Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future

Iwan Rhys Morus

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785785757
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

'[This] crisply succinct, beautifully synthesized study brings to life Tesla, his achievements and failures...and the hopeful thrum of an era before world wars.' - Nature Nikola Tesla is one of the most enigmatic, curious and controversial figures in the history of science. An electrical pioneer as influential in his own way as Thomas Edison, he embodied the aspirations and paradoxes of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. In an era that saw the spread of power networks and wireless telegraphy, the discovery of X-rays, and the birth of powered flight, Tesla made himself synonymous with the electrical future under construction but opinion was often divided as to whether he was a visionary, a charlatan, or a fool. Iwan Rhys Morus examines Tesla's life in the context of the extraordinary times in which he lived and worked, colourfully evoking an age in which anything seemed possible, from capturing the full energy of Niagara to communicating with Mars.Shattering the myth of the 'man out of time', Morus demonstrates that Tesla was in all ways a product of his era, and shows how the popular image of the inventor-as-maverick-outsider was deliberately crafted by Tesla - establishing an archetype that still resonates today.

PART 1

THE ELECTRICAL CENTURY

CHAPTER 1

A Child of the Storm

What did the future look like in 1856? For Milutin and Djuka Tesla, living in the village of Smiljan in the province of Lika in Croatia it must have appeared quite uncertain in many ways. They were Serbs, living in Croatian lands, and members of the Orthodox Church in a predominantly Catholic Austrian Empire. Until a few years previously, Milutin had been an Orthodox priest in the town of Senj on the Adriatic coast. The family had moved to Smiljan in 1852, hoping to make a better living in a more prosperous place and with a larger population of co-religionists to support their priest. The times must have seemed precarious, nevertheless. It was only a few years since the Empire had been convulsed by the wave of revolutions that had swept across Europe in 1848. The little town of Smiljan had certainly not been immune to those convulsions, and the unstable frontier with the Ottoman Empire was not far away.1

According to family legend, when Nikola Tesla was born at midnight on 9 July by the old Julian calendar, a thunderstorm was raging over the village. The midwife reputedly worried that the infant Tesla would be ‘a child of the storm’. Djuka apparently responded, ‘No, of light.’2 It is a powerful image, and one that Tesla himself made much of in later life. The story certainly fits in well with the image Tesla wanted to convey of his own unique genius. His special link with electricity had been forged at the moment of his birth.

Whether or not a storm really raged over Smiljan that night, it seems that Tesla was a sickly child. He was baptised immediately, which suggests some concern that he might not survive. Like all male children born in the military frontier, the young Tesla was promptly enlisted in the local regiment, with the expectation that he would commence service at the age of fifteen.

Though Milutin had broken with family tradition by joining the priesthood, the Teslas were a military clan. Nikola’s grandfather had served first in Napoleon’s army in the Illyrian provinces that had been ceded by Austria to France, then, following Napoleon’s defeat, in the Austrian imperial army. Milutin and his brother Josif had both been enrolled as students in the Austrian Military Officers’ School until Milutin had rebelled and decided to join the church instead. Tesla’s uncle Josif remained in the army and became a mathematics professor at the military academy.

Djuka Mandić on the other hand came from a line of priests. Her father and her grandfather had both entered the church, and her brother Nikolai became the Archbishop of Sarajevo. There were military men on the Mandić side of the family too, with Nikola’s uncle Pajo becoming a colonel in the Austrian army. Both families were Serbs, and committed both to the Orthodox Church and to a vision of a future independent Serbian state.

The Tesla household – and the wider family – within which the young Nikola grew up was clearly one that valued the life of the mind. His uncle Josif was not just a professor of mathematics but the author of a number of mathematical works. His father Milutin was prosperous enough to be able to collect a growing library of books, including works in science and mathematics as well as the theological tomes that might be expected in a priest’s study. He also wrote regularly for a number of Serbian journals and magazines on a variety of topics, particularly on the need for education in the Serbian language. There were clearly plenty of opportunities for an eager and inquisitive young child. Tesla remembered his mother Djuka as ‘an inventor of the first order’ who would ‘have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities’.3

Tesla was exaggerating the remoteness. Smiljan might have been in a relatively obscure corner of the Austrian Empire, but it was still part of a modern European state, and one that during his childhood was changing rapidly in the wake of the 1848 revolution. The political and ethnic geography of this eastern frontier of the empire was certainly complex. Tesla’s ancestors would have settled in the area having fled Ottoman encroachments a few centuries earlier. Their settlement on the precarious border was a deliberate imperial policy designed to provide a ready supply of local soldiery to defend against possible Ottoman invasion. Croats, Serbs and other ethnic groups, Catholic, Orthodox, and even Muslim, lived cheek by jowl along the border. When Tesla was ten years old, the old Austrian Empire became the new Austro-Hungarian Empire with the incorporation of the Kingdom of Hungary on 30 March 1867. The world in which he was growing up was rapidly changing, and those changes would create new opportunities and new possible futures for ambitious young men.

Milutin Tesla’s own activities as a writer show how fully engaged the family were with the world around them. Milutin contributed regularly to the Novi Sad Diary and other Serbian publications. He mainly wrote about the need for Serbian language education, complaining that ‘except for the clergy and merchants or tradesmen, here and there, hardly anyone knows how to sign his name in Serbian.’ He complained that ‘Serbs in Croatia do not have High Schools, Teachers’ Colleges, or any other public places of learning.’4 As well as his journalism, he was involved in campaigns to establish schools for the local population. Smiljan might have been a long way from the empire’s centre of political, economic, and technological power in Vienna, but it was not remote from it. The empire’s political leaders were busily embracing a technological future and the tentacles of progress were spreading out across its territories.

Throughout the 1840s the empire’s railway networks were spreading rapidly. This was the result of a determined effort by the state to industrialize and innovate. By the 1850s there were railway lines running south from Vienna to Ljubljana in Slovenia and onwards towards Trieste. By the 1860s the railways were encroaching on Croatian territory too, although it would be a long time before they arrived at Smiljan. The railways were a deliberate effort to consolidate the empire. As contemporary commentators noted, railways made the world smaller and more manageable. As the English commentator Dionysius Lardner put it, with the advent of the railways ‘the whole population of the country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two-thirds of the time which now separates them from it; they would also sit nearer to one another by two-thirds of the time which now respectively alienates them.’5 In the Austrian Empire, they were an equally deliberate effort to improve industry.

The Austrian Empire’s adoption of the electromagnetic telegraph during the 1840s was as calculated and strategic as the enthusiasm for the railways. Telegraphy in the empire was an imperial monopoly – the Telegraphenregal – and its adoption was a deliberate attempt to acquire the trappings of a progressive and modern state. Like the railways, the electromagnetic telegraph made the world seem smaller. It annihilated time and space, said its promoters. It certainly revolutionized the speed at which information could travel. For the empire’s political leaders, it was another tool in their efforts to subjugate the various ethnic groups that lived within its borders and to create a homogenous and culturally united state. In 1865 the Austrian Empire was one of the signatories of the International Telegraph Convention in Paris. A few years later the International Telegraph Conference assembled in Vienna. The Austrian Empire was ready to embrace the future, and that electrical future was coming closer to Smiljan and to Nikola Tesla.

Tesla himself recalled his own first encounter with electricity from a very early age. As a very young boy he remembered playing with the family cat, Macak. Stroking the animal on a particularly cold and dry evening, he ‘saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement’. The cat’s back ‘was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house’. His father told him that ‘this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.’ Tesla found himself wondering if nature was like the cat, and whether God was the one who stroked it to generate lightning. Looking back at the event decades later, Tesla supposed that it must have been the first time that he started thinking about the nature of electricity.6

He certainly saw himself as having inherited his mother’s gift for invention. He traced his inventiveness to a very early age, describing how he had made his own fish hook to catch frogs. In another experiment, he ‘acted under the first instinctive impulse which later dominated me – to harness the energies of nature to the service of man’. He made a machine powered by ‘May-bugs’ – which seems to have worked well until one of his friends ate the insects. He remembered disassembling – and failing to reassemble – his grandfather’s clocks. He also ‘went into the manufacture of a kind of pop-gun which comprised a hollow tube, a piston, and two plugs of hemp’.7 Along with inventiveness came introspection. Tesla said of his own inventive gifts that he had spent so much of his young childhood inside his own head that he had become very good at imagining in detail how things might work.

In 1863, when Nikola was seven years old, the Teslas moved to the slightly larger town of Gospić, following his older brother’s tragic death in an accident. His brother Dane died falling from a horse and his death traumatized the young Nikola and his parents. In later life Tesla recalled his brother as being ‘gifted to an extraordinary degree – one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain’. From then onwards, the ‘recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison’.8 More immediately, Dane’s death meant the end of an idyllic (in memory at least) rural childhood, and the transfer of Milutin’s hopes and ambitions for his older son to his younger one.

Gospić, among other things, meant school, and a move to strange and forbidding new surroundings. In principle, at least, schooling within the Austrian Empire was free and compulsory between the ages of six and twelve, so Tesla had already attended school in Smiljan for a year. The school in Gospić offered more opportunities, however. Tesla remembered seeing mechanical models there for the first time, and being inspired to build his own simple water turbines as a result, which he tried out in the local stream. At around the same time he ‘was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls.’9 He even told a sceptical uncle (his mathematical uncle Josif perhaps) that he would one day go to America to carry out his scheme.

When he was ten, Tesla moved on to the local gymnasium to continue his schooling. Here he encountered ‘various models of classical scientific apparatus, electrical and mechanical’. He remembered that the ‘demonstrations and experiments performed from time to time by the instructors fascinated me and were undoubtedly a powerful incentive to invention’.10 He was coming to excel in mathematics as well. He put this down to the facility for seeing things accurately inside his own head that he thought was at the root of his capacity for invention. He had an ‘acquired facility of visualizing the figures a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part 1: The Electrical Century
• Part 2: Battle of the Systems
• Part 3: Scientific Showman
• Part 4: Selling the Future
• Part 5: Visions of Tomorrow
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright