Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 22

straight lines that you see in the figure he calls a “brush”; it gives off a glow that he calls luminosity — whose shape and form he reports is very sensitive to the presence of objects or nearby electric or magnetic fields.

However fascinating his demonstration, Tesla still has not produced the forerunner of the Audion. The latter, we recall, was invented by Lee de Forest, and was the first working three-element vacuum tube. His patent application is dated January 29, 1907, and it issued on February 18, 1908. Despite de Forest’s confused understanding of his invention, within the next half dozen years it was proving its worth as both an amplifier and an oscillator. If we want to see the forerunner of the Audion we must look to the work of Fleming and Edison, whose devices, like de Forest’s, relied on thermionic emission. The distinguished historian of the vacuum tube, Gerald Tyne, makes no mention of Tesla in his well-regarded opus.⁷¹ This is not surprising — Tesla’s bulbs responded by glowing only in the presence of strong, quasi-electrostatic fields produced by his machines.

It is regrettable that Tesla’s narcissism caused him to write this paper — it can only provide difficulty for his acolytes and apologists. The ignorance he displays of classical electromagnetic theory, which by 1919 was a mature subject, can only diminish his reputation.

Gernsback and His Magazine

If Tesla’s True Wireless is so utterly wrong, and if it conflicts with the paradigms used by engineers and scientists of 1919, how did he get his article published? To answer this, we must focus on the magazine where it appeared and its editor/publisher Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967).⁷² Almost a generation younger than Tesla, Gernsback had certain things in common with him: they were both inventors with substantial lists of patents — Gernsback had 22, Tesla 112; both came from groups that placed them in small minorities in the United States (Gernsback was a Jew from Luxemburg); both studied science and engineering on the European continent; and both occupied a kind of nether world bridging science and fantasy.⁷³ They apparently had a lasting friendship that would tend to counter suspicions that Tesla was an anti-Semite. Gernsback pressured the Westinghouse Company, which had benefited greatly from Tesla’s work in three phase power and induction motors, to give the near destitute inventor a pension in 1934.⁷⁴

Gernsback’s Electrical Experimenter

The Electrical Experimenter, started by Gernsback in 1913, is where we find Tesla’s article six years later.⁷⁵ Although the term “science fiction” did not exist until coined by Gernsback in 1929, his magazine Modern Electrics carried a serialized story of that genre in 1911–12, written by Gernsback — something to keep in mind when we look at the Electrical Experimenter, where Tesla was to publish abundantly in the 7-year life of that magazine.⁷⁶

What sort of magazine was the Electrical Experimenter? It was dense