direction from an early age; at the age of five he invented a unique bladeless waterwheel and placed the little model in a creek. The child also built a motor powered by sixteen live June bugs. His father was not impressed. He insisted that Nikola would follow family tradition and be a clergyman, so he began his son's education at a young age with rigorous mental exercises.

When he was of legal age, Nikola managed to get his father's permission to study engineering instead of the ministry. After he completed his studies at the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz and then in 1880 at the University of Prague, he worked for a European telephone company and upgraded their technology.

Meanwhile, a more difficult challenge which he had shouldered in his college days was always with him; he was determined to improve the electrical motor and dynamo. Dynamos naturally make alternating current, the type of electric flow which continually changes directions. Tesla intuitively felt that it should be possible to run a motor on AC electricity and eliminate the inefficient sparking of brushes from a commutator. His theory went against textbook knowledge in those early days of electrification, when direct current (DC) was considered the only type of current that would run motors.

MAGNETIC WHIRLWIND

Despite ridicule from his engineering professor, Tesla maintained that there had to be a better way. He worked so intensely on this and other engineering problems that his health broke down. While Tesla recuperated, a friend who was a master mechanic and an athlete took him for long walks through Budapest. In February of 1882 one day while they walked in a park, Tesla was inspired by the setting sun. To his amazement, that is when he made a breakthrough to answering the technical challenge of making a workable AC electrical system to turn a motor. He was reciting lines from the German poet Goethe's Faust:

The glow retreats, done is the break of toil; It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring. Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil, Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!

Tesla was stopped in his tracks by a vivid vision. It was as if a 3-D holographic picture of a rotating magnetic field was in motion in front of his eyes and he could reach out and put his hands into it. He saw how the field—a magnetic whirlwind—was produced by alternating currents out of step with each other. He saw separate coils of wire, arranged as four segments of a circle. The first alternating current would energize a coil creating an electromagnetic field which attracted the magnet and then faded. The second overlapping current would feed the next coil and drag the magnet around further and then fade and so on. He saw it as a process similar to the sun traveling around and "giving life wherever she goes."

Speechless, Tesla waved his arms in excitement. His buddy tried to lead him to a nearby bench, but Tesla grabbed a stick to draw a diagram in the dust.

"See my motor here! Watch me reverse it," Tesla blurted out. His friend was afraid that Tesla had lost his mind. Tesla was indeed in another world at that moment. As he watched his vision move, he saw the electrical principle that later made the twentieth century operate.

His rotating magnetic field would not only mean a better motor, it would revolutionize the electrical industry. He mapped out refinements of the idea with several or even five overlapping currents at a time—the basis of a polyphase transmission system. But first he had to convince someone to finance the development of these world-changing inventions. A steppingstone to that goal was a job in Paris later that year, where he attracted the attention of the Continental Edison Company by his successes as a troubleshooter who fixed their dynamos. Another step was to demonstrate the first induction motor for the mayor of Strassburg. The mayor had invited wealthy potential investors to the demonstration, but they failed to comprehend Tesla's vision of a future for the brushless motor.

DITCHDIGGER TO MILLIONAIRE

Surely it would be welcomed in America, Tesla thought. At twenty-eight years of age he was ready to make his move to the land of opportunity, where he expected that his great discovery would be quickly developed for humanity's use. Before Tesla left Paris, one of his bosses at Continental Edison handed him a letter introducing him to the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison.

"I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man," the letter read.
When Tesla stepped off the ship in New York on June 6, 1884, he only had four pennies in his pocket, because he had been robbed on the way to the ship. But he did not at all resemble the stereotypical impoverished immigrant; he wore a bowler hat and stylish coat, and his posture was aristocratic. He still had the letter of introduction to Thomas Edison.
Edison, then age thirty-seven, had already proven his ability as a businessman as well as inventor. He was a hero to Tesla at first. The polite European admired Edison's accomplishments—discoveries made by trialand-error and with only grade-school level of formal education. Tesla ignored his rough manners. But Edison on the other hand repudiated Tesla's theory on how to work with AC electricity; Edison used DC in his electric lamps and had invested all his efforts in DC technologies.
Tesla was put to work repairing and improving Edison's DC dynamos and motors on board a ship. He also won Edison's grudging respect by working eighteen-hour days in Edison's Manhattan workshop, seven days a week, and by conquering difficult technical problems.
One day Tesla described how he could improve the efficiency of Edison's dynamo, and Edison reportedly replied, "There's fifty thousand dollars in it for you if you can do it." The European immigrant worked tirelessly—thirty-two hours in one stretch. After months of work, the new machines were tested and found to measure up, and Edison prepared to profit from his improved dynamo. When Tesla went to the boss and asked for the promised $50,000 bonus, however, Edison would not pay.
"Tesla," he said, "you don't understand our American humor."
Nikola Tesla had a well-developed sense of humor, but when someone reneged on a verbal deal he was not amused. He walked out, and into a job on a crew digging ditches with pick and shovel.
Two years later Tesla's luck changed; he had the opportunity to develop his "polyphase system" of AC and patented the AC motor, generator and transformer. By 1891, Tesla had forty patents on his AC induction motor and polyphase system.
An industrialist and inventor of the railroad air brake, George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh, helped Tesla to change history. Westinghouse, a stocky, adventurous man with a walrus mustache, shared Tesla's vision of a power system that could harness hydroelectric resources such as Niagara Falls and could send high-voltage electricity on wires over vast distances. He bought all of Tesla's patents on the polyphase AC system, and signed a contract to pay Tesla a million dollars cash, plus royalties of $2.50 per horsepower produced by the system. Tesla thought he would never have to worry about money again; he could invent to his heart's content.

HIGH STAKES

One of the first challenges that Westinghouse and Tesla faced together was what was called the War of the Currents—the AC/DC battle. It was a time when America's power grid had not yet been built but DC proponents were nevertheless becoming an entrenched interest group stubbornly lighting the use of alternating current (AC) for generating, sending and using electricity. Thomas Edison led the opposition. His own inventions used direct current (DC). However, DC does not travel well. To give people electrical lights, heat and other uses of the current, a power plant had to be built for every square mile served. At the end of a mile of DC power line, light bulbs barely glowed. Skyscrapers and their elevators would have been impossible to build if Edison's views had won.

Tesla knew that AC was the better system for electrical distribution; it could easily travel for hundreds of miles down very slender wires at high pressures (high voltage) and then transformers could reduce the voltage for household use.

In the War of the Currents, most of the casualties were animals. During the time that Edison gave speeches defending the merits of DC over AC, the neighborhood around his New Jersey laboratory was mysteriously losing dogs and cats. Throughout 1887 Edison or his staff grabbed animals off the street by day, and at night invited reporters and other guests to watch what happened when an unsuspecting dog was pushed onto a tin sheet and electrocuted with high voltages—using the Tesla/Westinghouse AC current, of course. Edison refered to electrocuting as "Westinghousing."

Carrying on this strategy of linking AC with electrocution and death, the Edison camp distributed scare pamphlets warning that Westinghouse wanted to put this deadly AC current into every American home. However, Edison omitted the fact that the current would first be reduced in voltage. Through this disinformation campaign, Edison was determined to sway the public toward his DC technology, inefficient as it was.

To answer accusations against the safety of AC, Tesla in turn developed showmanship; he proved that he could conduct AC through his own body without ill effects. He stood on a platform in white tie and tails and corkbottomed shoes. Bolts of electricity crackled and snapped, and he allowed several hundred thousand volts to dance over his body and light the bulbs in his hands. However, although the voltage (pressure) of the electricity was high, he reduced the amperage (quantity) and used high frequencies. That type of electrical current crawls over a body and therefore doesn't reach vital organs. As an argument against Edison it was cheating, because domestic AC switches back and forth on a conductor 60 times a second, not thousands of times as in high frequencies.

Edison, however, played dirtier. He persuaded state prison authorities to kill a death-row prisoner with AC current instead of executing him by hanging. It was a further attempt to popularize the phrase "to Westinghouse" as a replacement for "to electrocute." Prison officials miscalculated the amount of current needed to kill the condemned man, and newspaper reporters witnessed a messy smoky execution.

Despite Edison's efforts, Tesla and Westinghouse won the Battle of the Currents. In 1892 Westinghouse built an AC system for lighting the 1893 world fair in Chicago.

TYCOONS PUT SQUEEZE ON WESTINGHOUSE

A big hydroelectric project was the second major victory for AC supporters; in 1895 Tesla's first generating unit was put into operation at Niagara Falls. Eventually, Tesla's distribution system delivered immense amounts of electrical power across the continent. Since Westinghouse had signed a contract giving Tesla $2.50 per horsepower, Tesla could have died as a multibillionaire.

"Morganization" intervened, however, with cut-throat practices directed against George Westinghouse. Business competitors in the real-life game of Monopoly tried to squeeze him out of the power picture and gave him an ultimatum: "get rid of your contract with Tesla or you're finished." When Westinghouse laid his cards in front of Tesla and admitted to being in financial trouble, Tesla demonstrated his priorities. He remembered that Westinghouse had believed in him and had invested in the new AC patents when others had not had such courage. Therefore, so that Westinghouse would survive financially and the technology would be developed, Tesla took a cash settlement and walked away from the millions of future dollars assigned to him by the per-horsepower deal. He tore up the lucrative contract in order to help a friend.