Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'[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.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 344
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
NIKOLA TESLA AND THE ELECTRICAL FUTURE
IWAN RHYS MORUS
‘There have been other Tesla biographies, but this is the one I have been waiting for. Neither hagiographic nor hatchet-job, it sets its mercurial subject in his cultural and historical context: a visionary and showman, part genius and part crank, totally a product of his age. Tesla cannot be understood without a clear view of the (uniquely American) legend he embedded himself within, and Iwan Rhys Morus expounds that view brilliantly. Tesla, he shows us, was – like his one-time boss and rival Thomas Edison – inventing nothing less than the electrified future.’
—Philip Ball, author of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen
‘Nikola Tesla saw himself as a rebel, a free-thinker, a disruptor and the sworn enemy of scientific mediocrity. Brilliant in his experimentation, chaotic in his methodology, Tesla was the twentieth century’s first visionary tech entrepreneur.’
—Thomas Dolby, musician and sound tech pioneer
Contents
Prologue
Nikola Tesla is in many ways one of the most enigmatic, curious, and controversial figures in the history of science. He was controversial during his own lifetime too, with opinion divided between those who thought he was either a visionary, a charlatan, or a fool. Whatever he was, he was full of apparent contradiction. Tesla was a consummate showman and a very private recluse – a man of science who seemed to be addicted to self-promotion and sensationalism. He was a prolific inventor of technologies that sometimes helped make other men’s fortunes, but failed completely to make one for himself. Tesla embodied the aspirations and the paradoxes of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Looking back now at the future that Tesla imagined, it still seems very familiar. It is no coincidence that Elon Musk named the company making his electrical car of the future ‘Tesla’. Tesla’s fin-de-siècle invocation of an electrical future still casts its shadow over the ways we understand our future now.
The final decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth century were a time of unprecedented technological transformation. Tesla was one of the key innovators of that innovative age. He was a key figure in developing new ways of generating and transmitting electrical power. He played a vital role in establishing the networks of power that still run our economies more than a century later. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the global spread of the telegraph network, the invention of the telephone, and the beginnings of wireless telegraphy. The discovery of X-rays and radioactivity seemed to open up new vistas for the future. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the beginnings of powered flight. This was the world that produced Tesla, and that he helped produce. His restless speculations and experiments about the way tomorrow would be also helped inaugurate new ways of trying to understand the future – the ways we still turn to as we try to make sense of the future now, and imagine how to get there.
Tesla is often described (and some of his promoters described him in this way during his own lifetime) as a man ahead of his time. It is a relatively common way of talking about great innovators – Leonardo da Vinci is another example of someone often talked about in this way. In Tesla’s case, however, the suggestion could not be more wrong. He was in all ways the product of the scientific and technological turmoil of those final decades of the nineteenth century during which the future seemed to be coming closer on an almost daily basis. That is why this book will not be just a biography of Nikola Tesla. It will take the inventor as its guide and follow him through the cut-throat entrepreneurial culture of late Victorian and Edwardian electrical invention. I want to explore the electrical future that Tesla saw himself creating, and the raw materials from which that future was being forged.
The decades during which Tesla completed his education, came to America and made himself as an inventor were characterized by a near-addiction to innovation. Both the Old World that Tesla left, and the New World where he lived for most of his adult life were undergoing rapid technological change. Electricity was no longer just a thing of lecture theatres and exhibitions, but was leaking everywhere into everyday life. Cityscapes and townscapes across Europe and America were now festooned with the paraphernalia of electrical technology. Cables criss-crossed the sky, carrying power to homes and businesses, or buzzing with information from telegraphs and telephones. Electric tramcars trundled down the streets. At night, public buildings and shopfronts dazzled the eye with spectacular displays of electric lighting. To many people, it looked as if tomorrow’s world had already arrived, and people like Tesla were the ones who had delivered it.
This was a time when engineers and inventors could be heroes. They were held up and celebrated as examples of what discipline and perseverance could achieve. As we shall see, even on the far frontiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire it was possible for a young man like Tesla to dream of a life of invention. Invention offered a road to fame and fortune. More importantly, it seemed to offer an opportunity to change the world. The prevailing image of invention and inventors was one of determined individualism. Tesla, of course, fashioned himself carefully to fit that image, as did others like Thomas Edison. To be an inventor Tesla had to be a showman too. Electricity seemed made for spectacle and Tesla turned himself into a consummate performer of electrical spectacle. He quite literally made himself part of the display, making it seem as if he held the electrical future in his hands.
Electricity and invention at the beginning of the twentieth century were bound up with imagining the future. The nineteenth century was in many ways the century that saw the invention of the future. The nineteenth-century future was imagined as a place that would be different from the present and generated by technological progress and innovation. This was particularly the case with electricity. Electricity was understood as the stuff from which the future would be made, to such a degree that it was almost impossible to discuss electricity at all without invoking its future. To most people, electricity simply was instantaneous communication, with or without wires; new sources of power; locomotion; improved agriculture and control of the weather; weapons and flying machines – and electrically generated health. This was a future extrapolated from bits and pieces of present technology. One of the things that made Tesla so successful was that he was very good at offering compelling images of the future his inventions would deliver.
The stories that Tesla told about the future of wireless communication and wireless power that he was trying to build at Wardenclyffe during the first few years of the twentieth century were very much part of a wider culture of speculating about the future – both in fact and in fiction. The magazines and newspapers that reported on Tesla’s activities and relayed the visions of the future that he promised were filled with such stuff. They published scientific romances by the likes of H.G. Wells as well – and sometimes the scientific romance and the scientific facts were hard to disentangle. It was no coincidence that Tesla’s speculations about wireless communication with Mars, for example, were aired at the same time as everyone was reading The War of the Worlds. Telling tales about the future was integral to the business of invention. Inventors like Tesla needed to excite the public’s imagination to sell them their vision of the future – and to attract the attention of the money men whose cash would be needed to make those visions real.
One of the reasons, I think, why Tesla remains such a fascinating and seductive figure is that the image of invention he wrapped around himself remains a very familiar one. That image – which Tesla helped create – of the inventor as an exceptional kind of individual is still the way we tend to think about inventors and innovation today. Just as people in the nineteenth century associated invention with individuals, so do we. Where they made Brunel, or Edison, or Tesla into heroes, we do the same with their contemporary equivalents – though maybe we are a little more inclined than our great-grandparents to make them villains instead. Whether we think of them as heroes or as villains though, the image of invention that we have inherited from the nineteenth century is one that portrays innovation as something that is produced through the exertions and talents of remarkable individuals. Tesla’s self-portrait as the uniquely gifted, asocial, daydreaming obsessive is one that still resonates for us today.
That notion of invention as belonging to exceptional individuals like Tesla has its impact too on the way we tend to think about the future and how – and by whom – it gets made. As far as Tesla was concerned, the future was going to be made by him. Tesla’s future seems familiar to us, not because we are living in it, but because we still imagine the future in the same sort of way and using the same sorts of ingredients as he did. We make our futures out of bits and pieces of the present. That is one reason, at least, why we should take Tesla seriously still. In the rest of this book I use Tesla as a way in to the future as it looked from the end of the nineteenth century. Understanding that future is important in my view, because it helps us understand why we now imagine the future as we do. Understanding Tesla can tell us not just about how we got to where we are, it can help show us why we think as we do about where we are going, too.
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 and performing the operations, not in the usual intuitive manner, but as in actual life … it was absolutely the same to me whether I wrote the symbols on the board or conjured them before my mental vision.’11 He was developing an ability to see things and concepts inside his head and examine them from different angles.
He was still obsessed with inventing things – or that is how he remembered his past self looking back from the vantage point of a successful life of invention in the future. He developed an idea for an engine that worked by creating a vacuum, for example. He even built a prototype and was delighted when it seemed to work. Tesla was ‘delirious with joy’, he remembered. He wanted to use the contraption to power a flying machine. In his imagination he would transport himself through the air to distant places, and now he knew just how to do it in reality: ‘a flying machine with nothing more than a rotating shaft, flapping wings, and – a vacuum of unlimited power!’ Tesla was devastated when it dawned upon him that his fabulous vacuum engine could not possibly work in the way he had envisaged, and that the slight movement he had observed in his prototype must have been caused – ironically – by a leak.12
The next stage of Nikola’s education meant leaving home. At the age of twelve he was sent to the gymnasium in Karlovac, about 150 kilometres away from Gospić, living with his father’s sister and her husband (another military man) while studying there. Tesla was by now a devotee of electricity, fascinated by the experiments carried out by the school’s professor of physics. He remembered in particular ‘a device in the shape of a freely rotatable bulb, with tinfoil coatings, which was made to spin rapidly when connected to a static machine’. Tesla wrote later that it was ‘impossible for me to convey an adequate idea of the intensity of feeling I experienced in witnessing his exhibitions of these mysterious phenomena. Every impression produced a thousand echoes in my mind. I wanted to know more of this wonderful force; I longed for experiment and investigation and resigned myself to the inevitable with aching heart.’13 Tesla had found his vocation – and was desperately afraid that he would never be able to achieve it.
By now Tesla knew that he wanted to be an inventor. But he also knew that his father was determined that his remaining son should follow him into the church. Milutin’s original ambition had been that his eldest son should become a priest, but following Dane’s tragic death he had transferred those hopes onto Nikola. It was now his duty to fulfil the role that had been intended for his older brother and continue the family tradition. However repugnant Nikola found the thought of entering the priesthood – and it seems clear that he had no sense of calling at all to such a future for himself – he was also determined to be a dutiful son and to do what both his parents wanted. His dream of studying engineering and devoting his life to invention would have to remain just that – a dream.
Tesla’s longing for a future as an inventor is revealing in itself about the world in which he was living. Regardless of his parents’ ambitions for him, this was a world in which such a future seemed possible. It was a world where a career in invention was at least a plausible ambition, even for a young man living on the edges of the Austrian Empire. It shows that the nineteenth-century world really was getting smaller. Even in small towns in Croatia like Gospić and Karlovac, the tentacles of progress had penetrated. As those mechanical models and electrical demonstrations that Tesla encountered at school attest, science and technology were part of that penetration. Tesla already knew enough about physics to fantasize about an invention ‘to convey letters and packages across the seas, thru a submarine tube’, and even ‘a ring around the equator which would, of course, float freely and could be arrested in its spinning motion by reactionary forces, thus enabling travel at a rate of about a thousand miles an hour, impracticable by rail’.14
Tesla got his way, of course. He became an inventor, not a priest. At the end of his final year of school at Karlovac he received a message from his father suggesting that he should take a hunting trip to the mountains rather than hurry home to Gospić. Puzzled, since hunting was not an activity usually favoured by his father, he disobeyed the instruction – and returned home to find the town in the middle of a cholera outbreak. Tesla promptly fell ill himself and was close to dying. His parents were distraught. With nothing to lose, perhaps, Nikola made one last bid for freedom. ‘Perhaps I may get well if you let me study engineering,’ he bargained with his father. Milutin’s response was unequivocal: ‘You will go to the best technical institution in the world.’ As far as Tesla was concerned, it was as if ‘a heavy weight was lifted from my mind.’15
Milutin insisted that his son spent a further year recuperating from his illness before setting off to continue his studies, but he kept his promise. Tesla was enrolled to study at the Joanneum Polytechnic School in Graz. His father had also secured for him a scholarship from the Military Frontier Administration Authority that would both fund his studies and allow him to defer his obligatory military service until he had completed his studies there. The Joanneum had been founded in 1811 by the Archduke John of Austria. In 1864 it became a Technische Hochschule, making it one of just four institutions in the Austrian Empire that offered degrees in engineering. The technical education that he would receive there would be among the best in Europe. The Technische Hochschulen had been established by the empire to provide precisely that – and to produce a generation of technically trained and proficient experts who would be at the forefront of the imperial drive towards its own technological future.
Notes
1. For details of Tesla’s background and childhood see the excellent W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). For a history of the Austrian Empire see Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
2. The story is repeated in many places. See for example Dan Mrkich, Tesla: The European Years (Ottowa: Commoners Publishing, 2010), p. 55.
3. Nikola Tesla, My Inventions and Other Writings (London: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 8. The original ‘My Inventions’ appeared as a series of articles in the magazine Electrical Experimenter in 1919, commissioned by the editor Hugo Gernsback.
4. Mrkich, op. cit., note 2, p. 54.
5. [Dionysius Lardner], ‘Railways in Ireland’, Quarterly Review, 1839, 63: 1–34, on p. 13.
6. Quoted in Carlson, op. cit., note 1, p. 18.
7. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 25.
8. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 6.
9. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 28.
10. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 31.
11. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 32.
12. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 32.
13. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 34.
14. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 35.
15. Tesla, My Inventions, op. cit., note 3, p. 34.
CHAPTER 2
Electric Power
In the summer of 1873, while Tesla was coming to the end of his schooldays at Karlovac and succumbing to cholera at home in Gospić, the world was coming to Vienna. The Vienna International Exhibition was officially proclaimed open on 1 May that year. It was, quite explicitly, about defining the empire’s place in the new industrial world of the future. It was ‘the great event that was to proclaim New Austria the peer in hopeful enterprise and self-improvement, of her elder sisters, England and France’.1 Huge resources had been thrown at the event, and the sheer physical space occupied by the exhibition – 2,330,631 square metres – was enormous. The main building measured almost a kilometre from end to end. As an exhibition it was judged a huge success. As one commentator put it: ‘No pencil will ever succeed in depicting its beauties, no tongue will give more than a feeble echo of its wonders.’2 As a money-making exercise it was a complete failure, mainly because it coincided with a financial crash in the middle of the summer.
The Vienna exhibition was, of course, the latest in a line of industrial shows that had been inaugurated by the huge success of the Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park in the summer of 1851. People had flocked to the Crystal Palace in their hundreds of thousands, with about 6 million visitors having passed through from the day the exhibition was ceremonially opened by Queen Victoria on 1 May until it closed its doors for the last time on 11 October. The Great Exhibition offered its visitors a frozen tableau of the past and present of invention, and invited them to imagine a future made up out of its contents. In a letter to her father, Charlotte Brontë called it ‘a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe’. It was ‘as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it thus, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect’.3
The exhibition in Hyde Park set the standard for the ones that followed. Just a few years later Paris organized its own Exposition Universelle, with a Palais de l’Industrie to rival London’s Crystal Palace. Just over a decade after the Great Exhibition’s runaway success, London hosted its second international exhibition in the summer of 1862. Electricity was an increasingly common presence at such shows. Visitors to the 1862 exhibition could marvel at the ‘magnetic telltale of Professor Wheatstone’ that ‘telegraphically announced his or her arrival to the financial officers in whose rooms were fixed the instruments for receiving and recording the liberated current’.4 There were electromagnetic dynamos too. At the next Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867 there was plenty of electricity as well. Jules Verne visited the exhibition while writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and some of the electrical technologies he encountered there found their way into his novel.
The visitors who flocked to the Vienna exhibition, just like those who had flocked to London and Paris, were there to find out what the future would be made out of. Among the exhibits they would find plenty of evidence to suggest that the shape of things to come would be electrical. There were exhibits of the latest telegraphic technology, for example. The German company Siemens & Halske had a variety of telegraphic apparatus on show. Visitors could inspect samples of undersea cables. As well as telegraphic apparatus, they exhibited a steam-driven electromagnetic generator in the Machine Hall and used it to power an electric light. In among the huge steam engines in the Machine Hall were a number of other electromagnetic generators as well.
One of the electrical exhibitors at Vienna was the Belgian inventor Zénobe Gramme. He was there to exhibit the new electromagnetic generator he had recently invented. The generator was notable in that it generated an almost entirely constant direct current, rather than the fluctuating alternating current usually produced. It was also extremely powerful. The story has it that at some stage during the exhibition, Gramme’s partner Hippolyte Fontaine accidentally connected the Gramme generator to another one nearby, that happened to be generating current. He was amazed to see that the Gramme generator itself started moving. Not only was Gramme’s device a generator, it was also a powerful engine. The story seems apocryphal. It seems more likely that Gramme and Fontaine were already aware of their device’s potential as an engine, and that they chose the Vienna exhibition as a suitable opportunity to mount a public demonstration of their discovery. The Gramme machine, in any case, would have a significant role to play in Tesla’s future.
By the time Gramme put his invention through its paces in Vienna, electromagnetic generators and engines had been around for almost half a century. From the 1820s onwards, electricians competed to find ways of making electricity useful. Hopes were high that electricity would power the future. As one commentator, the English electrician Alfred Smee, put it, ‘to cross the seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed, be the most noble achievement ever performed by man.’5 Many electricians were convinced that electricity held the secret to understanding the universe, and that getting to grips with the stuff would not only offer ‘a closer insight into the operations of nature as connected with the animal, vegetable or mineral kingdoms’ but offer ways of ‘usurping at no distant period, the place of steam as a mechanical agent’, so that electricity would become ‘in the most extensive manner, subservient to the uses, and under the control of man’.6
William Sturgeon’s invention of the electromagnet in 1824 was the key to these early efforts to make electromagnetic engines. They generally worked by making use of the electromagnet’s capacity to switch its magnetism on and off in rapid succession to produce either a reciprocating or a rotary motion. During the 1830s the American Thomas Davenport developed his own electromagnetic engines, making use of Joseph Henry’s improved and more powerful electromagnets. With engines like these, technological optimists were confident that ‘half a barrel of blue vitriol, and a hogshead or two of water, would send a ship from New York to Liverpool.’7 Dreams of future electrical travel seemed on the verge of fulfilment in 1839 when the German-born Moritz Hermann von Jacobi sailed a boat with fourteen passengers on the river Neva in St Petersburg, powered by an engine working with a battery of the nitric acid cells just invented by the Welsh electrician William Robert Grove. In 1848 when the British Association for the Advancement of Science visited Grove’s home town of Swansea, they were invited to see a boat powered by his nitric acid cells sailing around an ornamental lake at Penllergaer.8
In the United States the inventor and patent agent Charles Grafton Page succeeded in persuading a Congress usually averse to unnecessary expenditure to award him $40,000 to develop an electromagnetically powered locomotive. It took a decade to complete but on 29 April 1851 Page’s 24-horsepower locomotive, powered by a bank of Grove’s nitric acid cells, set off on a public demonstration trip from Washington DC to Baltimore. It was a triumph and a disaster. As Page’s friend John Greenough reported, ‘we carefully timed the revolutions of the driving wheels, and found that at our highest speed we had attained the unlooked for rate of nineteen miles an hour … propelled by some invisible giant, which by his silence was as impressive as his noisy predecessor, although less terrific.’9 The speed was the problem though. As they were rattled around on the rails the fragile Grove cells started to shatter. The locomotive never made it to Baltimore, with Page calling an ignominious halt to the journey after only a few miles. It took two hours for the damaged locomotive to make it back to the starting point.
Electromagnetic engines like the ones that Page developed were just not powerful enough to be commercially successful – and banks of batteries were simply not a reliable or economic enough source of electricity. As Grove himself pointed out, it would only be when ‘instead of employing manufactured products or educts, such as zinc and acids, we could realise as electricity the whole of the chemical force which is active in the combustion of cheap and abundant raw materials’ that electricity would be an economic source of power. Only then would they ‘have at our command a mechanical power in every respect superior in its applicability to the steam-engine’.10 It was not really until the 1870s, when inventors like Gramme started to develop new kinds of electromagnetic engines, and new ways of generating electricity economically in large quantities, that the dream of electric power and locomotion started looking like a practical reality for more than a few visionaries like Page.
Locomotion was not the only potential use of future electricity, of course. The induction coil (another piece of electrical technology that, like Gramme’s engine, would play a key role in Tesla’s future) was another invention of the 1830s. Following the great experimenter Michael Faraday’s observation of electromagnetic induction in 1831, a number of experimenters (including Faraday himself) tried to develop new instruments to show off the new effect. The first induction coils were made by the Irish philosopher-priest Nicholas Callan in 1836 and consisted of two coils of copper wire, one inside the other. When a current was switched on and off in the inner coil, a current was generated in the outer coil as well. It offered experimenters and lecturers a way of magnifying the spectacular effects of electricity in their demonstrations. As Callan put it, ‘it supplies the place of all the various kinds of voltaic batteries, of the battery for producing a large quantity of electricity of low intensity, of the battery for exciting a large quantity of electricity of the intensity necessary for the rapid fusion and deflagration of metallic wires, and of the battery for producing an electric current of high intensity.’11
At the beginning of the 1850s the German instrument maker Heinrich Ruhmkorff, living in Paris, developed a technique for making induction coils far more powerful. Now they could become a source of serious spectacle. With Ruhmkorff coils it was possible to generate electricity of far higher intensity than could be generated from an ordinary coil. Another German instrument maker, Heinrich Geissler, found a way of exploiting this to spectacular effect with his invention of the eponymous Geissler tube. Geissler was a skilled glassblower and could produce his tubes in a variety of fantastical shapes. When they were filled with different gases and hooked up to a coil they glowed in different colours. Throughout the second half of the century, ever more extravagant Geissler tubes were essential items in the repertoire of popular scientific lecturers. They came in a variety of shapes and elaborate coils. Some featured fluorescent liquids as well as glowing gases, or were made from uranium glass that glowed green in the dark.
