Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah by Nigel Cawthorne Read Free Book Online Page A

visited Louis Pasteur in his laboratory and received the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur for his achievements.
    Meanwhile Tesla met Norwegian scientist Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862 – 1951) whose study of electrical resonance was vital in the development of radio. While dining out in Paris with French engineer and physicist André Blondel, he also ran across the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844 – 1923) when she dropped her lace handkerchief near his dining table and Tesla rushed to hand it back to her. Legend has it that their eyes met with a burning intensity. The Electrical Review remarked that he may be ‘invulnerable to Cupid’s shafts’, but Sarah Bernhardt may have been an exception. Tesla said much later, that it was a scarf he had picked up, not a handkerchief and he did not return it. He kept it, without washing it, for the rest of his life.
    While Edison continued his tour of Europe, being feted everywhere he went, Tesla paid a short visit to his family, then returned to New York, where he opened a laboratory on Grand Street. There he began work on lighting and radio transmission. ‘I was not free in Pittsburgh,’ he said. ‘I was dependent and could not work … When I [left] that situation, ideas and inventions rushed through my brain like Niagara.’
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    Making Outlandish Claims
    When Edison was in London, visiting his power stations, an engineer named Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (1864 – 1930) was building an AC power station in Deptford, south London, that was able to transmit electricity at 11,000 volts to central London, seven miles away. Meanwhile, Tesla claimed that he had a system that could ‘place a 100,000 horsepower on a wire and send it 450 miles in one direction to New York City, the metropolis of the East, and 500 miles in the other direction to Chicago, the metropolis of the West’.
    This outlandish claim was greeted like those of the current conmen John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837 – 98), who was jailed in 1888 for contempt of court after having claimed to have invented a perpetual-motion machine, and Walter Honenau, who tried to sell pills that, he said, turned water into petrol. However, Tesla’s claim turned out, just a few years later, to be true.
    Tesla also continued helping Westinghouse with their development of his motor, again taking no payment apart from the equipment Westinghouse provided to furnish his new lab.
    Tesla stayed in touch with the men in his family by letter, but usually only sent cheques to his sisters. He also made an effort to pay back all the money his uncles had spent on him. Uncle Petar had risen to become a Metropolitan – the Orthodox equivalent of a Cardinal – while Uncle Pajo responded by sending fine wines as Tesla often complained of the poor quality of wine in the US. He had little time to enjoy them though. He was working seven days a week, stopping only to freshen up in the hotel that had now become his home, or to keep some pressing appointment.
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    Experimental Physics
    Rather than working as an engineer, Tesla was now more of an experimental physicist. His close friend, electrical engineer Thomas Commerford Martin (1856 – 1924), president of the AIEE 1887 – 88 and editor of Electrical World , was writing an article on Tesla. During their interviews, Tesla would intersperse his diatribes on how his Serbian family had fought off the diabolical Turks with new theories on electromagnetism and the structure of light.
    After Martin’s article was published in February 1890, a meeting of the AIEE was devoted to Tesla’s AC system. Experiments in the long-distance transmission of AC current were then being conducted in Germany and Switzerland. Westinghouse was opening a hydroelectric plant at a mining camp in Telluride, Colorado, using Tesla’s AC system and the International Niagara Commission announced that it was looking at the best way to exploit the