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

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    Whirling through Endless Space
    Tesla agreed to present his work on high-frequency phenomena to the AIEE. The meeting would be open to the public and the journalist covering the symposium for Electrical World also managed to sell a piece to the prestigious mainstream magazine Harper’s Weekly . It said that Tesla had gone beyond noted European physicists such as Professor Heinrich Hertz in his understanding of the electromagnetic theory of light.
    He also put on a number of spectacular demonstrations. In one, light streamed from a wire attached at one end to a coil. In another, a fine thread of platinum wire inside a glass bulb span, forming a funnel of light. He produced light bulbs that worked with just one wire attached, or with none at all, and generated huge sparks and electric flames. Electricity, he showed, would run to earth.
    As a finale, Tesla ran tens of thousands of volts of AC through his body to light up light bulbs and shoot sparks from his fingertips to show that alternating current was not a killer when handled properly. Electrical World said: ‘Exhausted tubes … held in the hand of Mr Tesla … appeared like a luminous sword in the hand of an archangel representing justice.’ Tesla concluded his lecture, saying:
    We are whirling through endless space with an inconceivable speed. All around us everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere is energy. There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly. Then, with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides. The mere contemplation of these magnificent possibilities expands our minds, strengthens our hopes and fills our hearts with supreme delight.
    In the audience was Robert Millikan (1868 – 1953), who won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for his work on cosmic rays. He said: ‘I have done no small fraction of my research work with principles I learned that night.’
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    The London Lectures
    Tesla then took his show to London in 1892, where he gave two lectures at the Royal Institution. There, Tesla said, James Dewar (1842 – 1923), the Institution’s Professor of Chemistry, ‘pushed me into a chair and poured out half a glass of a wonderful brown fluid which sparkled in all sorts of iridescent colours and tasted like nectar. “Now,” he said, “you are sitting in Faraday’s chair and you are enjoying the whisky he used to drink.”’
    It was not lost on Tesla that he was lecturing on the same stage where Faraday had outlined the fundamental principles of electromagnetic induction in the 1830s. Again he put on a show of sparks, glowing wires, no-wire motors and coloured lights that spelt out the name William Thomson, the leading engineer, mathematician and physicist who was in the audience, and who that year, had become Lord Kelvin . Again he ran high-volt AC current through his body, to the amazement of his audience of distinguished scientists.
    He also melted and vaporized tinfoil in a coil and produced a new type of lamp that would disintegrate zirconia and diamonds, the hardest known substances. Then he described the ruby laser which would not be built until 1960. Most of these demonstrations were brand new, not repeats of ones he had given in America.
    He also demonstrated the first vacuum tube. This would later be used to amplify weak radio signals. And he concluded the lecture with speculation that improvements could be made to the transatlantic telegraph cables so that they could carry telephone calls, and the possibility of wireless transmission. The Electrical Review said:
    The lecture given by Mr Tesla … will long live in the imagination of every person … that heard him, opening as it did, to many of them, for the first time, apparently limitless possibilities in the