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).
