Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah by Nigel Cawthorne

applications and control of electricity. Seldom has there been such a gathering of all the foremost electrical authorities of the day, on the tiptoe of expectation.
    At the end, he tantalizingly informed his listeners that he had showed them ‘but one-third of what he was prepared to do’. Consequently, the audience remained in their seats and he had to deliver a supplementary lecture. He then presented Lord Kelvin with one of his early experimental Tesla Coils which would be crucial in the development of wireless transmission.
    Tesla went on to wow French academicians with a lecture in Paris, before heading home to Gospic where he found his mother gravely ill. She died soon after. He later wrote: ‘The mother’s loss grips one’s head more powerfully than any other sad experience in life.’
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PART TWO: UNLIMITED POWERS

Chapter 5 – Father of the Wireless
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    A mass in movement resists change of direction. So does the world oppose a new idea. It takes time to make up the minds to its value and importance. Ignorance, prejudice and inertia of the old retard its early progress. It is discredited by insincere exponents and selfish exploiters. It is attacked and condemned by its enemies. Eventually, though, all barriers are thrown down, and it spreads like fire. This will also prove true of the wireless art.
    Nikola Tesla
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    While in Europe, Tesla visited the Ganz works in Budapest to see a 1000-volt alternator they were building. He also visited Belgrade where the Serbian King Alexander I conferred the special title of Grand Officer of the Order of St Sava on him and the Serbian poet Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj wrote a poem in tribute to him.
    On the return leg of his journey he went to Berlin to visit Hermann von Helmholtz , who developed the mathematics of electrodynamics, then went on to Bonn to see Heinrich Hertz , who was the first man to transmit and receive radio waves. Hertz had conducted his experiments with a simple sparking apparatus that could transmit radio waves across his lab. However, Hertz was a theoretical physicist who simply wanted to investigate the theories of James Clerk Maxwell , not an electrical engineer who wanted to put them to a practical use. Tesla had already duplicated Hertz’s experiments and, from them, developed the Tesla Coil which was capable of transmitting wirelessly over long distances.
    Hertz had sought to demonstrate that space was filled with a substance called ether, which was both inconceivably tenuous, yet extremely rigid. The reasoning was that, if light and other electromagnetic phenomena are waves, they must have something to propagate through. Tesla maintained that such a substance could not exist and the two men did not get on. In fact, the existence of Hertz’s ether had already been disproved experimentally by A.A. Michelson (1852 – 1931) in Germany in 1881 and, again, in collaboration with Edward Morley (1838 – 1923) in the US in 1887 .
    On board ship on the way back to the US, Tesla had one of his epiphanies. He was thinking about an experience he had while walking in the Alps. Observing an oncoming thunderstorm, he noticed that rain held off until the first flashes of lightning and wondered whether he could use electricity to control the weather.
    When Tesla arrived back in New York after his triumphal trip, he was greeted with a photograph of Edison signed: ‘To Tesla from Edison.’ Then Westinghouse dropped by with the news that they had won the contract to provide the power for the forthcoming 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
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    The Wireless Transmission of Power
    Hertz had conducted his experiments with a battery and a simple circuit interrupter, like a Morse key, connected to an induction coil – a small transformer – to produce a high-voltage spark. This could be detected using a copper loop with a spark gap.
    Tesla quickly realized that, instead of a battery with a circuit interrupter, it would