In the Footsteps of Genius Page 15

and, in connection with that, the effects of a high-frequency electrical field.

Unfortunately, of some of his investigations scientists even today have only unclear notions. His notes and later interpretations are not sufficient for the explanation of certain experiments. For example, it is known that for a time he worked on the production of a powerful source of radiation. Among the equipment which arrived in Colorado there is also a double-focus X-ray tube with a platinum plate; and in one magazine he wrote: Since the power of the oscillator practically has no limitation, the problem now is to make a tube which would withstand any necessary pressure…²⁷ The exact intention or the result of these experiments is still unknown.

In what did Tesla really succeed during his strenuous investigations in Colorado Springs? It is quite certain that from one marvelous work in a veil of secrecy, enormous costs and occasional theatrical events, not a single practical invention came about — if by practical we mean a telephone or an improvement of a coil. Judging by “Edison” standards, however, in the same way one could reproach Einstein for not having invented a washing machine.

Did he then, at least, succeed in making some more significant contribution to human knowledge? The answer is, undoubtedly, affirmative. Scientists do not know and perhaps will never know the full range of his investigations, and the trouble is that even he himself often did not follow his intuition, theories and preliminary experiments to the stage of verification. But, in any case, he left behind him certain fundamental discoveries which his scientific successors in many disciplines even today, from time to time, rediscover.

The present director of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Dr. Aleksandar Marinčić, says that today, when we better understand the resonant behavior of the Earth, “we can judge how right Tesla was when he said that the mechanism of the propagation of electromagnetic waves in ‘his system’ is different from that which Hertz established.”

Because of the secrecy which still surrounds this most significant period of Tesla’s investigations, the Diary from Colorado Springs is one of the most gladly read of Tesla’s works. For many scientists the Diary is the starting basis for becoming acquainted with Tesla or for the reconstruction of what Tesla considered that he had succeeded in attaining.

A man of touching tenderness

When he entered his seventh decade, Tesla had already begun to feel the burden of the years. More than that, however, he felt also the burden of a certain strange illness which more and more often overcame him: he bent under the knowledge that some of his greatest ideas would not be realized in his lifetime.

The tower at Wardenclyffe for wireless radio emissions and the transmission of energy, built in 1903, served for experiments only three years. Tesla did not have the money to do everything he wished, and the industrialists, even his friend Westinghouse, no longer believed in the project.