Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne [Cawthorne, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Science, History, Biography
ISBN: 9780785829447
Amazon: 078582944X
Barnesnoble: 078582944X
Goodreads: 18330192
Publisher: Omnipress
Published: 2014-04-04T23:00:00+00:00

Tesla the Trailblazer

While Pupin could only assert that Marconi was the inventor, Tesla came armed with lectures, articles and patents. While Marconi had only been granted his first US patent in 1904, Tesla had given a practical demonstration of wireless in St Louis, Missouri in 1893. He had transmitted a signal from his Houston Street laboratory to West Point before 1897. People who visited his lab saw the equipment. He then compared the Marconi patent to his own, saying: ‘If you take these two contemporaneous diagrams, and examine the subsequent developments, you will find that absolutely not a vestige of that apparatus of Marconi remains, and that in all the present system there is nothing but my four-tuned circuits. Everybody is using them.’

Following Tesla to the stand was John Stone Stone, who could himself claim to be the inventor of the radio. He filed a crucial patent on tuning 2 years before Marconi, and he acknowledged that it was Tesla, not Marconi, who was a trailblazer.

Due to World War I, the legal battle was abandoned before the case was decided. Fearing a German attack, Marconi did not return to Europe on the Lusitania. Instead under a false name and in heavy disguised, he set sail on the St Paul. On 7 May 1915, the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine with the loss of 1,134 lives, including 128 US citizens. America was outraged. It was already suspected that the Telefunken radio station was passing coded messages to submarines. Two weeks later The New York Times reported that the Germans had developed ‘air torpedoes’ which were dropped from zeppelins and controlled by wireless – the very thing Tesla had claimed to have invented.

When the US joined World War I in 1917, the former head of the Tuckerton station was arrested for spying and the Sayville station was taken over by the government. Tesla’s monthly royalty cheques from Telefunken stopped. Edison, Fessenden, Pupin, Thomson and others got jobs as advisors to the government, but Tesla – possibly because of the connections with Telefunken – was left out.

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