"Not to stagger on being shown through the laboratory of Nikola Tesla," McGovern would later recall, "requires the possession of an uncommonly sturdy mind...
"Fancy yourself seated in a large, well-lighted room, with mountains of curious-looking machinery on all sides. A tall, thin young man walks up to you, and by merely snapping his fingers creates instantaneously a ball of leaping red flame, and holds it calmly in his hands. As you gaze you are surprised to see it does not burn his fingers. He lets it fall upon his clothing, on his hair, into your lap, and, finally, puts the ball of flame into a wooden box. You are amazed to see that nowhere does the flame leave the slightest trace, and you rub your eyes to make sure you are not asleep."
If McGovern was baffled by Tesla's fireball, he was at least not alone. None of his contemporaries could explain how Tesla produced this oft-repeated effect, and no one can explain it today.
One day in 1898 while testing a tiny electromechanical oscillator, he attached it with innocent intent to an iron pillar that went down through the center of his loft building at 46 East Houston Street, to the sandy floor of the basement.
Flipping on the switch, he settled into a straight-backed chair to watch and make notes of everything that happened. Such machines always fascinated him because, as the tempo built higher and higher, they would establish resonance with first one object in his workshop and then another. For example, a piece of equipment or furniture would suddenly begin to shimmy and dance. As he stepped up the frequency, it would halt but another more in tune would take up the frantic jig and, later on, yet another.
What Tesla was unaware of on this occasion was that vibrations from the oscillator, traveling down the iron pillar with escalating force, were being carried through the substructure of Manhattan in all directions. (Normally earthquakes are more severe at a distance from their epicenter.) Buildings began to shake, windows shattered, and citizens poured onto the streets in the nearby Italian and Chinese neighborhoods.
At Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street, where Tesla was already regarded with suspicion, it soon became apparent that no other part of the city was having an earthquake. Two officers were dispatched posthaste to check on the mad inventor. The latter, unaware of the shambles occurring all around his building, had just begun to sense an ominous vibration in the floor and walls. Knowing that he must quickly put a stop to it, he seized a sledgehammer and smashed the little oscillator in a single blow.
With perfect timing the two policemen rushed through the door, allowing him to turn with a courteous nod.
"Gentlemen, I am sorry," he said. "You are just a trifle too late to witness my experiment. I found it necessary to stop it suddenly and unexpectedly and in an unusual way... However, if you will come around this evening I will have another oscillator attached to this platform and each of you can stand on it. You will, I am sure, find it a most interesting and pleasurable experience. Now you must leave, for I have many things to do. Good day, gentlemen."
When reporters arrived, he blandly told them that he could destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in a matter of minutes if he felt like it.
Tesla, long before anyone else, published in
Electrical World and Engineer (March 5, 1904) what has always stood out as the clearest statement by any pioneer working in the wireless art
of what radio was to become and as we know it today. He envisioned the entire concept of transmission of intelligence, not just the sending of a single message from one point to another -- and he alone of the pioneers in radio did so.
Tesla said his "World Telegraphy constitutes, I believe, in its principle of operation, means employed and capacities of application, a radical and fruitful departure from what has been done heretofore. I have no doubt that it will prove very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries and less accessible regions, and that it will add materially to general safety, comfort, and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization, and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one's pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world's news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horse-power can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence."
Scherff wrote that creditors were "hounding me hard," and that the illness of his wife had put him in debt. He hoped Tesla would make some payment on his loans. The inventor loftily responded, "Please do not give way to bitterness. You know that the experiences you have had were unusual and that while they have not benefited you materially to a great extent, they have been the means of developing the good that is in you..."
Tesla said that he was deeply religious, although not in the orthodox meaning of the word, and gave himself "to the constant enjoyment of believing that the greatest mysteries of our being are still to be fathomed and that, all the evidence of the senses and the teachings of exact and dry sciences to the contrary notwithstanding, death itself may not be the termination of the wonderful metamorphoses we witness."
"Mr. Tesla looked up at the [library] windows, which are fenced with the iron bars, that some pigeons did not fall down somewhere and got freezed," he [Dragislav Petkovic] recalled. "In one corner he spotted one which was halfway frozen. He told me to stay here and watch that the cat does not come to get him while he look up for others. While I was watching, I tried to reach the pigeon, but could not do it because the bars were so close to one another. When Mr. Tesla returned, he quickly bended and pulled him out.
"'All things from childhood are still dear to me,'" he told Petkovic, as he began to pat the almost frozen pigeon, assuring it that it would recover.
"Then," said Petkovic, "he took the package from my hand and started throwing the food all around in front of the library. When he distributed the food he told me: 'These are my sincere friends.'"
In his desk in New York lay a letter, some years old, from Katharine Johnson, one of the last that was kept, or perhaps written, by her to her "ever silent friend." She had gone to Maine without her children or husband for part of the summer.
"I came here a month ago, quite alone," she wrote, "to this hotel full, but empty for me, since it is a strange world. Here, I am as detached as if nothing belonged to me but memory. At times I am filled with sadness and long for that which is not -- just as intensely as I did when a young girl and I listened to the waves of the sea, which is still unknown, and still beating about me. ... I do not know why I am so sad, but I feel as if everything in life had slipped from me."
[Kenneth M.] Swezey, on meeting the inventor for the first time in 1929, ... was surprised to discover (as he wrote) "a tall skinny man of upright posture" who might go about for hours in a daze of concentration, but who also had a side intensely human and "almost painfully sensitive with fellow-feeling for everything that lives."
The strange tale of the white pigeon was told by the inventor to O'Neill and William L. Laurence, science writer for the New York
Times...
"I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years," he said. "Thousands of them, for who can tell--.
"But there was one pigeon, a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I would know that pigeon anywhere.
"No matter where I was that pigeon would find me; when I wanted her I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. She understood me and I understood her.
"I loved that pigeon.
"Yes, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.
"Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her.
"As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me -- she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes -- powerful beams of light."
Tesla paused and then, as if in response to an unasked question from the science writers, continued.
"Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.
"When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life's work was finished.
"Yes, I have fed pigeons for years; I continue to feed them, thousands of them, for after all, who can tell--".
-- Margaret Cheney