Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 3

For our present discussion, the important paradigm shift began with the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879). Consider what Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said about Maxwell’s work of the period 1860–1873: “From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.”⁴

Maxwell produced a paradigm, or a model, for light: it was an electromagnetic wave having transverse electric and magnetic fields. The theory described a wave moving at the speed of light that could be generated by electrical means, and it did not specify a wavelength — it could be, for example, 700 nanometers (like visible light, whose wavelengths were known in Maxwell’s era), or around 300 meters (like broadcast AM radio of our time).

In the late 17th century, Newton had maintained that light consisted of streams of particles, which he named corpuscles; his prestige was such that his model still had some adherents as late as Maxwell’s era, although there was much evidence favoring a wave theory. To further complicate matters, others analyzed light as a ray that describes the path of the light energy.⁵

We now come to a narrative familiar to many readers. In the period 1886–1889, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz carried out a series of experiments in which he generated a wave that exhibited wavelengths on the order of meters, possessed a measurable electromagnetic field, and to a fair approximation moved at the known speed of light.⁶ These waves could be reflected, polarized, and diffracted — just as visible light, whose properties had been studied for several centuries. Had the Nobel Prize been awarded in the lifetimes of Maxwell and Hertz, they would surely have been winners. Hertz’s work was published in the period 1887–1891 and served as a stimulus to such people as Guglielmo Marconi, Oliver Lodge, and Karl F. Braun, who sought to employ Hertz’s discovery in the field of wireless telegraphy. The story is well told in the book by Aitken.⁷

Tesla recounts a meeting with Hertz in the document we are studying: he traveled to Hertz’s laboratory in Bonn, Germany, in 1892 and describes in “The True Wireless” an unfruitful encounter where he informs Hertz that he had been unable to reproduce his results. If we believe Tesla, the two parted “sorrowfully” with our narrator subsequently regretting his trip.⁸ He also informs us that later, even having developed a “wireless transmitter which enabled me to obtain electromagnetic activities of many millions [sic] of horse-power,” he was unable to “prove that the disturbances emanating from the oscillator were ether vibrations akin to those of light…” Unable to generate what soon became known as Hertzian waves, and having read articles describing such waves over the eighteen-year period preceding this article, he remarks, “The Hertz-wave