Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 62

-and, of course, Tesla had no drawings with which to try to convince him. But Edison gave him a job, for he had excellent training as an engine and Edison needed trained men.

        Busy with routine electrical work, Tesla waited nearly three years for a chance to turn his mental image into an actual motor he could show to others. In 1887, he was able to borrow enough money to start his own laboratory, and the following year the alternating-current motor and generator were practical realities-on a Laboratory scale-though much practical engineering would still be needed to fit them to commercial use.

        George Westinghouse, another inventor, was the first to see their value. He bought the patents and gave Tesla a job as engineer in his Pittsburgh factory.

        But Tesla couldn't get along with the other Westinghouse engineers. From his standpoint, the alternating-current job was done. Even "schoolboys" could now iron out the few remaining kinks. Meantime, his brain had started to hatch even bigger dreams. He went back to his laboratory in New York.

        "Be alone-" he once told a science writer. "That's the secret of invention. Be alone-that's where great ideas are born.

A LONE HE WAS. In the years that followed, Tesla had many admiring acquaintances, but seldom a friend. After his mother, no woman ever entered his personal life.

        His manner toward others was cordial but reserved, distant. His words were as if uttered by some god, sitting on an Olympus high above the rest of humanity. Backed by his fame, those words made a tremendous impression.

        He lectured at every scientific center in this country and in all the important capitals abroad. Things which, as yet, existed only inside that amazing brain of his were so real to him, he made them real to his listeners.

        He described radar and radio broadcasting and even television. He advocated electro-therapy. He foresaw a day when man would control nature in every respect-even the weather-when machines of all kinds, and the power to run them, would be so cheap that poverty would vanish from the world.

        Without wanting to be, Tesla was a superb actor. After listening to him and seeing his wonders, audiences were ready to believe nearly anything.

        Tesla reasoned that you could sell electric power cheap if you could do away with the millions of poles and insulators, the millions of tons of copper wire used to transmit it from place to place. He thought he knew how to do it-and J. P. Morgan backed him with $300,000.

        On Long Island, Tesla built a huge power plant with a 154-foot steel-ribbed tower topped by an enormous mushroom-shaped copper dome. From this dome he planned to bombard the earth's crust with millions of volts of electric energy. The power so added to the earth's permanent charge could be drained off at some other point-any point-on the earth's surface. Thus, it would be possible for electric power to be sent anywhere without conduits, poles or wires. Or so he thought, until he tried it.