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

pierce the surface of the ball several times and set tubes and plungers at each place the plungers in these will vibrate up and down in answer to every movement which I may produce in the plunger of the first tube. If I were to produce an explosion in the centre of the body of water in the ball, this would set up a series of vibrations in the whole body. If I could then set the plunger in one of the tubes to vibrating in consonance … in a little while and with the use of a very little energy I could burst the whole thing asunder.
    Nikola Tesla, explaining a global telegraph system
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    Back in New York, Tesla began developing Elisha Gray’s teleautography into telephotography. Edison then announced that he planned to launch the autographic telegraph, which would allow journalists to file their stories effortlessly, along with sketches and pictures. Tesla claimed his system could also work wirelessly, at a time when sending a Morse signal still had to be perfected.
    Tesla had studied a system developed in 1846 by Scottish physicist Alexander Bain (1810 – 77). It transmitted pictures using a grid of wires imbedded in wax under a sheet of chemically treated paper. The receiver used the same grid where an electric stylus drew the shape. Tesla found that it was better to break down the elements of the picture using one wire and a spinning disc. Dr Arthur Korn of the University of Munich, who transmitted a photograph in 1902, cited his debt to Tesla. These experiments were the basis of the fax machine and the television.
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    Connecting to the Earth’s Energy
    From what he read, Tesla began to suspect that Marconi was using clones of Tesla’s equipment in his experiments. After Sir William Preece had cancelled the test of Tesla’s equipment, Lloyds of London contacted Tesla and asked if he would rig up a ship-to-shore system for an international yacht race in 1896. Tesla high-handedly refused, fearing that his work would be confused with the amateurish efforts of others in the field.
    He then began secret experiments that he did not even tell his lab assistants about. He would set up his transmitter in East Houston Street, then take a battery-powered receiver up the Hudson River to West Point, a distance of some 50 miles. From there, he could tune in to the signal from the transmitter. He did this two or three times, he told a court in 1915.
    At the same time, he considered harnessing wind power, tidal power, solar energy and geothermal energy. Electricity could be used to electrolyze water, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen, whose explosive recombination would produce heat and steam. He patented a machine to produce ozone and worked out how to separate nitrogen out of air electrically. The farmer would simply shovel earth into the machine and switch it on. The current would drive out the oxygen and hydrogen, leaving the nitrogen to be absorbed in the soil which would emerge ready-fertilized.
    Over 4,000 people turned out to see his lecture on the advances he had made in the field of X-rays at the New York Academy of Science, though it is thought that they had hoped to see him hurling thunderbolts again. Then in an article in Scribner’s Magazine on Marconi’s successful transmission of a radio signal 8 miles (13 km), he outlined a system for transmitting messages instantly around the world using the telluric currents that run below the surface of the Earth. He also had plans to transmit signals through the ionized layers thought to exist in the upper atmosphere.
    While Tesla had done all the early development in radio, Marconi was preparing to transmit a signal across the English Channel. Once again Tesla had failed to exploit his own invention. Without the money to pursue his bigger projects, his pronouncements made him sound like a mad scientist. Brown and Peck were still earning thousands from his patents, while Westinghouse had joined forces with GE. Tesla’s induction motors and