The World System of Power; "Wardenclyffe"
Shoreham, Long Island, New York
THE year 1900 marked to Tesla not only the opening of a new century but also the beginning of the world-superpower and radio-broadcasting era. With the encouragement of J. P. Morgan to spur him on, if he could accommodate any more spurring than his own inner drive furnished, and with $150,000 in cash from the same source, he was set to embark upon a gigantic venture, the building of Wardenclyffe Station, a world wireless-power and a world broadcasting station.
The cash on hand would be totally inadequate to finance the project to completion, but this did not deter him from making a start. He needed a laboratory both to replace the Houston Street establishment, which had become entirely inadequate, and to include equipment of the type employed at Colorado Springs, but designed for use in the actual world-broadcasting process. The location was determined as the result of an arrangement he made with James S. Warden, manager and director of the Suffolk County Land Company, a lawyer and banker from the West who had acquired two thousand acres of land at Shoreham, in Suffolk County, Long Island, about sixty miles from New York. The land was made the basis of a real-estate development under the name Wardenclyffe.
Tesla visualized a power-and-broadcasting station which would employ thousands of persons. He undertook the establishment, eventually, of a Radio City, something far more ambitious than the enterprise in Rockefeller Center in New York which bears this name today. Tesla planned to have all wavelength channels broadcast from a single station, a project which would have given him a complete monopoly of the radio-broadcasting business.
What an opportunity nearsighted businessmen of his day overlooked in not getting in on his project! But in that day Tesla was about the only one who visualized modern broadcasting.
Everyone else visualized wireless as being useful only for sending telegraphic communications between ship and shore and across the ocean. Mr. Warden saw possibilities of a sort in Tesla's plan, however, and offered him a tract of two hundred acres, of which twenty acres were cleared, for his power station, with the expectation that the two thousand men who would shortly be employed in the station would build homes on convenient sites in the remainder of the 2,000-acre tract. Tesla accepted.
Stanford White, the famous designer of many churches and other architectural monuments throughout the country, was one of Tesla's friends. He now disclosed to the famous architect his vision of an industrial "city beautiful'' and sought his cooperation in realizing his dream. Mr. White was enthusiastic about the idea and, as his contribution to Tesla's work, offered to underwrite the cost of designing the strange tower the inventor sketched, and all of the architectural work involved in the general plan for the city. The actual work was done by W. D. Crow, of East Orange, N. J., one of Mr. White's associates, who later became famous as a designer of hospitals and other institutional buildings.
It was a fantastic-looking tower, with strange structural limitations, which Mr. Crow found himself designing. Tesla required a tower, about 154 feet high, to support at its peak a giant copper electrode 100 feet in diameter and shaped like a gargantuan doughnut with a tubular diameter of twenty feet. (This was later changed to a hemispherical electrode.)
The tower would have to be a skeletonized structure, built almost entirely of wood, metal to be reduced to an utter minimum and any metal fixtures employed to be of copper. No engineering data were available on wood structures of this height and type. The structure Tesla required had a large amount of "sail area,'' or surface exposed to wind, concentrated at the top, creating stresses that had to be provided for in a tower that itself possessed only limited stability. Mr. Crow solved the engineering problems and then the equally difficult task of incorporating esthetic qualities in such an edifice.
When the design was completed another difficulty was encountered. None of the well-known builders could be induced to undertake the task of erecting the tower. A competent framer, associated with Norcross Bros., who were a large contracting firm in those days, finally took over the contract, although he, too, expressed fears that the winter gales might overturn the structure. (It stood, however, for a dozen years. When the Government, for military reasons decided it was necessary to remove this conspicuous landmark during the First World War, heavy charges of dynamite were necessary in order to topple it, and even then it remained intact on the ground like a fallen Martian invader out of Wells' "War of the Worlds.")
The tower was completed in 1902, and with it a large low brick building more than 100 feet square which would provide quarters for the powerhouse and laboratory. While the structures were being built, Tesla commuted every day from the Waldorf-Astoria to Wardenclyffe, arriving at the nearby Shoreham 
station shortly after eleven am and remaining until three-thirty. He was always accompanied by a man servant, a Serbian, who carried a heavy hamper filled with food. When the laboratory transferred from Houston Street was in full operation at Wardenclyffe, Tesla rented the Bailey cottage near the Long Island Sound shore and there made his home for a year.
The heavy equipment, the dynamos and motors, that Tesla desired for his plant were of an unusual design not produced by manufacturers, and he encountered many vexatious delays in securing such material. He was able to carry on a wide range of high-frequency current and other experiments in his new laboratory, but the principal project, that of setting up the worldwide broadcasting station, lagged. Meanwhile, he had a number of glass blowers making tubes for use in transmitting and receiving his broadcast programs. This was a dozen years before De Forest invented the form of radio tube now in general use. The secret of Tesla's tubes died with him.
Tesla seemed to be entirely fearless of his high-frequency currents of millions of volts. He had, nevertheless, the greatest respect for the electric current in all forms, and was extremely careful in working on his apparatus. When working on circuits that might come "alive,'' he always worked with one hand in his pocket, using the other to manipulate tools. He insisted that all of his workers do likewise when working on the 60-cycle low-frequency alternating-current circuits, whether the potential was 50,000 or 110 volts. This safeguard reduced the possibility of a dangerous current finding a circuit through the arms across the body, where there was chance that it might stop the action of the heart.
In spite of the great care which he manifested in all of his experimental work, he had a narrow escape from losing his life at the Wardenclyffe plant. He was making experiments on the properties of small-diameter jets of water moving at high velocity and under very high pressures, of the order of 10,000 pounds per square inch. Such a stream could be struck by a heavy iron bar without the stream being disrupted. The impinging bar would bounce back as if it had struck another solid iron bar...a strange property for a mechanically weak substance like water. The cylinder holding the water under high pressure was a heavy one made of wrought iron. (See Viktor Schauberger on this site, to find out why water behaves this way!)
Tesla was unable to secure a wrought-iron cap for the upper surface, so he used a heavier one of cast iron, a more brittle metal. One day when he raised the pressure to a point higher than he had previously used, the cylinder exploded. The cast-iron cap broke and a large fragment shot within a few inches of his face as it went on a slanting path upward and finally crashed through the roof. The high-pressure stream of water had peculiar destructive effects on anything with which it came in contact, even tough, strong metals. Tesla never revealed the purpose or the results of these high-pressure experiments.
Tesla's insistence on the utmost neatness in his laboratory (interior view - right) almost resulted in a tragedy through a case of thoughtlessness on the part of an assistant. Arrangements were being made for installing a heavy piece of machinery which was to be lag bolted to the thick concrete floor. Holes had been drilled in the concrete. The plan called for pouring molten lead into these holes and screwing the heavy bolts into the metal when it cooled. As soon as the holes were drilled, a young assistant starting cleaning up the debris. He not only swept up the stone chips and dust: he got a mop and thoroughly washed that area of the floor, thoughtlessly letting some of the water get into the holes. He then dried the floor. In the meantime Tesla and George Scherff, who was his financial secretary but also served in any way in which he could be helpful, were melting the lead which would hold the lag screws in the holes in the floor. Scherff took the first large ladleful of lead from the furnace and started across the laboratory to where the holes had been drilled, followed shortly by Tesla bearing another ladle.
Scherff bent down, and as he poured the hot liquid metal into one of the holes an explosion followed instantly. The molten lead was blown upward into his face in a shower of searing hot drops of liquid metal. The water which the assistant used to swab the floor had settled into the holes and, when the melted lead come in contact with it, it was changed to steam which shot the lead out of the hole like a bullet out of the barrel of a riffle. Both men were showered with drops of hot metal and dropped their ladles. Tesla, being several feet away, was only slightly injured; but Scherff was very seriously burned about the face and hands. Drops of the metal had struck his eyes and so severely burned them that it was feared for a while that his sight could not be saved. However, despite the almost unlimited possibilities for accidents in connection with the vast variety of experiments which Tesla conducted in totally unexplored fields, using high voltages, high amperages, high pressures, high velocities and high temperatures, he went through his entire career with only one accident in which he suffered injury.
In that a sharp instrument slipped, entered his palm and penetrated through the hand. The accident to Scherff was the only one in which a member of his staff was injured, with the exception of a young assistant who developed X-ray burns. He had probably been exposed to the rays from one of Tesla's tubes which, unknown to Tesla and everyone else, had been producing them even before Roentgen announced their discovery. Tesla had given them another name and had not fully investigated their properties. This was probably the first case of X-ray burns on record.
Tesla was an indefatigable worker, and it was hard for him to understand why others were incapable of such feats of endurance as he was able to accomplish. He was willing to pay unusually high wages to workers who were willing to stick with him on protracted tasks but never demanded that anyone work beyond a reasonable day's labor. On one occasion a piece of long-awaited equipment arrived and Tesla was anxious to get it installed and operating as quickly as possible. The electricians worked through twenty-four hours, stopping only for meals, and then for another twenty-four hours. The workers then dropped out, one by one, picking out nooks in the building in which to sleep. While they took from eight to twelve hours' sleep, Tesla continued to work; and when they came back to the job Tesla was still going strong and worked with them through his third sleepless twenty-four-hour period. The men were then given several days off in which to rest up; but Tesla, apparently none the worse for his seventy-two hours of toil, went through his next day of experiments, accomplishing a total of eighty-four hours without sleep or rest.
The plant at Wardenclyffe was intended primarily for demonstrating the radio-broadcasting phase of his "World System''; the power-distribution station was to be built at Niagara Falls. Tesla at this time published a brochure on his "World System'' which indicates the remarkable state of advancement he had projected in the wireless art, now called radio, while other experimenters were struggling to acquire familiarity with rudimentary devices. At that time, however, his promises seemed fantastic. The brochure contained the following description of his system and his objectives:
"The World System has resulted from a combination of several original discoveries made by the inventor in the course of long continued research and experimentation. It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the interconnection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here many call up any other subscriber on the Globe. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered, or music played in some other place, however distant."
"These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line wire. One far reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated through one or more wires (at a distance obviously restricted) can likewise be actuated, without artificial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the Globe. Thus, not only will entirely new fields for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission, but the old ones vastly extended."
While at work on his Wardenclyffe radio-broadcasting plant, Tesla was also evolving plans for establishing his world power station at Niagara Falls. So sure was he of the successful outcome of his efforts that he stated in a newspaper interview in 1903 that he would light the lamps of the coming international exposition in Paris with power wirelessly transmitted from the Falls. Circumstances, however, prevented him from making good this promise. His difficulties and his plans were outlined in a statement published in the Electrical World and Engineer, March 5, 1904: (Below) Compliments: Gary Peterson of 21st Century Books, http://www.tfcbooks.com ; used by permission.
Read much more on this subject in the book - "Nikola Tesla; Journey To Mars: Are We Already There?!" below -
