Inventor - Greatest Dream Ends in Failure

By DOANE R. HOAG

NEW YORK, N.Y., Jan. 8, 1943 — Until today, he had been a familiar figure in New York: the tall, white-headed, handsome old gentleman who was frequently seen strolling. through Central Park with a small brown paper bag in his hand. He always wore gray spats, gray suede gloves, and perfectly tailored clothes that were cut in the style of half a century ago. Under his beetling white brows were a pair of the most intense brilliant blue eyes that ever were seen in a human face.

If you watched him, particularly at night, you would see a strange thing happen. You would see him pause, whistle softly, and then there would be a loud rushing sound, and out of the darkness would come hundreds and hundreds of pigeons. They clustered at his feet, lit on his arms and shoulders while he tossed out handsful of grain and seed from his brown paper bag.

It is rare that birds will leave their roosts at night to feed, but this man seemed to have some irresistible power over the pigeons of Central Park. They never failed to come at his whistle.

Few people so much as knew the old gentleman's name, yet he was one of the greatest inventors who has ever lived. Hardly a single electrical appliance you use today but has somewhere in its history the hand of this remarkable man. His name was Nikola Tesla.

There had been a time, back in the rich and colorful 1890s, when he was famous. When everybody knew his name. When visitors to New York would crowd into the luxurious Palm Room of the Waldorf-Astoria just to get a glimpse of Nikola Tesla.

You were smart if you got there a few minutes before 8 o'clock, when you would see the headwaiter pull on a pair of freshly laundered white cotton gloves and set a single place at a large reserved table — laying beside the knives and forks a stack of two dozen brand-new linen napkins, which Nikola Tesla always required.

A steaming pot of black coffee also was set on the table, but none of it would ever be drunk. Nikola Tesla believed it was harmful to the system to drink coffee, but he couldn't eat a meal without smelling its delicious fragrance.

At precisley 8 o'clock, Nikola Tesla himself would arrive. Tall, handsome with jet-black hair then, he would be dressed in a swallow-tail coat and white tie. His handkerchiefs and collars were never laundered; they were simply thrown away at the end of each day. His gray suede gloves were discarded after one week's wearing. The two dozen new napkins at this place were simply for him to polish his silverware with before eating. He would use a separate napkin for each piece of silverware, dropping the napkins in a pile on the floor each time one was used.

He was one of the wealthiest and most sought-after bachelors in New York society, yet no woman ever sat at his table. He said he was much too busy to share his time with any woman, and that loneliness was the price an inventor paid for his great accomplishments.

He worked at a breathless pace all his life, racing against time, limiting himself to two or three hours of sleep each night. His tremendous brain was so jam-packed with ideas and plans that there was never time enough to get everythig done. He invented the alternating current induction motor, he invented generators, high tension transformers that made it possible to harness waterpower and transmit it over long distances without power loss. Neon signs, fluorescent lighting, radio, television, short wave diathermy, electron microscopes, electric eyes, atom smashers and literally hundreds of other devices are due at least in part to the genius of this incredible man.

Forty years before World War II, he demonstrated the feasibility of radio-controlled torpedoes, and warned the world of robot bombs in the next war. He hated war, and dreamed of creating a death ray that would make even the smallest nation impregnable to invasion.

He dreamed of charging the upper atmosphere with electricity to make the sky itself glow like a gigantic fluorescent lamp and turn the night into perpetual day. He dreamed of creating a race of mechanical men to perform all the hard and menial labor for human beings.

More than 80 years ago he actually began work on a worldwide broadcasting station that would transmit news and music to people everywhere on earth. That was 27 years before radio broadcasting, as we know it, began.

The greatest dream of his life, and one that was left uncompleted at his death, was of finding a way to transmit electricity by wireless so that anyone on earth could raise an aerial over his house or his automobile and draw from the air all the electric power he needed to heat and light his home, run his car, operate his lawnmower, or anything else he desired. It would be much the same as today, when one can draw electromagnetic energy out of the air to operate radios and television receivers.

Tesla believed he could do this by charging the entire earth with electricity, turning it into a giant electrical condenser. In attempting to do this, he built an enormous electrical transformer up in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains. It towered 20 stories, was the biggest transformer every built. When he threw the switch, a lightning bolt of a hundred million volts leaped 135 feet through the sky, and the thunder was heard in Cripple Creek, 15 miles away!

This greatest dream of Tesla's ended in failure, and to the end of his life, he was still working on it. On the eighth of January in 1943, the children who used to play in Central Park learned that the kindly old gentleman who had let them help feed the pigeons, had died. And all over the world, the greatest scientists and engineers felt a pang of sorrow, for they knew that in the death of Nikola Tesla, the world had lost one of its greatest scientific brains. He had lived for 87 years, but even that had not been half enough time for all the things he had planned to do!