The Truth About Tesla

The Myth of the Lone Genius in the History of Innovation

Christopher Cooper

• Publisher: Race Point Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780760363706
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Everything you think you know about Nikola Tesla is wrong.

Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest electrical inventors who ever lived. For years, the engineering genius was relegated to relative obscurity, his contributions to humanity (we are told) obscured by a number of nineteenth-century inventors and industrialists who took credit for his work or stole his patents outright. In recent years, the historical record has been "corrected" and Tesla has been restored to his rightful place among historical luminaries like Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Gugliemo Marconi.

Most biographies repeat the familiar account of Tesla's life, including his invention of alternating current, his falling out with Edison, how he lost billions in patent royalties to Westinghouse, and his fight to prove that Marconi stole 13 of his patents to "invent" radio. But, what really happened?

Consider this: Everything you think you know about Nikola Tesla is wrong. Newly uncovered information proves that the popular account of Tesla's life is itself very flawed. In The Truth About Tesla, Christopher Cooper sets out to prove that the conventional story not only oversimplifies history, it denies credit to some of the true inventors behind many of the groundbreaking technologies now attributed to Tesla and perpetuates a misunderstanding about the process of innovation itself.

Are you positive that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? Are you sure the Wright Brothers were the first in flight? Think again! With a provocative foreward by Tesla biographer Marc. J. Seifer, The Truth About Tesla is one of the first books to set the record straight, tracing the origin of some of the greatest electrical inventions to a coterie of colorful characters that conventional history has all but forgotten.

chapter one

Myth of the Lone Genius

Tesla (9th from the left) with Albert Einstein (to his right), Charles Steinmetz (to his left) and other luminaries inspecting the New Brunswick Marconi Station

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

—MARK TWAIN, LETTER TO HELEN KELLER, MARCH 17, 1903

Every writer is an inventor. And like the best inventors, the best writers borrow heavily from others. Every fact you read here, every story recounted, has been told in existing biographical publications or can be found through a robust search of the Internet. No single component of this book is new, and yet the story of Nikola Tesla has never been told like this before. Like most ingenious ideas, the truth about Tesla has always been right there for anyone—from the most ardent fanatic to the most casual inquisitor—to find, if only he or she stumbles upon the right bits of information, in the right order.

And that is the point, really. Innovation, like history, is messy. It involves the passions and perplexities of people, with all their quirks and foibles. We like to think of innovation as occurring in leaps and bounds, society rapidly propelled forward by revolutionary concepts uncovered by the best and brightest among us. After all, human history is written in technological epochs, from the Bronze Age to the steam engine, the skillful harnessing of hot water to power an entire industrial revolution. This history is clean, if simplistic. It is nothing like the history we live, where technological progress is wrought in painstakingly small increments, as much from a clash of competing self-interests as from a wondrous sense of curiosity. It is a sanitized history, devoid of the kinds of daily struggles, for guts and for glory, that make life both messy and meaningful.

Patents and Prestige

On an unseasonably hot afternoon in June of 1943, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America v. United States, the lawsuit that would put an end to the decades-old legal battle over just who invented the radio. Technically, the suit was the final attempt by the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi and his American subsidiary to recover damages from U.S. companies for infringement of radio patents he had been issued in 1904. Since December 1901, when Marconi announced that he had successfully intercepted in Newfoundland a wireless signal transmitted from England, the inventor was heralded as the father of radio. Shortly thereafter, he quickly set about protecting his interests by applying for patents on both the method and apparatus he used.

Guglielmo Marconi

Initially, the U.S. Patent Office rejected Marconi’s application, citing (among other things) a patent issued in 1900 to Nikola Tesla for a wireless “System of Transmission of Electrical Energy” that the Serbian inventor claimed could be used “to transmit intelligible messages to great distances.”¹ Although Marconi denied ever having read anything about Tesla’s system, in October 1903 the U.S. examiner found Marconi’s claim, well, patently absurd.² Only a year later, however, in a decision that remains a mystery to this day, the Patent Office suddenly reversed itself and granted Marconi patents for the most essential radio components.³ To add insult to injury, the Nobel Committee granted Marconi—not Tesla—the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909.

By 1915, Tesla had had enough and filed his own suit seeking to invalidate Marconi’s patent.⁴ He was, however, on the brink of bankruptcy, living off of loans from financiers whom he enticed by making extraordinary claims to world-changing inventions like electrical flying machines and the global transmission of wireless electricity. Tesla barely had money to feed himself, let alone pursue an expensive patent suit.

In any event, powerful financial interests aligned against Tesla, largely as a result of historical events few could have foreseen. By 1917, as the bloody events of World War I were just reaching their nadir, the U.S. government seized all patents owned by U.S.-based radio manufacturers. This allowed the military to use the technology for the war effort without being encumbered with pesky and expensive licensing fees. Although the war ended only a year later, the military sought to keep the national radio system it had created squarely in U.S. control. Navy admiral W. H. G. Bullard met with executives of the General Electric Corporation to strike a grand bargain. If GE agreed to stop selling its AM radio transmitters to the Marconi Company (and its U.S. subsidiary, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America), the U.S. government would sanction a virtual monopoly on long-distance radio by an American-owned subsidiary controlled by GE. The executives agreed, quickly bought controlling interest in Marconi Wireless, and incorporated the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), after which the U.S. military granted the company rights to all of the radio terminals it had confiscated during the war. Thus, by the autumn of 1919, Marconi Wireless was in the hands of powerful industrialists who had every incentive to protect Marconi’s patent.

In the meantime, Tesla had gone broke, he had suffered a nervous breakdown, his wireless patents had expired, and he simply did not have the wherewithal to pursue a lawsuit against these interests. Tesla’s defeat, however, would not stop them from reinforcing Marconi’s patent by bringing an infringement claim of their own in the U.S. Court of Claims. Twenty-seven years later, the case had reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in the swelter of early summer, wrestled with how to resolve the thorny issue once and for all.

The conventional wisdom is that Tesla was finally given due credit when Chief Justice Harlan Stone, writing for a five-member majority, declared that the inventor had, in fact, anticipated at least four major components of Marconi’s radio system.⁵ But the decision was hardly the resounding vindication many of Tesla’s admirers claim. The inventor’s role in the whole matter takes up fewer than four pages of an opinion that runs nearly sixty, most of which are devoted to reviewing how the essential components of Marconi’s system had borrowed heavily from inventors other than Tesla—namely, the American physicist John Stone Stone and two British inventors, Sirs John Ambrose Fleming and Oliver Joseph Lodge.

Justice Felix Frankfurter

After grappling with the issue for weeks and reading over a draft of the majority opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter refused to side with his colleagues.^* Consistent with his penchant for judicial restraint, Frankfurter penned a florid dissent, cautioning the court from using hindsight to recreate how scientific innovations occur:

The discoveries of science are the discoveries of the laws of nature, and like nature they do not go by leaps. Even Newton and Einstein, Harvey and Darwin, built on the past and on their predecessors. Seldom indeed has a great discoverer or inventor wandered lonely as a cloud. Great inventions have always been parts of an evolution, the culmination at a particular moment of an antecedent process. So true is this that the history of thought records striking coincidental discoveries, showing that the insight first declared to the world by a particular individual was “in the air” and ripe for discovery and disclosure. The real question is how significant a jump is the new declaration from the old knowledge.⁶

Frankfurter went on to express that he had littl...