Tesla: Inventor of the Modern by Richard Munson

Author:Richard Munson [Munson, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, History, Inventions, Science, Science & Technology, Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780393635447
Google: FDNttAEACAAJ
Amazon: 0393635449
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-05-22T03:00:00+00:00

11.

SHEER AUDACITY

Wardenclyffe, Long Island

Tesla returned to New York City in January 1900 with a bold plan to build a giant transmission tower and a profitable business around the electrical phenomena he had observed in ­Colorado Springs. Confident of his prospects, he upgraded to the luxurious ­Waldorf Astoria, the world’s tallest hotel and the first to provide complete electric service and private bathrooms. Located on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, the hotel attracted many of the world’s wealthiest and most celebrated, including Andrew Carnegie, Prince Henry of Prussia, and Arctic explorer Frederick Cook. As part of his investment deal with John Jacob Astor, who was one of the hotel’s owners, Tesla would live there for the next two decades.

Tesla filed three patents that year for wireless communication devices and bragged to the media that “my experiments have been most successful, and I am now convinced that I shall be able to communicate by means of wireless telegraphy not only with Paris during the [upcoming] Exhibition [Universelle of 1900], but in a very short time with every city of the world.”1

A key part of the inventor’s public relations blitz featured his article and Dickenson Alley’s photographs from Colorado Springs for The Century Magazine, that well-respected venue edited by his good friend Robert Johnson. Tesla’s piece was to be in the same issue as an article on political reform by Theodore Roosevelt, then nominated to be vice president. In front of this wide audience, Johnson hoped Tesla would explain the historical importance of his discoveries; instead, the inventor used this platform to pontificate.

Tesla’s first draft highlighted lifestyle advice. “Whisky, wine, tea, coffee, tobacco, and other such stimulants are responsible for the shortening of the lives of many, and ought to be used in moderation,” he wrote. “But I do not think that rigorous measures of suppression of habits followed through many generations are commendable. It is wiser to preach moderation than abstinence.”2 In the same article, however, he admitted that he’d consumed enough alcoholic beverages to “form a lake of no mean dimensions.”3

Tesla even offered recommendations about hygiene: “Uncleanliness, which breeds disease and death, is not only a self-destructive but a highly immoral habit. In keeping our bodies free from infection, healthful and pure, we’re expressing our reverence for the high principle with which they are endowed. He who follows the precepts of hygiene in this spirit is proving himself, so far, truly religious.”4

Why would Tesla offer lifestyle and hygiene advice? In his mind, the suggestions had something to do with inventing. The Scientific Man, as he envisioned that ideal, needed to be moderate and clean.

Of course, that model inventor also had to offer broad thinking, and Tesla proposed later in the article a global system of wireless communications. He predicted controlling the weather with electrical energy. He foresaw a world in which machines eliminated the need for war.

The ever-expanding article became a source of conflict with ­Johnson, who complained that Tesla’s ramblings offered more visions than facts. “Trust me in my knowledge of what the public is eager to hear from you,” the seasoned editor wrote.

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