Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 18

England on March 2, 1899, he says, “I think it desirable to bring before you some observations and results I have obtained with a system of Hertzian wave telegraphy, which was the first with which I worked….”⁵⁴ His U.S. patent 676,332 of 1901 refers to “a transmitter producing Hertz oscillations.” And, following Kuhn, we can say that Hertzian waves entered the discourse of “normal science” because we find extensive references to them in a textbook, e.g., Poincaré, cited above. In fact, studying the index of Poincaré, we find that he uses Hertzian waves and electromagnetic waves as synonyms. John Ambrose Fleming, who was the first Professor of Electrical Engineering at University College, London, and who did major work for Marconi beginning in 1899, published a textbook titled Hertzian Wave Wireless Telegraphy in 1903, in which there is not the slightest doubt that wireless telegraphy relies on the waves of the title.

Interestingly, Tesla, in certain of his turn-of-the-century U.S. wireless patents, refers to Hertzian waves, or “radiations,” being “brought into prominence” by Heinrich Hertz.⁵⁵ In all of these instances, such waves are disparaged as being of an outmoded or less desirable way of transmitting signals, or energy, which should be discarded in favor of one that either uses extremely strong electric fields and high antennas to ionize a layer of the earth’s atmosphere which is to then act as a conductor of a transmission system (which includes the earth’s crust) — or of another that uses wavelengths so long as to make the earth into a conducting sphere that has been brought to a resonant condition. In the later case, he recommends using frequencies lower than 20,000 cycles per second (cps) and asserts one might go as low as 6 cps (patent 787,412, lines 260–270).

Maxwell and Einstein: Difficulties for Tesla

When Tesla wrote his True Wireless paper he was not a young man — he was 63. Male life expectancy in the United States was then 54. His formal education in science and engineering had taken place many years before. He had studied for somewhat less than three years at the Austrian Polytech in Graz Austria in the late 1870’s. In 1880 he audited courses at Charles Ferdinand University in Prague but was not enrolled. His course work should have given him a solid grounding in electric circuit theory, and it was in school that he developed a great interest in alternating currents, especially for motors.⁵⁶ It is highly unlikely that Tesla would have studied Maxwell’s theory while at school. As first presented in 1873, it was so difficult that few could understand it; nowhere will you find in Maxwell’s treatise the four succinct equations studied today by all electrical engineering and physics students. His analysis is based entirely on potentials, not the electric and magnetic fields used now. He used 20 equations and 20 variables, and it was only through the efforts of such people as Hertz, Heaviside, and Willard Gibbs