Wizard : the life and times of Nikola Tesla : biography of a genius

665 Pages·1996·5.56 MB·English

by  Tesla

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-poor 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
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