In reading about the odd genius, it isn’t clear just how far Tesla got in radio technology.
On one hand, he did file several important patents (which were used/infringed) by his rival Marconi. Yet, when he attempted to build his own radio communications system (the famous Wardenclyff Tower, LI, NY), he never achieved anything in the way of trans-Atlantic communication.
Earlier, he did show a remote-controlled electrically propelled boat (which he controlled via a system of radio control)-this was witnessed by many people (he called this system “Telematics”)-but I can find no evidence that he went beyond this simple application.
My question: if Tesla had (in fact) mastered the basics of radio communication (in the late 1890’s), why did Marconi surpass him? As regards the Wardenclyff disaster, Tesla had the full financial backing of JP Morgan-why did he fail?
He got nowhere. In part because he didn’t even believe that radio signals existed – i.e. Hertz was mistaken and there there was no such thing as transverse-wave radiation. Tesla instead had his own concept of “Hertzian waves” that were compression waves in the ether, but even these were nothing more than a curiosity, and useless for long-range communication. So Tesla never made anything close to a radio broadcast. He did make some very short-range power transmission demonstrations, sending electrical currents through the ground, and claimed he once transmitted power this way for 25 miles, but there were no witnesses. In 1919, Tesla reviewed his wild, incorrect ideas in The True Wireless.
I’ll agree he had important patents in wire transmission, but not that he had any patents infringed by Marconi. Some claim that a 1943 Supreme Court case Marconi Wireless Tel. Co. v. United States - 320 U.S. 1 overturned all of Marconi’s patents and declared Tesla the “inventor of radio”, but this is nonsense. The case only mentions Tesla in passing, and the main conclusion is that Marconi’s later tuning patent had been fully anticipated by John Stone Stone.
I believe he would have been greatly offended by implying that his work had anything to do with radio – that was “the fake wireless”. Tesla’s proposed “World Power” system was supposed to transmit electrical power through the ground to distant points. It didn’t make sense and it didn’t work.
This was an interesting experiment, although the use of coherers as receivers made it impractical at the time. I assume he got caught up in his more grandiose schemes, and didn’t follow up on what actually was a more practical idea. By 1914, John Hays Hammond, Jr. was leading the effort in conjunction with the U.S. military – by now Hammond could use vacuum tubes, which were much more sensitive and reliable.
Tesla hadn’t mastered radio communication, which left the door open for determined experimenters like Marconi. And with respect to the Wardenclyff power transmission work, it turned out that no amount of Morgan money could overturn the laws of physics.
But weren’t the Maxwell Equations generally accepted by that time?
Somehow Tesla seems to have concurrently accepted Maxwell’s equations but not the validity of Hertz’s experiments. How Tesla decided that compression-waves were consistent with Maxwell I don’t know, but in conclusion to The True Wireless he stated “The Hertz wave theory of wireless transmission may be kept up for a while, but I do not hesitate to say that in a short time it will be recognized as one of the most remarkable and inexplicable aberrations of the scientific mind which has ever been recorded in history.”
Thanks for the info. In all the books I’ve read, I believe that Tesla sold Wardenclyff as a communications system. JP Morgan was jealous of Marconi, and wanted to muscle in on the radio communications business. As I understand it, Morgan had backed Tesla (in the construction of the AC Niagara Falls power station), and felt that funding Tesla would give him some leverage in wireless (whether he actually expected Wardenclyff to work is not clear)-but in any event, the money lent to Tesla was chicken feed.
Tesla never had “the full financial backing of JP Morgan” nor was this ever stated in any of the major biographies of him that I’ve read. Morgan may not have fully understood the science (if any) of what Tesla was trying to do, but he perfectly well understood the concept of pouring money down a rathole and he stopped the funding even though Tesla pleaded and nagged for years thereafter. It’s also been pointed out in every biography that Wardenclyff was not a radio system but a power transmission system; it never could have worked no matter how much money was spent on it although some adulating books waffle on this. The patents that the Supreme Court cited were filed for power transmission purposes not for radio, although that was a consequence.
Those same biographies, if read closely - even the adulating ones - show that Tesla did not understand modern physics and that the world passed him by after about 1899. He never made it into the 20th century with any projects that panned out. Tesla believers want to believe, but there’s no there there.
Information on the Wardenclyff project is hard to find. As I said, my understanding was that it was supposed to be some kind of CW radio transmitter. As far as transmitting power, I have never read anything that mentioned that purpose.
I did read that Morgan’s estate attempted to collect from Tesla (for the funds advanced)-but by that time, Tesla was broke.
Regarding Tesla’s activities after 1900-he did make some money on other inventions, but it is true to say that his creative peak had passed.
Tesla’s patented speedometer were used in automobiles up to the 1980’s, so he must have gotten patent royalties on hat, for quite some time.
Cite that it was used until the 1980s?
It’s mentioned in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article.
I don’t necessarily accept Wikipedia as true. Having Wardenclyff as a wireless electricity transmitter doesn’t make much sense-it wasn’t near any hydroelectric power source, and it was in a remote part of LI.
So, I think Tesla had represented it (to J.P. Morgan) as a communications station (of some kind).
As for the Tesla rotating magnet speedometer, my 1988 GMC truck has one. (These were replaced by electronic versions in the 1990’s).
Sure looks like he didn’t make much money on that patent.
Well, Tesla licensed the speedometer to Waltham Precision, Inc., who made them for many years (most were sold to Ford Motor Co.)
We’ve had a few threads on this here. Consensus was that if he could prevent the power from being reduced over three dimensions, it could be used for a variety of commercial and military uses,especially in the early decades of the 20th century.