Pigeons and MRI: Tesla Vignettes

Tesla and Edison

Tesla came to America after living in France for 2 years, and Mr Edison hired him to work at the Edison Machine Works in New York City. Edison's electric power generators producing direct current (DC) worked well only when electricity requirements were small. The power and output of DC are relatively weak, making its transmission over long distances impractical. Tesla solved this issue by perfecting alternating current (AC). Transformers decrease or increase the power of AC as needed, so if long-distance transmission is required, power is amplified, making it more efficient (with DC current, a generator every 3–4 km is needed). When Edison refused to pay him for his inventions, Tesla left and later sold them to Westinghouse. The War of Currents erupted, and Edison tried to instill fear in AC users by calling it extremely dangerous. He went as far as paying children to steal dogs, electrocute them with AC, then scatter their bodies together with flyers alerting the public to the dangers of AC. When killing dogs no longer shocked the public, he killed larger animals (sheep, cows, horses), eventually leading to the electrocution of Topsy the elephant (for a video of this see: http://tinyurl.com/mumu8mq and, for a good description of the process, I suggest reading Jean Echenoz's fictional Tesla biography Des Eclairs³).

Additionally, Edison promoted the first successful electrocution of a prisoner by using AC (DC was tried but was not powerful enough to kill a human being) to showcase the dangers of this type of electricity. The subsequent legal battles that erupted nearly caused Edison and Westinghouse to go broke and forced Tesla to forfeit royalties from his patents owned by the latter. When Edison died, Tesla wrote this bitter obituary: “He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene…. His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense.”⁴ Just before dying, Edison acknowledged that ignoring Tesla's AC patent had been his biggest mistake.

Tesla and Roentgen

Before x-rays were officially named, Tesla investigated them by using single-terminal vacuum tubes (conventional ones use 2 terminals). We know that high-energy electrons emitted by a cathode hit the special material (tungsten, molybdenum) of the anode, “braking” them and secondarily emitting a very small percentage of high-energy x-rays. In Tesla's tube, no target existed. Energy left the electrons encountering a high-field electrical environment resulting from the oscillations of AC, and as they collided with the glass encasement, x-rays were generated. His experiment also worked well by using Geissler tubes that were filled with substances such as inert gasses (these were the forbearers of fluorescent light and the electron microscope). While in New York, he produced images of the bones in his hands and sent them to Roentgen, who ignored them. Tesla also claimed that his design produced x-rays much more powerful than Roentgen's. Because Tesla never published his findings and his research notes were lost during a fire of suspicious nature, he never received credit for the discovery of x-rays. Fortunately, he also became aware of Roentgen's health issues induced by radiation exposure and avoided them himself.

Tesla and Marconi

Although Guglielmo Marconi is credited with having invented the telegraph and received the Nobel Prize for the radio, Tesla discovered both years before Signore Marconi did. Tesla discovered that by using his coils, radio signals could be transmitted over great distances as long as the receiving coil was tuned to the resonant frequency of the transmitting one (sound familiar?). The receiving coil magnifies signals via resonance. Just before Tesla could demonstrate that his invention was able to transmit signal as far as 50 miles, his laboratory suspiciously burned down, causing him to lose his instruments and documents (note that Tesla demonstrated transmission at shorter distances in St. Louis 2 years before Marconi showed his invention). About the same time as the aforementioned tragedy, Marconi developed a 2-way transmitter whose signals were too weak to cross even a small pond. He solved the problem by using Tesla coils. Marconi claimed ignorance about Tesla's coils when applying for a US patent, and the granting of patents to both inventors was delayed due to arguments on both sides claiming property rights. Aided by rich investors, Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company thrived in the stock markets, and soon Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison became its 2 most important American investors. Shortly thereafter, Marconi amazed the world by transmitting signals wirelessly across the Atlantic Ocean. Because Marconi was using several of Tesla's patents to accomplish this, Nikola was not worried; but he should have been because 4 years later, the United States awarded the patents for the telegraph and radio to Marconi under political pressure from Carnegie and Edison. When Marconi received the Nobel Prize, Tesla was furious and sued Marconi for stealing his patents. Later, the Marconi Company sued the US government because the armed forces had used its patents for communications during World War I without permission or payment. The US Supreme Court eventually ruled that these patents belonged to Tesla (now dead and childless), thus avoiding any payments owed by the government to Marconi's company.⁵ Tesla predicted that all of us would carry small, wireless telephones in our pockets; something Marconi did not.

Tesla and Twain

Exactly where Tesla and Samuel Clemens met is not clear; it could have been at the Player's Club (a bar in Manhattan) or in the laboratory. Although Tesla was familiar with Twain's writings, it was not until after the discovery of AC that Twain noticed Nikola. Both men shared friends in high society, including the Johnsons, Kipling, Roosevelt, and Muir. Tesla invited Twain to his laboratory, where the famous writer partook in some electrical experiments that reportedly filled him with vigor and vitality. While Twain was spending time in Austria, he heard about Tesla's experiments on destructive terror (the Death Ray) and wrote urging him to use these to make war impossible in the future by making it available to all (an idea akin to “assured mutual destruction”).

Tesla and the FBI

While living in Colorado Springs, Tesla started developing the idea for a particle beam that could be used as a weapon, and though his idea never materialized, it was described in what is known as the “Tesla Papers.” Immediately after his death, unknown persons raided his apartment in the New Yorker Hotel, stealing documents for fear that they would fall into Soviet hands. Two days after his death (when he was found by a maid), the FBI confiscated all that was left. The FBI appointed Dr John Trump of the National Research Committee to look into the documents, and he concluded that they were mostly speculative in nature. After World War II, interest in them was revived and the heavily funded “Project Nick” was started in Dayton, Ohio, only to be dropped later. Interest in a beam weapon waxed and waned until the late 1970s, when construction of a large beam weapon by the Soviets came to light. As a response, in the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative.⁶ All attempts to build a Death Ray have failed, and many think that answers to the problems encountered were addressed in the missing “Tesla Papers ” (some think that the US Government has them and is hiding them).

Tesla and Birds

No one knows why Tesla was interested in pigeons. This interest is nicely portrayed in The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt.⁷ As an old man, Tesla walked every day to Bryant Park (located behind the New York Public Library between 6th Avenue and West 42nd Street, a scene again found in Paul Auster's Moon Palace⁸). At that time, pigeons were considered unmeritorious, and perhaps Tesla felt similarly about himself. On the night that he was awarded the Edison Medal (how ironic!), he suddenly disappeared from the banquet only to be found in Bryant Park covered by pigeons from head to evening pumps. Tesla said he considered pigeons to be his “sincere friends.” He took sick ones into his apartment and caused cleaning crews to complain of dirt. Just days before his death, he became particularly attached to one and was able to recognize this particular bird and fed it every day (white wings with a touch of gray in their tips, photographs available at: http://www.teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla-timeline-1922-tesla-pigeon-dies). When the pigeon became sick, Tesla took it with him to his apartment, but attempts to cure the bird failed and it died. Tesla died only a few days after the pigeon, it is said of a broken heart (this may be true because he died of heart failure); he previously stated that he had loved her as a man loves a woman (how sad is that?). Much has been made about the symbolism of the pigeon, comparing it with the dove in religion and its meaning in Tesla's life. Curiously, Tesla's favorite meal was squab.

Tesla, like Einstein, was a generalist, and like Edison, he was self-taught. His thoughts extended into many arenas of human enterprise without dwelling on details of how to accomplish them. Because he almost never published in scientific journals, many of his ideas are now lost. Some of his projects sounded like science fiction but are now reality; others are still within the realm of the impossible but are being reconsidered. Our knowledge has expanded so much that extrapolating what we now know into the world where Tesla lived is simply not possible, so it is hard for us to grasp his achievements. However, it is thanks to them that MR imaging and modern neuroimaging are possible.

Bonus

Two wonderful stories about Edison and Topsy, and Tesla and his pigeons can be found in Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet.⁹