The Secret
I have discovered the secret of high blog traffic!
Since I posted about this week’s episode of House, M.D., my hits have quadrupled. Apparently, many people want to know about the phrase written on the chalkboard behind House in the classroom where he grilled his 40 or so candidates:
Tesla was Robbed!
The phrase appears alone on the board early in the episode. But later in the episode, House writes the following above it:
SYN
RBC
TACH
PANIC
for synesthesia, red blood count, tachycardia and panic attacks.
These latter are part of House’s diagnostic procedure. He’s using the chalkboard instead of the old whiteboard in the office. But the Tesla remark, which appears, on a cursory examination, to be written in a different hand (though the style of the R is similar), is incongruous.
Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia in 1856 and emigrated to the United States and became a citizen there. He was a prolific and eccentric inventor. Among his more enduring inventions are fluorescent light bulbs and alternating current. AC is the operating standard for all major electrical distribution the world over, and Tesla’s AC generator design is used to generate very nearly all of the electricity on the commercial market. Having revolutionized the world with AC, Tesla next tried to move into wireless transmission of electricity. Tesla constructed large air-core resonant transformers for the purpose, and was extremely successful in getting them to transmit high voltages great distances without wires. Tesla invented long-distance radio communication in 1897 and was awarded US patents on the technology in 1900.
An upstart Italian, named Guglielmo Marconi, was working on achieving a similar feat. He was initially successful only in transmitting electrical signals a short distance. Nothing compared to what Tesla had been able to accomplish at his Colorado Springs laboratory. Marconi applied for patents on radio technology beginning in late 1900, after Tesla had been awarded his patents. Naturally, the US Patent Office denied Marconi’s applications.
Tesla is rumored to have once quipped,
Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.
That Marconi used technology that was covered by patents held by Tesla is a matter of historical record. Whether Marconi actually got the ideas from Tesla, or developed them on his own, is debatable. What is also known, however, is that Marconi’s major American investor was a man named Thomas Edison. Edison was also a prolific inventor, and was a proponent of direct current electrical transmission. The electric chair was invented by Edison, using Tesla’s alternating current, as part of the two inventors’ ongoing and often bitter feud. But so long as Tesla held the patents on the technology Marconi was using in his radio experiments, Marconi could not obtain a patent.
That changed in 1904 when, for reasons unknown to history, the US Patent Office reversed its decision not to award Marconi a patent on the radio. Marconi also eventually won the Nobel Prize for his “invention.” Tesla never won one, even though he made a much more lasting contribution to electrical science than any other inventor of his time. Tesla eventually went broke and died in massive debt.
This is, I believe, what “Tesla was Robbed!” refers to. Not only the loss, during his life, of his radio patent, but the loss of the Nobel Prize to Marconi.
But Tesla wins in the end. In the same year as his death in 1943, the United States Supreme Court finally upheld Tesla’s prior patent on radio technology. To this day, as a matter of US law, Tesla, not Marconi, is the inventor of the radio. Tesla has even triumphed over Edison. Edison’s most celebrated inventions (phonograph, movie projector, light bulb) have largely been replaced by technologies that rely more heavily on Tesla’s contributions (CDs, digital video projectors, fluorescent bulbs). Today, Tesla’s inventions touch and improve every corner of modern Western Civilization.
Tesla is a fascinating man. The apparent robbery of his radio patent is a tragedy. He would have become fabulously wealthy from it, which he would have used to further his sometimes enigmatic (to laymen, that is, not Tesla) research into areas such as long distance transmission of electricity and radio waves. The equipment that he needed was quite expensive. His Wardenclyffe Tower facility on Long Island, for example, had a 55 ton steel ball lofted 187 feet in the air, and steel tubes extending 420 feet into the earth (quoting Tesla) “to have a grip on the earth so the whole of this globe can quiver.” (Source: Wikipedia entry for Wardenclyffe Tower)
Because of Tesla’s penury, the Tower was ultimately taken over by his creditors and demolished.
Unfortunately, Tesla also contributed mightily to his own financial duress when he voluntarily surrendered his royalty agreement with George Westinghouse for the use of Tesla’s patents on the alternating current motor. The agreement called for Westinghouse to pay Tesla $2.50 for each horsepower of motor capacity that Westinghouse sold using Tesla’s patent. When Westinghouse was in a state of financial duress, Tesla simply tore up the agreement, rather than re-negotiating it down to a lower, more sustainable level.
Once torn up, as far as I know Tesla was never to receive royalties on future sales of his A/C motors. Westinghouse became rich on selling not just the A/C motors, but all of the rest of the A/C utility infrastructure, much of which Tesla designed.
Tesla was a great man. As you point out, we are all far richer for his having existed.
I’ve often wondered about Tesla, but I’m always a little sceptical about whether his story belongs in the genre of “Linus was smarter than Bill Gates”. At some point, I should read a good biography of his. Any particular recommendations?
Tesla wrote an autobiography titled My Inventions. It is pretty widely available.
Another that looks interesting is Empires of Lignt by Jill Jonnes. I haven’t read it, but I probably will. It concentrates on the Edison v. Tesla v. Westinghouse battle.
For his most prolific and productive period, Tesla was not only a scientific genius, but quite business savvy. He got patents on things and tried to enforce them. He licensed on terms that, for a brief time, made him extremely wealthy.
What caused his downturn in later years, I don’t know. The Electric Wars were very public, with all sides going to extremes in marketing their own products and flinging mud at others’. I speculate the tearing up of the Westinghouse contract, to keep Westinghouse from being run into the ground, might have been an overly dramatic gesture of triumph to demonstrate Tesla’s ultimate control over the future of Westinghouse.
~Q
Tesla got robbed. Sure he did and it’s all explained in Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla.
http://www.netsense.net/tesla/
There were a number of culprits, but the main one has to be J.P. Morgan. His first slight of hand was to force Tesla to attach his fluorescent lighting patents to their wireless deal. And then, Tesla gives Morgan the deal of the century, a monopoly on a vast mass communication system which would have included radio, TV and what became cell phone technology, and Morgan deep sixes the contract because he’s afraid that Tesla was right! Morgan wanted wires, because he had large copper, rubber and lumber reserves, and how do you put a meter on a wireless system.
Later, of course, Tesla’s secret particle weaponry papers, his plans for a Star Warsian “Teleforce”, was taken and hidden by factions of the vast industrial military complex. All of this is explained in detail in Seifer’s mind-blowing page turner, Wizard.
[Notes from the Seneschal: Broken YouTube links were removed from this comment. Overly advertismental content was removed from this comment.]
“I speculate the tearing up of the Westinghouse contract, to keep Westinghouse from being run into the ground, might have been an overly dramatic gesture of triumph to demonstrate Tesla’s ultimate control over the future of Westinghouse.”
This may have been true on some level, although by doing so, Tesla gave up any “control” he had over Westinghouse. From what I’ve read, Tesla was so supremely confident in the multitude of inventions that he would create, that he felt he could afford to generously give up his royalties on the patent for the A/C motor. He simply *knew* that electromagnetism was such a rich area of inquiry, that many more wealth-creating inventions would be his.
Radio probably was one of those discoveries, but the loss of the patent ended that. Unfortunately, he did not achieve anything else of the same scale as the A/C motor or radio, which had the potential to earn him large amounts of money. At the same time, he spent huge amounts of money in his research efforts. That financial mis-match led to his financial demise.
I interpret his gift to Westinghouse, unfortunately, as foolish over-generousness. He is still a great man, but in this instance he made an enormous financial and business mistake.
By the way, “Empires of Light” is a great book. An even better one is “The Merchant of Power” by John F. Wasik about the largely unknown, despised pioneer of the modern utility, Samuel Insull. I am reading that book now.
Insull began as Thomas Edison’s right-hand man when Edison developed the first electric utility in the United States. Insull took Edison’s achievement and massively improved it, creating the modern form of low-cost central station generation of power. Unfortunately, because his large utility trust, Middle West Utilities, went bankrupt during the Great Depression (along with thousands of other companies), and FDR chose to single him out as one of the businessman-enemies who “caused” the Great Depression, he has been reviled since then. His achievements in developing low cost, widely available electric power have been forgotten, yet today every modern electric utility operates largely under business principles he established.
Insull also is responsible for advocating the modern form of utility regulation. Does that make him an evil person? That is an interesting question.
Absolutely.
Tesla was born in a place that now belongs to Croatia but he was not a Croat.He was a Serb, his father was an ortodox priest and his mother was a daughter of an ortodox priest.
Interestingly enough, I did not say Tesla was a Croat. I said he was born in Croatia. I am well aware that he was a Serb, but I find his ethnicity and religious background hardly relevant.
~Q
What everyone seems to be missing is that Tesla himself had synesthesia. Hence the apt reference.