The Pros and Cons of Conning Pros

 

Raising funds for a new engineering venture always brings with it the temptation to promise more than you can deliver.  At the very least, that seems to be what has happened with a Texas-based outfit called at various times Wireless Power, Texzon Technologies, and Viziv Technologies, which is currently in bankruptcy proceedings.  As I have had very peripheral dealings with the organization personally, perhaps I should tell the story from my perspective.

 

Five or six years ago, I was driving along a connecting road south of Dallas, Texas, when I saw a curious structure sitting out in a pasture half a mile or so north of the road.  It was a sort of tower consisting of a tall, narrow sheet-metal box, a square girdered column on top of that, and a rounded hemispherical metal dingus to top it off, the whole thing being a couple of hundred feet tall (60 meters).  It wasn't a windmill, I didn't think it was some kind of weird artwork, but it wasn't any kind of antenna I was familiar with either, so when I got back home I did some Internet digging.

 

Turns out it was constructed by an outfit calling itself Viziv Technologies.  Their website is still up as of this writing, and being interested mainly in the technical aspects of what they were doing, I studied it in some detail.

 

In a sentence, they seemed to be trying to revive Nikola Tesla's old dream of power transmission without wires.  Among the many wild promises Tesla made in his lifetime that he fell short of delivering, wireless power transmission was one of the more striking ones.  In experiments in Colorado Springs around 1900, Tesla claimed to have developed a system that would allow him to send useful amounts of electric power indefinitely long distances without wires.  But the most authoritative biography of Tesla by historian of technology W. Bernard Carlson says that the longest-distance transmission Tesla actually documented in his experiments there was sixty feet (18 meters). 

 

Around the same time, a couple of German physicists named Arnold Sommerfeld and Jonathan Zenneck were working out the mathematics of how electromagnetic waves (including the kind of waves Tesla was using) followed the moderately-conducting surface of the earth.  The mathematics is rather difficult, but by 1920 it was well understood.  Local AM radio stations use what amounts to a Sommerfeld-Zenneck surface wave to reach their listeners.  Of the fifty kilowatts or so that goes into the most powerful AM stations in the U. S., the vast majority of that power winds up heating the soil, and only a few milliwatts here and there is delivered to receivers. 

 

The Viziv folks were reviving Tesla's dream of transmitting power without wires, but in their website's discussion of Zenneck waves, groundbreaking experiments, and promising results, they never mentioned the question that Tesla never answered satisfactorily about his idea:  if anybody can get free power just by putting up an antenna, how are you going to bill for it, even assuming it works?  But the Tesla connection explained the odd resemblance of the top of the Dallas tower to Tesla's grandest folly, a giant wooden tower with a hemispherical dome built in Wardenclyffe, Long Island, which was demolished during World War I to prevent German submarines from using it as a landmark.

 

A few months after I saw the tower, an electrical engineering student of mine contacted me for some advice.  He was thinking of interviewing with a company called Viziv Technologies, and would I take a look at their website and tell me what I thought?  I can't remember exactly what I said, but it was probably some version of the standard advice I give to every student wanting to join a startup:  "Do it while you're young and without a lot of obligations.  It probably won't go anywhere, but you might have some fun and it will be a good learning experience no matter what happens."

 

Something or other made me look into how Viziv Technologies was doing a month or so ago, and the answer is, not too well.  Google it now and you get a lot of bankruptcy-filing documents.  It seems that after inducing investors to put a lot of money into salaries, equipment, the tower, and other expensive stuff, the company failed to deliver on its promises.  To be fair, they were not putting all their investment eggs in the wireless-power basket.  They were also talking about low-frequency communications and location services and so on.  But unless they had discovered something that Sommerfeld and Zenneck and everybody else doing electromagnetics since 1910 had missed, there wasn't anything remarkable about Zenneck waves except the fact that most non-EE types had never heard of them. 

 

According to one comment posted on a physics discussion page, a couple of brothers named James and Kenneth Corum were the techno-whizzes behind Viziv.  These people have undoubted technical credentials, and have gone on record as doing investigations and reproductions of some of Tesla's most interesting experiments, including one in which he claimed to have made ball lightning.  But even smart people can be hoodwinked by those who wish to use them to acquire gains that turn out to be ill-gotten in retrospect.  The comment claimed that the technology was "demonstrated to work with great efficiency" (whatever that means), and then somebody rooked the Corums out of their intellectual property and forced the company into bankruptcy so they could grab the patents for themselves.

 

Not knowing which side of the fence the writer of that comment stands on, it's hard to say what really happened.  Another interpretation that I personally lean toward is that the business people in charge were using the Corums as science oracles to talk to non-technical investors, who pretty much had to take their word for whatever they said.  Something made the company go into bankruptcy, but it would take a forensic accountant and an investigative reporter weeks to figure out exactly what. All I can conclude is that the people putting in money ran out of patience when some promises were not fulfilled, and turned off the cash spigot. 

 

It's ironic that a company based on ideas that Tesla first promoted without fully understanding the math behind what he was doing has apparently ended up where Tesla did:  without credibility in the technical or the business communities, and broke.  Viziv Technologies may rise again, but at this point, I wouldn't put any money on it—or in it.

 

Sources:  The Viziv Technologies website itself is at https://vizivtechnologies.com/.  A photo of the only light bulb lit by Tesla's experiments at a verified distance from the transmitter (sixty feet) appears on p. 290 of W. Bernard Carlson's Tesla:  Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press, 2013).  Numerous open-access sources about the Viziv bankruptcy are on the Internet, such as the chronological one at https://www.docketbird.com/court-cases/Viziv-Technologies-LLC/txnb-3:2020-bk-32554.    I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Johnathan Zenneck and Arnold Sommerfeld.

Moral Exemplars Still Wanted: "The Current War: Director's Cut"

One way of teaching engineering ethics that is less grim than picking through wreckages of failed projects is to portray moral exemplars:  engineers who did the right thing in a critical situation and benefited people thereby.  For example, William LeMessurier, a structural consulting engineer, played a prominent role in determining that the 60-story Boston skyscraper formerly known as the John Hancock Tower was unstable in certain types of wind loading.  The analysis he and his colleagues produced convinced the owners to install millions of dollars' worth of cross-bracing, and the building is still standing today. 

For many generations both in the U. S. and abroad, Thomas Edison was a heroic inventor whose ideas benefited millions.  In 1940, at the height of the inventor-as-hero period in U. S. history, MGM brought out a pair of panegyrics based on his life: "Young Tom Edison" starring Mickey Rooney, and "Edison the Man" with Spencer Tracy.  I must confess that seeing the the former film on TV played a disproportionately large role in my decision to become an electrical engineer, around the age of eight.

However, cinematic heroes today tend to be mainly of the comic-book variety, so when "The Current War:  Director's Cut" was finally released after a two-year delay connected with the fall of Harvey Weinstein, whose production company financed the film, I could hardly wait to see what a present-day director and actors would do with the raw material.

And some of it is pretty raw.  There was no hint in the MGM flicks that Edison was ever anything less than selfless as he enthusiastically searched for innovations that would be boons for humanity.  In particular, there was nothing about the admittedly sordid tricks he pulled to make George Westinghouse's rival AC system look like a threat to public safety, up to and including killing horses and pigs (but not an elephant, as was falsely attributed to him by some confused reports of an elephant's electrocution he filmed at Coney Island in 1903).  But in "The Current War," Benedict Cumberbatch's Edison is no one's idea of a moral exemplar, though he would qualify as perhaps an object of pity.

Just the kind of historic rabbit-trail I took you on about the elephant is one of the problems with the film.  Despite the director's thoughtful inclusion of little side-titles when new characters are introduced (I particularly liked "Nikola Tesla, futurist"), the people I saw the film with all complained that it was very hard to follow.  Although I have made somewhat of an amateur study of Edison, Westinghouse, and that era of the history of technology, I myself had trouble figuring out who was who unless the side-titles were there to help.  In particular, there was an older bewhiskered gent who seemed to be Westinghouse's technical Svengali, but who was only addressed as "Frank."  At the time I guessed it was Frank Sprague, who played a prominent role in early electric tramways.  But later in the film it turned out he was Franklin Pope, an "electrician" (which was what electrical specialists sometimes called themselves back then) who died, not trying to get Westinghouse's electric fan motor to work as the film implied, but in trying to fix a motor-generator installed in the home of his own basement.

As most historical films have to do, this one takes dramatic license with the facts, but stays reasonably close to the main narrative, which is the battle between Edison's first-to-the-market but ultimately unsuccessful DC system, and Westinghouse's cheaper and better alternative of AC, which is still with us today.  The climax of the MGM Spencer Tracy flick, which was Edison's invention of the light bulb, is relegated to a long speech by Cumberbatch at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Westinghouse won the bid to light up the fair, and that triumph symbolized the end of the current war.  Westinghouse and Edison run into each other at the Japanese exhibit, and Westinghouse asks Edison what it felt like to invent the light bulb.  What ensues is perhaps the best piece of classical acting I've seen Cumberbatch do—no special effects, no superhero action, just a man painting a picture of a scene with words that answers the question better than any number of adjectives. 

Cumberbatch seems to be making a career of portraying emotionally peculiar geniuses:  first as the legendary Sherlock Holmes, then as the eccentric mathematician and code expert Alan Turing, and now as Edison.  Critics of the film say he does a good job of portraying our era's idea of the corporate genius:  the Steve-Jobs-type disrupter of the status quo who nevertheless betrays his usually-suppressed emotional life by playing back the voice of his dead wife on his new invention, the phonograph.  Edison's first wife Mary did die in the midst of the current war, which only added to his distress and frustration.  But he didn't let her death slow him down in pursuing his goals by whatever means he thought necessary, including secretly cooperating with a man who thought electrocution would be better than hanging condemned criminals.

I suppose I should have put a spoiler alert on that last paragraph.  But it's unlikely that too many people will see the movie just for the suspense.  To techno-nerds such as myself, who are familiar with many of Edison's lesser-known inventions, the film was a feast of seeing cinematic reproductions of things like the first kinetograph projector (an early form of motion-picture machine) and his electric pen for writing on paper for mimeograph reproduction.  And the film gets some humor out of the Edison family's alleged habit of secretly communicating with each other via Morse-code taps. 

But for the average viewer who has little or no prior knowledge of the era, I'm afraid the film will be a rather confused mish-mosh of mysterious devices, obscure motives, and hard-to-identify characters. A strength of the film is that everything takes place against a lovingly-reproduced CGI background of 1890s America, including a panoramic view of the Columbian Exposition, complete with the original Ferris wheel, that ought to be issued as a two-by-three-foot poster on its own.  I'm not sure what effect the movie will have on eight-year-olds, but don't look for there to be a flurry of young people flocking to be electrical engineers in about ten years.  Actors, maybe, but not engineers.

Sources:  "The Current War:  Director's Cut" was released on October 24, 2019, and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas Edison.  I referred to a review of the film posted at https://www.thewrap.com/the-current-war-directors-cut-film-review-benedict-cumberbatch-tom-holland/ for details of the delayed release, and also Wikipedia information concerning the 1903 elephant electrocution of Topsy.

Tesla and the Ethics of Publicity

A few weeks ago I mentioned that an eminently qualified historian of technology has written a biography of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), the inventor of the eponymous Tesla coil, the induction motor, and numerous other ingenious contraptions.  While Tesla has been the subject of numerous popular biographies and even a film or two, earlier treatments tended to play up the sensational and mysterious aspects of his career, while neglecting the deeper context of his times and the significance of his actual technical contributions.  By contrast, University of Virginia historian W. Bernard Carlson has shown how Tesla flashed upon the scene of early electrical technology rather like a spark from one of his own coils, only to fade out almost as fast into relative obscurity after about 1910.  What is more, Carlson traces the reason for Tesla’s failure to live up to his potential on a conflict between ideal and illusion.  When illusion took over, Tesla lost credibility, first with the technical community, then with the public, and most seriously for his career, with his financial backers. 

Possessed of a rare type of imagination which allowed him to controllably visualize complex structures and scenes so real to him that he sometimes lost sight of reality while contemplating them, Tesla always worked primarily in the realm of the ideal—the perfect mental construct that performed his every bidding.  This is how he envisioned what was arguably his most significant invention:  the alternating-current induction motor.  While Tesla would later claim that the idea came complete and finished to him in an instantaneous flash of insight in Budapest in 1882, the reality was that it took him years of development and experimentation to present the idea to the world in patentable form.  Another historian of technology named John Staudenmaier likes to assess the importance of a technology by asking what the world would be like if the technology in question disappeared overnight.  Some idea of the importance of Tesla’s invention can be grasped by realizing that if all induction motors suffered some kind of mechanical rapture one day and vanished off the face of the earth, we would virtually all be without running water, most factories and plants of all kinds would stop working, we’d have no air conditioning, no elevators, and, well, we would be in quite a pickle all told. 

Once the Westinghouse interests bought Tesla’s induction-motor patents and made him fairly wealthy, the inventor moved on to other things:  high-frequency currents, the nascent field of radio, and his grandest vision:  the worldwide distribution of electric power without wires.  It was to test this last idea that he built what was probably the world’s largest Tesla coil in Colorado Springs in the summer of 1899, using the bulk of the town’s power plant output late at night to run it.  In doing this, he was following a vision of how his technology would supersede the high-tension transmission lines and distribution networks that at the time were just beginning to spread the blessings of electricity to the public.

Tesla’s work in Colorado Springs was documented not with detailed published papers or plans for developing profitable technology.  He had always enjoyed playing the showman by dazzling nineteenth-century audiences with high-voltage displays that even today attract the attention of jaded twenty-first century audiences, and giving interviews to newspapers that made him sound more like a magician than a sober scientist or engineer.  Most of what Tesla brought back from Colorado was pretty photographs, including the famous one that shows him calmly sitting in a chair reading while many megavolts of lightning flashes above his head.  In distributing the photograph, Tesla was forthright about the fact that it was a double exposure:  first the sparks were photographed with no one nearby, and then the machine was turned off while Tesla seated himself near it and the photographer set off a flash charge.  But the illusory message the picture conveyed probably overpowered any disclaimers, and in the years afterwards, Tesla’s career would increasingly be characterized by visionary claims and promises of fantastic results followed by broken promises and missed deadlines.

Tesla’s letters of this period to the financier J. P. Morgan pleading for funds make for painful reading.  When Morgan finally turned him down once and for all, Tesla lapsed into an obscurity from which he occasionally emerged to give interviews laced with hints of militarily useful marvels such as death rays and supremely powerful explosives.  These hints were taken seriously enough that following Tesla’s death in 1943, the FBI prompted the wartime Office of the Alien Property Custodian to confiscate Tesla’s papers and obtained the services of a radar expert to see if there was anything worth keeping secret for government use.  There wasn’t.  But the record of Tesla’s interviews over the years inspired a small cult following that continues to this day to put out the idea that when he died, he took secrets with him that we have not yet discovered on our own.

Promising a little more than you can deliver at the time is a time-honored tradition in technical enterprises, and has given rise to words such as “vaporware,” meaning software that somehow is always going to be released in the next few months but never actually arrives at the customer’s doorstep.  But too much of this sort of thing can land individuals such as Tesla, firms, or entire industries in so much trouble that they can never recover.  Vision—the ability to conceive and express novel ideas that attract the participation of others—is a necessary part of the engineering enterprise.  New ventures always contain a measure of the unknown, and visionaries lead the rest of us—financiers, organizers, managers, and customers—to assist in turning their visions into reality.  As historian Carlson points out, if Tesla deceived people, it was with their cooperation, much as an actor deceives a willing audience.  But ultimately, Tesla found himself in a world where illusion was expected to be followed by useful, profitable hardware.  And when he could no longer deliver things that the real world of 1910 needed, he turned instead to mystical utterances that attracted attention, but no money.  Tesla’s life is a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to understand what the right mix of technical prowess, vision, and hard work can do—and what happens when illusion overwhelms ideals.

Sources:  I used W. Bernard Carlson’s new biography Tesla:  Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton Univ. Press, 2013) as my main source of material for this post.  The famous photo of Tesla and his million-volt coil can be viewed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_colorado_adjusted.jpg.  One of these days I will write up the story of how a psychology grad student from New York and a ten-year-old Texas boy built a Tesla coil (the boy was me).