October 15, 1954

Tesla was “Nick” to us, for my late father had the pleasant duty to write the checks for his millionaire supporters who owned Okonite Wire and Cable and who waxed rich on the lush profits of selling the telephone rights for Manhattan Island to the NY Telephone Co. for some $17,000,000. This was a tax-free transaction and that sum was quite a sizable one in those days. They loaned money to Marconi through their British group and financed in part Fessenden, de Forest, and many other lesser-knowns in the world of science. Tesla was their “problem inventor.”

They were not alone in their difficulties with him for J.P. Morgan, the elder, always had Nick as his pet problem. I worked for Morgan briefly on his palatial steam yacht, Corsair, as installation engineer and for Senator Nelson W. Aldrich on whose prize steam yacht, Alvina, I sailed as test engineer around the world. Both men had influence. Even John Hays Hammond, Sr., who loaned Tesla the cash for his robot was unable to understand this strange genius.

Edison had tried in his hale and bluff manner to befriend Tesla but his remarks had been construed by the extremely sensitive Tesla as an insult. With his typical Europeon-Slavic ideas of gentlemanly deportmant, he was a strange figure in the rough-and-tumble field of pioneer wireless and electricity. Most of the scientists that he met were good fellows. Some were of the back-slapping variety such as Edison, Fessenden, Marconi, de Forest, Fleming, Preece, Lodge, Slaby, Zenneck, and Seelig. The old New York Yacht Club group headed by Morgan, Gates, Rockefeller, Lieter, Davison, Carpenter, Bennett, and many others that my father knew so well, were all of the same order with perhaps a bit more restraint in being companionable.

I knew these men and answered to their good-natured nickname of “John the Wireless Man,” a title that tickled me no end as I liked to make sparks and create spectacular displays of high frequency. Nick, the quiet, studious, very proper, waist-bowing Germanic (Slavic) mannered Europeon, never seemed to quite fit into the cruder American scene. He seemed like a man apart - an individual of considerable reserve. This, coupled with his strange phobia of failing to shake one's hand and to dine with peculiar manners of hygiene made Nick a marked man. Many considered him a plain snob. Others called him a “Nut” while others referred to him as “The Genius” and were always making excuses for his actions taking pains to explain that this was to be expected of a genius.

Those who worked for Nick were rarely taken into his confidence. His sketches were always in parts. His records were never complete. He feared pirating. He was pirated and it was a shame that the man who refused the Nobel Prize on the grounds that he was a discoverer of principles rather than an inventor should have been so pirated, lied about, and discredited by his contemporaries. They lifted his ideas and went merrily on as though Tesla's inventions were free property.

I paled around with men like Earl Ovington on whose Bleriot monoplane I installed my original system using the first counterpoise antenna in 1910. While Earl soared at some 1500 feet over Mineola-Hempstead, we carried on the first two-way radio from plane to ground. He became one of the first air mail pilots. Ovington was a millionaire's son and a close friend of Tesla.

Earl would put on spectacular displays of fire works using a huge Tesla coil mounted on a platform over the Crows at the old Madison Square Garden. He would let me venture forth on the glass platform and take big sparks of terrifying length off a wand that I held in my hand. I soon found that we had a daily matinee and evening demonstration for the duration of the electrical show which attracted vast crowds who expected to see us both electrocuted. Earl was a show-off and he loved it. I was a scared kid even though fascinated with the sparks that I loved. Tesla would stand by with a paternal eye on us both. Tesla put on parties at his lab for millionaire friends. Nick loved to get the lights low and put on eerie displays. I must confess that I tried to emulate him many times and it was fun.

My first wireless transmitter of any size was a 10 kw open-core transformer and to that I had an open gap and a huge glass plate condenser in oil. With my huge antennas over Yonkers, I could get the distance that made the boys envious as I worked the ships in the mid-Atlantic. Prior to 1912, no license was required. The air was free and we pioneers did have the fun that no one these days will ever understand or imagine.

Nick grew very peculiar with age. Louis Pacant, my old chum, used to visit Tesla. Louis had been a smart boy in that he signed up over nine-hundred theaters on sound across the U.S. When Western Electric found they had been beaten, they paid-off handsomely to Louis. He enjoyed that for, as a poor N.Y. boy who had worked his way through Pratt in Brooklyn, he got a kick out of rubbing elbows with the “big boys.” As a quiet-mannered and discreet consulting engineer, he soon found Nick to be a companion of sorts. They would chat at Nick's penthouse but Louis could get so far. Nick had the peculiar reserve and suspicion that made him a unqiue figure. There were no others as close as Louis.

I could ramble on here with much. I have completed a documentary on the history of radio and am working on another on Howard Armstrong, my old schoolmate, whom I helped with his first feedback ideas and assisted with his first patent in Yonkers after his father refused to support him.

I wish that you would get some sort of eastern Tesla club among the science teachers with the idea of letting the younger generation know some of the Tesla thrills of discovery. I would like to see the Tesla Society give a medal each year for some worthy scientific achievement.

Unfortunately, words are totally inadequate to express the thrill of youth when engaged in pursuit of a pet hobby. I had so many in pursuit of electronics that I regret that I am unable to get those great big thrills into words that give justice to the years of wonder and indescribable thrills.

Cordially yours,

John Oliver Ashton
Palo Alto, CA