27 March 2009, mkrause
Facing the retreat of his sole financial backer John Pierpont Morgan, Tesla went desintegrated into other worlds. Before, he thought he had a silent agreement with Saint Sava (St. George), his patron saint. They would always stick together, Tesla thought. And now, with “Morgan the Gorgon” denying any further funding, Tesla felt that the saint has turned his back on him. But Tesla also had to keep his self-esteem, on a level quite high: Tesla reckoned his work immortal; he saw that he had brought in the greatest inventions of all times, and also that his name was linked to even more inventions than Archimedes or Galileo. Wardenclyffe destroyed not only implied that a huge edifice was shattered, or a dream was all over. The failure of Wardenclyffe shattered Tesla’s mind, and it took a long way to recover.
13 March 2009, mkrause
The House of Morgan: the mighty John Pierpont and his commanding daughter Anne were Tesla’s new target at the end of the first year of the new century (1901). It could have been a match made in heaven, a marriage of the ‘wizard of electricity’ and the foundress of suffragette city. However, Tesla, as always, went for the work, not for his love or personal relationships. And it worked, Pierpont Morgan gave him a lot of money, but for a price: 51% of all of Tesla’s patents were in the hands of the Wall Street Mogul now. And then Marconi sent three dots across the Atlantic, making Tesla’s most ambitious project obsolete. Teslas”WorldWideWireless system” was not needed any more, and it was much too expensive. Unfinished as it was Wardenclyffe had to be abandoned.
8 March 2009, mkrause
Sailing under the warm vent of financier John Jacob Astor’s investment Tesla started his Colorado Springs experiments. Knob Hill, the location of his experimental barn, is a nice neighbourhood today. The view up to Pike’s Peak is enormous; and one can imagine the time then, when heavy weatherfronts went about the plateau, Tesla and his colleagues Kalman Czito and Fritz Lowenstein watching the lightning storms, trying to make use of them (and finding Schumann cavities) ….
3 March 2009, mkrause
In 1898, the 1. Electrical Exhibition was opened in Chicago on May 2nd, by a telegram from U.S.-President William McKinley. The “War Fair” presented new weaponery for warfare, water bombs, submarine missiles and the like. Tesla’s robot boat - the first-ever radio-controlled vehicle - was designed to carry 6 torpedoes behind the front lines of the enemy, launch the missiles and return back safely. Today, we all have an understanding of this tactical weapon, in 1898 Tesla was laughed at and dismissed. Here the Tesla proverb “he was too far ahead of his time” is definitely true. Others cashed in on Tesla’s invention, in this case the otherwise well-known inventor John Hays Hammond Jr.; to call Mr. Hammond “father of radio-control” is not exactly true, but worth a definite laughter.
2 March 2009, mkrause
Andrew Carnegie: “Pioneering doesn’t pay.” How true this statement is you might see when studying Tesla’s robot boat of 1898. Today, the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade is proud to build replicas of Tesla’s world-first robot vessel and sell it to other museums. When Tesla presented his new marvel at Madison Square Garden, people shied away: nobody understood the significance and importance of Tesla’s invention. And the inventor added to the feeling of mystique by stating that his mind controlled the movements of the robot boat. What we can learn from this, Carnegie already said. In addition, Tesla built a so-called logic gate into the radio-control mechanism of his “submarine destroyer”. When in the 1950’s this essential safety mechanism (I/O barrier) was re-invented, it couldn’t be patented because of Tesla’s patent 613,809: “Pioneering doesn’t pay.”
