BLIND SPOT! CHARLEY ROSE DEFROCKED!

BLIND SPOT!

CHARLEY ROSE DEFROCKED!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006

“Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.”

Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)
English cleric and mystic

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”

Nikola Tesla, 1896

TO BE AND NOT TO SEE

I was watching Charley Rose, the likeable, engaging, empathic, mover and shaker interviewer of public television, when surprised at his lack of debt beyond celebrity consciousness.

Rose was interviewing a versatile film actor, Michael Caine, who was promoting his new film, “The Prestige.” The film deals with magic.

Caine casually mentioned Harry Houdini’s connection to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Then with the same casual aplomb, he brought up the name of “Nikola Tesla” whose persona is featured in the film, reeling off Tesla’s scientific accomplishments. He learned of these while being interviewed by a Serbian reporter.

Rose confessed that he wasn’t aware of the connection between Houdini and Doyle, nor of their polarized views on mysticism. Even more astounding, he confessed never to having heard of Nikola Tesla. One wonders how that could be possible. Then again, it falls into place in a celebrity conscious culture that is skin deep.

Houdini and Doyle met in New York City. It was the early 1920s, the dawn of the Jazz Age. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was touring America to promote the Spiritualism in which he passionately believed. Houdini, the world famous magician, took personal and professional pleasure in debunking mediums. Yet, he secretly yearned for contact with the beloved soul of his deceased mother. This found these two idiosyncratic characters first clashing and then forming an intriguing bond. A tantalizing mystery novel, “Nevermore” (1994) by William Hjortsberg gives an insight into this relationship.

My antennae were undoubtedly alerted to Rose’s ignorance, as my favorite uncle was interested in mysticism. Like Doyle, he had an academically trained and rationally inclined mind, but with a difference. Doyle was a medical doctor; my uncle a professor of economics, and head of his department at the University of Detroit, and a personal friend of the clairvoyant and mystic, Edgar Cayce.

TESLA: THE MAN OF THE CENTURY OUT OF HIS TIME

More surprising was Rose’s failure to have any recollection or name recognition of Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943).

Tesla was born in Croatia and was a Serb. History is not always kind to its greatest contributors. This was the case of Tesla in the twentieth century.

He invented alternating current as opposed to Thomas Edison’s direct current. He also created the Tesla coil, which led to the Tesla turbine, and hydroelectric power. Meanwhile, patents in his name numbered in the hundreds.

Many saw him the “Leonardo of the twentieth century,” yet the Nobel Prize was repeatedly stolen from him. He became a rival to Edison over A/C versus D/C electricity.

With the backing of Westinghouse Corporation, Edison mounted a propaganda campaign to make alternating current appear dangerous. Dogs and cats, and even an elephant were electrocuted onstage to make the point, while Edison asked men in the audience if they wanted their wives to risk their lives every time they plugged in the iron.

The sad fact is that Edison’s argument was not only duplicitous, but also totally false. Tesla’s alternating current was safer than Edison’s direct current, as well as more efficient and easier to deliver. Eventually, after first opposing Tesla on a commercial basis, banker J. P. Morgan, the nineteenth century’s quintessential robber baron, backed Tesla’s technology. So, today, we have A/C electrical hook ups in the United States, while Europe still maintains the more cumbersome and expensive D/C electrical system.

Tesla, in his heyday, lived in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where he dined alone each night in the Palm Room. There, he engaged in a ritual that involved a stack of linen napkins, with which he wiped cleaned every piece of cutlery, china, and glass on the table. That done, he could not eat until he’d calculated the cubic capacity of each vessel and, by extension, the volume of food before him. Obsessive compulsive, to be sure, but this inclination translated into determination and a singular focus and became a bellwether to his work.

Hardly a recluse, however, he was wined and dined as a trophy guest by the rich and famous. He partied with the Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers, and was best friends with Mark Twain, as well as acquainted with famous scientists across the world. He also hosted these guests in his Manhattan laboratory, astonishing them with his demonstrations worthy of Dr. Frankenstein.

While Twain and other guests watched in amazement, Tesla would stand on an improvised platform, wreathed in lightning. He’d pace the lab with tubes of light that seemed to have no power source, while juggling balls of fire that left no marks on his clothes or skin.

Where Edison was a chubby plodder, who wore his wife’s smocks while at work, Tesla was elegant and thin, a six-foot-six genius who performed his experiments in the formal attire of waistcoat and tails.

Tesla was constantly courted than rejected for the Nobel Prize. It was Tesla, rather than Marconi, who first patented a method for wireless broadcasting (i.e., radio), but Marconi received the Nobel Prize for it. Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan invested $150,000 in Tesla’s broadcast center, but held 51 percent of Tesla’s radio patents for security that left him in the lurch when credit was to come for this great discovery.

It was Tesla who harnessed the power of Niagara Falls. He worked for years on ways of transmitting energy wirelessly across great distances, and claimed he could capture electricity – free energy – from “standing waves” at the earth’s core.

He even professed he could destroy the entire planet with this idea of free energy waves. Think about it. The earth is a bundle of different energies: thermal energy from the core; gravitational energy from the pull of the moon; geomagnetic forces; solar energy from the sun; Gamma rays from outer space; kinetic energy from the earth rotation around the sun and on its own axis.

Tesla believed the earth has a natural resonant frequency with the earth producing “standing waves,” waves that do not progress through space.

Like all waves, these are forms of energy, which he believed could be tapped. His “Wardenclyffe Tower" and power plant on Long Island was where he conducted some of these experiments in the early part of the century. If you can imagine, the tower was a skeletal wooden structure of about a hundred feet tall capped by a gigantic metal hemisphere that would gladden comic book lovers, as it created visions of “Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century.”

The research at the center had to stop because J. P. Morgan was financing the project. He pulled the plug on financing when he learned that the tower was not for radio waves. Tesla was planning on transmitting power from the earth and sending it “free” everywhere about the world without wires.

Tesla was doing this for mankind, but Morgan was only interested in profit. He had big investments in Westinghouse and General Electric. He had spent a fortune building electric grids – wires, meters, and poles – and wanted a return on his investment. Tesla told him he didn’t need any of this. That he could get power directly from the earth, amplify it, and beam it everywhere. “People,” Tesla said, “just need a cheap receiver to download the energy.” This would be like radio antennae.

Tesla also had the sobering sense that he could stop the world’s electrical systems completely and forever, creating a “back-to-the-future” scenario with this technology. Cars would not ever start again, computers would go dead, all electrical control systems would die, and on and on, until only primitive existence would exist.

John Case has just published a suspense novel with this possibility, “Ghost Dancer” (2007), leaning on Tesla’s science. Earlier, the sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) gave credence to the Tesla possibility. The film is an adaptation of Harry Bates’s short story “Farewell to the Master” and is obviously based on Tesla’s research.

The John Case novel deals with Tesla’s work in plasma physics. Tesla was constantly working on ways to transmit energy without conductive wires. He created a beam of energy, a beam of protons – this is what he was doing at Wardenclyffe – targeting the beam for a massive release of energy to create a big light show. It nearly destroyed a large building in the area. Case built his novel on this premise.

Regarding the sci-fi film, "The Day the Earth Stood Still, it has Michael Rennie coming from another planet to warm the people of the Earth to stop nuclear testing before the planet is destroyed. Rennie arranges a demonstration of his power by stopping all electrically dependent activity across the globe briefly.

Tesla’s idea is not as farfetched as it might seem at first glance.

A flashlight can explain the idea. All light is the same, a stream of protons, traveling at the speed of light. But shining a flashlight through the dark and it’s going only so far and then the beam falls apart. The beam “loses coherence.” It loses energy to friction. For the beam to reach a distant point and retain coherence is almost impossible. Tesla found a way to send a beam of energy as paired waves in a plasmoid sheath, which eliminated friction. This allowed the beam to reach the target with the energy intact. It was Tesla’s Holy Grail in plasma physics that he was working on when he ran out of funds. It so fascinated author John Case to make it the denouement of his novel.

There isn’t a major electronic invention of the twentieth century in which his footprints are not first upon the discovery ground. The irony is that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine (July 20, 1931)for all his successes, commemorating his seventy-fifth birthday, when he couldn’t pay his bills, and was living in relative obscurity and unpleasant circumstances.

Tesla’s work is evident in Einstein’s work in the splitting of the atom. From an electromagnetic spectrum, he saw energy in waves. His work is also evident in Roentgen’s discovery of the “X-ray.” Three years earlier, 1892, Tesla had detected “visible light, black light, and a very special radiation,” accidentally “X-raying” his foot.

With the radiation, he had made shadowgraph pictures on plates inside metal containers. In 1894, he carried out more revealing plates when fire broke out in his laboratory and destroyed his work. He was so curious when Roentgen’s discovery was announced that he contacted the man: “If you would only be so kind as to disclose the manner in which you obtained them (i.e., X-rays).” Roentgen didn’t reply. Later, it was revealed he used Tesla’s approach.

Tesla had a hand is in quantum mechanics. Quantum theory is energy in waves. Matter, too, is in waves. Waves and particles are the same. We look at a glass. It seems solid, but inside the molecules of the glass are electrons in motion. So, we know the glass has resonant frequency, something Tesla discovered.

Excite an object, such as a glass, and the object vibrates at that frequency. Everything is like this. Like a tuning fork, you hit it and it sings, it vibrates, it oscillates at its own frequency.

Frequency in physics is number of waves per second. Resonant frequency is a bit more complicated, and this is why Tesla’s footprints are on Einstein.

If nothing is done to amplify the frequency, the frequency will vibrate slower and slower as the energy dissipates to what is called entropy. But if you add amplitude at the precise time the object could reach escape velocity then, well, it’s bye-bye world. Put another way, there is enough compact energy in a pencil, if released, to blow up a city. So, Tesla had a hand in the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

His footprints are on Gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves, infrared waves, light waves, neon lights, radar as well as X-rays. He constantly went back to his childhood for inspiration.

Inspired by the waterwheels he had played with as a child, he conceived a revolutionary prime mover called “the bladeless” turbine. He wrote:

“A long time ago I became possessed of a desire to produce an engine as simple as my induction motor; and my efforts have been rewarded. No mechanism could be simpler, and the beauty of it is that almost any amount of power can be obtained from it. In the induction motor I produced the rotation by setting up a magnetic whirl, while in the turbine I set up a whirl of steam or gas.”

Tesla had an old world childhood that did not prepare him for the high jinx and chicanery of his new adopted home in the United States. He was well educated as a physicist and electrical engineer at Graz, Prague, and Paris when he immigrated to the US at the mature age of 28 with an old world gentleman’s perspective. There would be little to discuss had he not patented nearly all his discoveries and inventions, but he did. Most remembered today is the Tesla coil, which led directly to radio transmission.

THE CONUNDRUM OF HISTORY

He worked for years for Thomas Edison, who stole many of his ideas and submitted them as his own to the patent office. This was not uncommon behavior of the great inventor. He was known in the trade for taking credit for the work of his people. It is one explanation for his hundreds of patents. Edison's biographers don’t mince words to the effect that he was a shrewd businessman and a predatory idea thief.

Marconi won the Nobel Prize for a patent that was once Tesla's, and then the patent office reverse itself. A similar situation happened with Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, which Tesla had not only already proven, but Roentgen’s work followed precisely what he had previously done.

The New York Times announced on November 7, 1915 that Tesla had won the Nobel Prize for physics for “the transmission of electrical energy without wires, which affects present-day problems,” only to have it awarded to William Bragg of the University of Leeds for his work on the structure of crystals.

Ironically, Tesla was supposed to have shared that 1915 prize with Edison. Tesla was nominated again in 1937 and was expected to win, but didn’t. He took umbrage with this statement:

“In a thousand years, there will be many recipients of the Nobel Prize, but I have not less than four dozen of my creations identified with my name in technical literature. These are honors real and permanent, which are bestowed, not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake.”

This points to the fact that people who deserve recognition at the highest level in their time do not always receive it in their lifetime.

And then, as Charlie Rose demonstrates, can be responsible for all kinds of miracles of modern life and not be identified or associated with them, or remembered for them. Everyone knows of Edison and his work; few know of the greater man, Tesla.

I must confess I can identify with Tesla's aloneness if not his genius, with his solitary pursuit of his passions without distraction, with the sanctity of his mind as his proudest possession, and with his obsessions with his ideas. I am also moved by his quiet elegance, his idiosyncratic disregard for the opinions of others, and his philosophical recognition of human weakness and its inclination to use others and their ideas rather than to have the passion, persistence, energy, and will to create their own.

Another dimension of the conundrum of history is Tesla’s relationship to Mark Twain. I am confounded by it. Twain was always looking to “invest in a sure thing,” and for this found him nearly bankrupt on more than one occasion. He never invested in his friend, Tesla, who could have used the support, but treated him as an oddity of nature. Indeed, Twain turned down entreaties from Alexander Graham Bell to invest in his telephone.

As a writer, Twain is America’s finest. But we know him best for his humorous lectures. Hitting the road as a humorous kept his family in funds to compensate for his constant misadventures as a venture capitalist. It was his speaking tours about the globe that spread his name and charm, and for which he is best remembered and often quoted. Yet, Twain hated these excursions with a passion.


APOLOGIES TO CHARLIE ROSE

I never know for sure what is going to surface in these peripatetic walks. I have been an admirer of Charlie Rose for years, suffered the pain of his recent collapse when, apparently the picture of health, during work abroad, he became gravely ill. His erudition and gritty interviewing style has always pleased me. It is reassuring to see him back in the pink, and I wish him nothing but well.

His failure to know of Nikola Tesla offended my sensitivities and surfaced during this walk. We Americans have never been comfortable with genius. We want genius to be packaged like cereal in an appealing design with our heroes confined to resonating images. We don’t want them to be out of the main stream, too different, dare I say, odd? We pride ourselves on our individuality, but that individuality has extreme limits beyond which we can manage only begrudging tolerance. We want the product of genius but not the body and soul of it. We want someone with whom we can identify, a lothario like John F. Kennedy, a celluloid stud like John Wayne, or a cuddly genius like Einstein, who worked hard until thirty and coasted the rest of the way.

Tesla was never like any of them. He was so far ahead of his time that the best minds took him for a dreamer, labeling him a poet and visionary, which was a way to write him off and forget him when the big prizes were awarded. Our heroes today are the innovators who never invented anything. In fact, nothing actually new has been discovered in the electronic world that approaches the work of Tesla early in this past century.

So, I apologize to Charlie Rose for my rant. He is the quintessential American and demonstrates the surface brilliance that is so endemic to our society, and which we now find the world finally grasping as our appointed legacy.

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