Nikola Tesla: The Guy Who DIDN'T "Invent Radio"

Thomas H. White -- November 1, 2012

It can be intimidating -- the assertion that it is a "settled fact" that "Nikola Tesla
was the real inventor of radio". Below are some thoughts about this all too widely
believed myth.

Question: Shouldn't Nikola Don't try this at home!

Tesla be considered the
"inventor of radio", given that
in 1943 the United States
Supreme Court (supposedly)
overturned all of Guglielmo
Marconi's patents and
proclaimed Tesla "the true
inventor"?

Gut Reaction: Are you

joking??? In no way, shape or
form can this guy be considered
the "inventor of radio". I call this the "Dum-de-dum! Look at me, Nikola Tesla, calmly
Furthermore, contrary to what sitting amidst the big sparks from my big spark machine"
photograph. Although the sparks (circa 1899) are real, widely
you might have read, the U.S. distributed photographs like this were essentially fakes -- the
Supreme Court never said that polite description is that the photograph is "a composite" --
he was -- not in 1943, not in any because Tesla's image was added separately. Actually sitting
this close to huge sparks risked a medical condition known as
other year. If fact, if anything "death". I do not know why Tesla decided he needed to
Tesla's "contribution" was to embellish the picture and issue it to an unsuspecting public. But
confuse and slow radio tricks like this helped convert his reputation from legitimate
experimenter to publicity-hungry showman. (One performer
development, due to his inspired by Tesla was Electrice, the Girl Who Defies
misunderstanding of the physics Electricity).
involved. Fortunately, at the
time few people were listening to his misguided and exaggerated "true wireless"
ramblings.

A More Dignified Response: A fuller answer is that although Tesla did do

groundbreaking research in early electrical systems, most importantly wired power
transmission using alternating current, his contributions to radio technology were
minimal, overshadowed by the far more important practical work conducted by
other inventors and scientists, including Heinrich Hertz, Oliver Lodge, Guglielmo
Marconi, Karl Braun -- the latter two shared the Nobel prize for physics in 1909 --
Reginald Fessenden and John Stone Stone. And about that 1943 Supreme Court

1
ruling -- Marconi Wireless Tel. Co. v. United States - 320 U.S. 1 -- this case
actually did NOT even try to determine "who invented radio". Instead, it just set
governmental compensation for the use of patents primarily during World War One
-- not the original patents covering radio transmission and reception, but ones
covering later improvements. One of these improvements was using an adjustable
"four-circuit" transformer configuration for radio transmission and reception. And
in this matter, the U.S. counterpart to Marconi's original British "four sevens"
tuning patent was in fact invalidated. But, instead of awarding priority to Tesla, the
court actually upheld a 1935 lower court ruling that Oliver Lodge's -- and
especially John Stone Stone's -- earlier work and patents had priority. So, to recap,
the 1943 decision didn't overturn Marconi's original patents, or his reputation as the
first person to develop practical radiotelegraphic communication. It just said that
the adoption of adjustable transformers in the transmitting and receiving circuits,
which was an improvement of the initial invention, was fully anticipated by patents
issued to Oliver Lodge and John Stone Stone. (This decision wasn't unanimous, but
the dissents sided not with Tesla, but with Marconi.)

In fact, it is bizarre to even claim Tesla "invented radio", since, as described below,
at least through 1919 he didn't even believe that radio waves existed, or that any
form of what he called "longitudinal space waves" could be used for long-distance
communication. Instead, he had his own unworkable idea of what constituted "the
true wireless", believing that alternating electrical currents somehow could be
injected into the ground to provide, not just communication, but also electrical
power "around the world".

Interesting Trivia: The syllabus at the beginning of the 1943 U.S. Supreme Court
decision provides a summary of the ruling. There are thirteen sections. None
mentions Tesla.

About that 1943 U.S. Supreme Court Decision

To repeat, the 1943 Supreme

Court case never made any sort
of ruling as to "who invented
radio", nor did it ever intend to.
Instead, it was a financial
compensation case, covering
later technical improvements
which were patented a few
years after Marconi had first
demonstrated long-distance
radiotelegraphic
communication.
2
During World War One, in order to support the war effort, the U.S. government
knowingly infringed on numerous radio patents, while promising to provide
compensation after the conclusion of the conflict. After the war ended, an
Interdepartmental Radio Board was formed to provide advice -- included in the
outstanding legal tangles was an American Marconi suit filed July 29, 1916. On
May 31, 1921, a Board report recommended awards totaling $2,869,700.27 to
fourteen firms, including $1,253,389.02 for four patents (pared down from the
initial claim of 350) that had been controlled by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph
Co. of America. (Neither Tesla nor John Stone Stone were included in this
recommendation -- this background information is provided by The Navy and the
Patent Situation chapter of Captain Linwood S. Howeth's History of
Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy). However, the U.S.
Congress declined to follow the board's recommendation, and instead told the
affected companies and individuals they would have to follow the normal
procedure of suing the U.S. government for damages, through the Court of Claims.

In 1919, most of American Marconi's assets had been sold to General Electric,
which used them to form the Radio Corporation of America. But, hoping for a
million dollar windfall, the stockholders of American Marconi pressed forward
with a lawsuit, primarily for compensation for the infringement of patent No.
763,772, which was the U.S. version of Marconi's British "four sevens" tuning
patent. The Marconi company had a long history of winning similar suits, both in
the U.S. and other countries. In particular, in 1914 the company had won an
important case against the National Electric Signaling Company, as a District court
upheld both Marconi's original U.S. radio patent and his later tuning patent. (That
ruling found Tesla's activities to be unrelated to radio communication, declaring
that "in 1893 Tesla reverted to the impracticable scheme of electrostatic induction".
A period example of this was an 1897 Electrical Review report, which noted that
Tesla proposed to signal for long distances by varying the planet's "electrostatic
equilibrium").

But one consistent pattern with these legal entanglements was they had ignored a
tuning patent, No. 714,756, issued to John Stone Stone in 1900, prior to Marconi's
tuning patent, apparently because individuals claiming they weren't infringing
Marconi's patent didn't see any advantage in saying they were really infringing
Stone's.

Irony Alert: Stone testified as an expert witness in a number of early patent

infringement cases, some of which included tuning, but was never called upon to
discuss his own tuning patent. Stone had organized one of the first radio
companies, and assigned his patents to it. However, after a small number of
installations, primarily for the U.S. Navy, the company went bankrupt, and in 1913
its assets went into receivership, to be sold to compensate the bondholders, so there
never had been any organized corporate defense of the Stone tuning patent. Double
3
Irony Alert: While Stone's company was active, it adopted a receiver design that
blatantly infringed Fessenden's electrolytic patent, so perhaps that was an extra
incentive not to stir up the legal system.

In 1915, American Marconi had sued the Atlantic Communications Company for
patent infringement -- this suit incidentally pitted Marconi against his 1909 Nobel
prize co-winner Karl Braun. And for the first time Stone joined the legal fray, in
support of the defense, in order to promote his own tuning patent. It is likely a
decision would have resulted in the court recognition that he wouldn't get until
1935. However, the outbreak of World War One in Europe caused the case to be
suspended as Marconi returned to his native Italy to support the Allied cause. Later,
the United States entered the war on the Allied side, and the government seized the
Atlantic Communications Company assets as enemy (German) property, so this
legal case was never concluded.

In the Court of Claims compensation case (this was the case reviewed in 1943 by
the Supreme Court), the U.S. government brought up Stone's largely forgotten
patent in its defense, and in 1935 the court upheld the contention that the Stone
patent had priority over Marconi's. (According to his biographer, a gratified Stone
wrote that "the Court of Claims had declared him to be the inventor of coupling,
and as letters of his at the time show, he took this for permanent acclaim".) The
American Marconi side -- stubborn to the end and not used to losing -- appealed
this decision, but eight years later the Supreme Court came to the same conclusion.

Since this was a patent case, the opinions make for complex reading. But, overall,
the Marconi plaintiffs fared badly with the Supreme Court's decision. They were
denied any compensation for Fleming's two-element vacuum-tube patent, because
the court ruled it had been improperly granted, thus was invalid. In addition,
sustaining the 1935 decision by the Court of Claims, the court ruled against the
Marconi side on almost all of the claims for Marconi's tuning patent. Again, there
are two important facts to remember about the 1943 ruling -- the case was not about
Marconi's initial invention of a practical system of radiotelegraphy, but instead
covered a later refinement -- variable four-circuit tuning. And although Marconi's
tuning patent was overturned, it was not because of Tesla, but because of Stone's
and Lodge's priority.

The idea that somehow this case was "a great victory for Tesla" ignores clear and
definitive statements in the ruling to the contrary. For example, from Justice
Frankfurter's dissenting opinion on the tuning patent, which sided with Marconi
(but NOT Tesla):

The inescapable fact is that Marconi in his basic patent hit upon something that
had eluded the best brains of the time working on the problem of wireless
communication--Clerk Maxwell and Sir Oliver Lodge and Nikola Tesla.

4
 Genius is a word that ought to be reserved for the rarest of gifts. I am not
qualified to say whether Marconi was a genius. Certainly the great eminence of
Clerk Maxwell and Sir Oliver Lodge and Nikola Tesla [320 U.S. 1, 63] in the
field in which Marconi was working is not questioned. They were, I suppose,
men of genius. The fact is that they did not have the 'flash' (a current term in
patent opinions happily not used in this decision) that begot the idea in Marconi
which he gave to the world through the invention embodying the idea. ... And
yet, because a judge of unusual capacity for understanding scientific matters is
able to demonstrate by a process of intricate ratiocination that anyone could
have drawn precisely the inferences that Marconi drew and that Stone hinted at
on paper, the Court finds that Marconi's patent was invalid although nobody
except Marconi did in fact draw the right inferences that were embodied into a
workable boon for mankind. For me, it speaks volumes that it should have
taken forty years to reveal the fatal bearing of Stone's relation to Marconi's
achievement by a retrospective reading of his application to mean this, rather
than that.

However, the majority opinion found priority for Stone and Lodge (again, NOT
Tesla):

Marconi's reputation as the man who first achieved successful radio

transmission rests on his original patent, which became reissue No. 11,913, and
which is not here in question. That reputation, however well deserved, does not
entitle him to a patent for every later improvement which he claims in the radio
field. Patent cases, like others, must be decided not by weighing the reputations
of the litigations, but by careful study of the merits of their respective
contentions and proofs. As the result of such a study, we are forced to conclude,
without undertaking to determine whether Stone's patent involved invention,
that the Court of Claims was right in deciding that Stone anticipated Marconi,
and that Marconi's patent did not disclose invention over Stone.

[Footnote 18] It is not without significance that Marconi's application was at

one time rejected by the Patent Office because anticipated by Stone, and was
ultimately allowed, on renewal of his application, on the sole ground that
Marconi showed the use of a variable inductance as a means of tuning the
antenna circuits, whereas Stone, in the opinion of the Examiner, tuned his
antenna circuits by adjusting the length of the aerial conductor. All of Marconi's
claims which included that element were allowed, and the Examiner stated that
the remaining claims would be allowed if amended to include a variable
inductance. Apparently through oversight, Claims 10 and 11, which failed to
include that element were included in the patent as granted. In allowing these
claims the Examiner made no reference to Lodge's prior disclosure of a variable
inductance in the antenna circuit.

Marconi's patent No. 763,772 was sustained by a United States District Court in
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. v. National Signaling Co., 213 F. 815, and his
invention as specified in his corresponding British patent No. 7777 of 1900,
was upheld in Marconi v. British Radio & Telegraph Co., 27 T.L.R. 274, 28

5
 R.P.C. 18. The French court likewise sustained his French patent, Civil
Tribunal of the Seine, Dec. 24, 1912. None of these courts considered the Stone
patent or his letters. All rest their findings of invention on Marconi's disclosure
of a four-circuit system and on his tuning of the four circuits, in the sense of
rendering them resonant to the same frequency, in both of which respects Stone
anticipated Marconi, as we have seen. None of these opinions suggests that, if
the courts had known of Stone's anticipation, they would have held that
Marconi showed invention over Stone by making the tuning of his antenna
circuit adjustable, or by using Lodge's variable inductance for that purpose.

As far as I can tell, claims that the 1943 Supreme Court case in some way declared
Tesla to be "the inventor of radio" didn't start to appear until the next decade -- I
have not found any contemporary reviews of the ruling which even remotely
suggested that the case was seen as a major recognition of Tesla, or that it
"overturned all of Marconi's patents". And, frankly, I don't have the slightest idea
how anyone could interpret this case as doing anything more than reviewing Tesla's
work while discussing the history of electrical tuning prior to the development of
radio communication. The closest analogy I can think of would be claiming that in
the case of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court ruled that Pat Buchanan had been
elected President of the United States. Yes, he was mentioned. No, he was not the
victor.

Irony Alert: In 1944, John J. O'Neill published the comprehensive and extremely
laudatory Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla. However, the author doesn't
mention the 1943 Supreme Court case and doesn't claim that any court had
proclaimed Tesla to be "the inventor of radio". In fact -- after inaccurately
describing Tesla's work as "radio" and overstating its applicability to modern
communications systems -- he even laments that "The system invented and
discovered by Tesla is the one in use today; but who ever heard anyone giving
Tesla the slightest credit?"

In marked contrast, there were contemporary references that John Stone Stone had
finally received the recognition he had long deserved for his tuning patent. For
example, a tribute by Lee De Forest that appeared shortly after Stone's death
included the following:

By the irony of fate Stone's death occurred less than one month before the
Supreme Court of the United States, in a historic decision handed down June
21, 1943, announced the invalidity of the once famed "four-tuned circuits"
patent of Marconi.
In view of the court's sweeping decision, concurred in by all but two Judges,
it is indeed to be regretted that John Stone could not have lived to witness this
long-belated official recognition of his well-merited claim to have preceded
Marconi in this all-important invention, so vital to radio communication. -- Lee

6
 De Forest, Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, September, 1943,
page 522.

(Tesla's obituary, in the May, 1943 issue of the same journal, far from declaring
him the "inventor of radio", instead diplomatically noted that his "theory of the
transmission of radio-frequency energy is at variance with that now accepted".
Meanwhile, the February, 1943 Power Plant Engineering commented "His obituary
notices in the newspapers referred to him as the 'electrical genius who discovered
the fundamental principle of modern radio.' As a matter of fact this is not true. Poor
old Tesla had very little to do with the discoveries of the fundamentals of radio, but
in his early days he experimented with the production of high frequency currents
and because his oscillation transformer, generally known as the Tesla coil,
produced spectacular effects, he became known as a wizard. A legend developed
about him which was kept alive by the imaginations of newspaper men. ... In his
development of the Tesla coil, Nikola Tesla produced a device which produced
extremely high voltage high-frequency currents and these produced startling
effects. Apparatus of this kind was seen in electrical and physics laboratories for
many years, but it never served any really useful purpose.")

A short time after the Supreme Court ruling was issued, Orrin E. Dunlap
compiled Radio's 100 Men of Science, providing "Biographical Narratives of
Pathfinders in Electronics and Television". Apparently unaware that the Supreme
Court had supposedly recognized Tesla's priority, Marconi's entry is titled
"Inventor of Wireless". (John Stone Stone's section is "Sharpened the Wireless
Tuners", while Tesla's gets the more nebulous title of "Genius Was Applicable to
Him".) The only reference in the biographical sections to the 1943 case appears as a
footnote in the Marconi review, and it documents John Stone Stone's recent
recognition:

Supreme Court of the United States on June 21, 1943, delivered an opinion in
the case of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America vs. the
United States invalidating Marconi's American patent No. 763,772 on four-
circuit tuning. The Court based its decision largely on finding that John Stone
Stone's patent, applied for February 8, 1900, was nine months prior to
Marconi's application for his American patent that covered tuning. Stone's
patent was allowed February 2, 1902. Marconi's was granted June 28, 1904. It
was the equivalent of his famous British patent No. 7,777 on tuning granted
April 26, 1900. -- Orrin E. Dunlap, Radio's 100 Men of Science, 1944, page
175.

In 1946, Donald McNicol (previous president of the Institute of Radio Engineers)

published Radio's Conquest of Space, reviewing "The Experimental Rise in Radio
Communication". Not only did he not credit Tesla as radio's inventor, he even went
so far as to say:

7
 It has already been stated that one of the books read by Marconi in 1894 or
1895, when he was twenty years of age and seeking knowledge of high-
frequency electric phenomena, was a book by Martin [The Inventions,
Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla] dealing with Tesla's researches in
America. A search through this work to locate text that might have been of
value or suggestive to Marconi does not bring to light anything which could
have been of value or suggestive to the young Italian if he was thinking of
wireless signalling. ...
There is no escaping the conclusion that Tesla had not fully grasped the main
point of Maxwell's message. ...
Tesla's conception of the direction which "wireless" research should take is
hinged upon this 1893 pronouncement with respect to "disturbing" the electrical
conditions of the earth, and it was this dominant idea which drove him to the
spectacular experiments carried on by means of Brobdingnagian towers erected
at great expense on Long Island, New York, and on Pike's Peak, Colorado. At
great expense, it was said, to a venturesome captain of industry. So far as
practical results are of interest this series of experiments proved unprofitable. --
Donald McNicol, Radio's Conquest of Space, 1946, pages 43, 54, 55-56.

To expand on McNicol's comments, he wasn't saying that Tesla hadn't done

valuable work, just that it wasn't applicable to Marconi's original radiotelegraph
system. It is sometimes misstated that Marconi's early equipment -- a simple spark-
gap transmitter and coherer receiver -- was heavily influenced by, or even a direct
copy, of Tesla. But Marconi's original transmitter was clearly based on Hertz's
basic design using a Rhumkorf spark coil, as improved upon by Augusto Righi, and
the coherer receiver in turn was an improved version of Edouard Branley's. Besides
being wrong, this is something of an insult to Tesla, since at the time he was
designing sophisticated industrial electrical power equipment, while Marconi was
essentially a tinkerer using homemade devices. (For example, in Figure 11 of "The
True Wireless", Tesla himself contrasted Marconi's original simple radiotelegraph
equipment ("Hertz Wave System") with his own patent ("Tuned Wireless System")
for proposed ground-current power transmission. In fact, after Marconi applied for
his first patent issued in Britain in June, 1896, the controversy was actually over
how similar his equipment was to that demonstrated by Oliver Lodge in 1894). But,
primitive as it was, it was Marconi who made history, by showing that radio signals
could be used for long-range wireless communication.

In 1946, radio engineer George H. Clark published a biography of The Life of John
Stone Stone. (Clark was a radio historian, whose collection of materials comprise
the bulk of the Radioana collection located at the Smithsonian Institution's
Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.) Clark certainly had no
doubts about the 1943 ruling being recognition of John Stone Stone. In a chapter
titled "Vindication", he wrote:

The U.S. Court of Claims declared the Marconi patent invalid, and having

8
 been anticipated by Stone's patent No. 714,756. One claim was excepted, on a
matter not pertinent to this story. The United States Supreme Court, to which
this case was appealed, upheld this finding in its decision of June 21, 1943...
And thus, after forty-one years, when the Stone Company had been long
forgotten and after the gallant patentee himself had gone to eternal rest, his
patent came to life again, and vindicated the high vision of it's creator. --
George H. Clark, The Life of John Stone Stone, 1946, pages 131-132.

In his 1950 autobiography, Father of Radio, Lee DeForest again reviewed the 1943
Supreme Court case. Although he mentions Tesla in passing when reviewing the
tuning decision, he clearly thought that Stone's work had been found to be far more
important than Tesla's:

By the irony of fate Stone's death occurred less than one month before the
Supreme Court of the United States, in a historic, decision handed down June
21, 1943, announced the invalidity of the once famed "four-tuned circuits"
patent of Marconi. This was the Marconi patent that almost stopped the
American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Co. in 1905. The belated decision was
therefore especially interesting and gratifying to me.
In coming to its decision, the Court laid especial emphasis on the early work
of Stone and Tesla, particularly the Stone patent No. 714,756, applied for nine
months prior to Marconi's and allowed February 2, 1902, a year and a half
before the grant of Marconi's patent. This, the Court said, "showed a four-
circuit wireless telegraph apparatus substantially like that later specified and
patented by Marconi. It described adjustable tuning of the closed circuits of
both transmitter and receiver, with antenna circuits so constructed as to be
resonant to the same frequencies as the closed circuits."
The Court points out Stone's emphasis on "loose coupling," the first in the art
so to do. Quoting freely from the Stone patent, the Court adds -- "These
statements sufficiently indicate Stone's broad purpose of providing a high
degree of tuning at sending and receiving stations," and "Stone's full
appreciation of the value of making all of his circuits resonant to the same
frequency. Stone showed tuning of the antenna circuits before Marconi, and if
this involved invention, Stone was the first inventor." -- Lee DeForest, Father
of Radio, 1950, pages 456-457.

The most famous radio engineer in the period from the late 1910s through the mid-
1950s was Edwin Howard Armstrong, best known for the development of the
superheterodyne receiver and FM radio, among many other achievements. And he
had no doubt about Marconi's priority in the initial development of radiotelegraphy:

Had Marconi been more of a scientist and less of a discoverer, he might have
concluded that his critics were right, and stopped where he was. But like all the
discoverers who have pushed forward the frontiers of human knowledge, he
refused to be bound by other men's reasoning. He went on with his
experiments; and he discovered how, by attaching his transmitted waves to the

9
 surface of the earth, he could prevent them from traveling in straight lines, and
make them slide over the horizon so effectively that in time they joined the
continents of the world. Several years were to pass before agreement was
reached on the nature of Marconi's great discovery, though Marconi himself
understood very well how to apply it and to employ it usefully; and it proved to
be the foundation upon which the practical art of wireless signaling was built.
Marconi's claim to the invention of wireless telegraphy is beyond challenge.
-- Edwin Howard Armstrong, Wrong Roads and Missed Chances, 1951,
reprinted in The Legacies of Edwin Howard Armstrong, page 289.

(In an obituary which appeared in the April, 1943 The Scientific Monthly,
Armstrong noted that Tesla had met with failure due to "following an erroneous
theory" to "disturb 'the charges of the earth'", compounded by the fact that he
failed to conduct further experiments which "might well have led to the
discoveries which later were made by Marconi".)

Okay then, what about this century? Surely by now everyone "knows" that it was
Tesla who invented radio, right? Well, in Sungook Hong's historical
review, Wireless: From Marconi's Black Box to the Audion, published by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press in 2001, the author was unconvinced:

In the US, Tesla undoubtedly thought about possible ways of using rapid
oscillation for signaling in the early 1890s. Tesla's admirers claim that Tesla
demonstrated message transmission by means of Hertzian waves for the first
time in 1893 in his St. Louis lecture. This claim is, however, not supported by
any direct evidence, and the fact that Tesla used a Geissler tube as a detector
(how could one effectively detect Morse-coded signals with the Geissler tube?)
strongly weakens the claim. In addition, his ideas about how signals are
communicated through space were similar to earth-conductive (wireless)
telephony, rather than Hertzian wireless telegraphy. For the Tesla-first claim,
see Cheney [Tesla: Man Out of Time 1981], pp. 68-69. Compare Cheney's
claim with Tesla's original, unclear ideas (Tesla 1894 [The Inventions,
Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla], esp. pp. 346-349). See also
Anderson [Priority in the Invention of Radio: Tesla vs. Marconi] 1980. --
Sungook Hong, Wireless, 2001, page 199.

That same year, Professor of Electrical Engineering Paul J. Nahin was even more
emphatic in his book, writing in a sidebar of The Science of Radio:

One other person whose name is occasionally put forth as the inventor of
radio is Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who was born in Croatia and later became a
naturalized American citizen. Tesla's was an intuitive, erratic personality, and
his rightful fame among electrical engineers is for the discovery of the rotating
magnetic field principle behind the synchronous ac induction motor. He was
also a force in the early development of multi-phase ac power distribution. The
unit of magnetic flux density is named after him. Others, however, not satisfied
with Tesla's true achievements, find it necessary to claim he did all sorts of

10
 other things as well (which, curiously, not even the full scientific might of the
Pentagon can duplicate, such as Tesla's famous 1934 'radio death ray' that he
said could destroy 10,000 planes 250 miles away and annihilate, in an instant,
an army of 1,000,000). It seems more likely that Tesla, unable to repeat his
early triumphs, looked for other ways to get back into the limelight he so
coveted; he began to make astonishing claims to wealthy potential patrons who,
knowing next to nothing of science, could be easily dazzled. One of these
claims was that he had "invented radio." Tesla was, without question, very
skillful at generating large, noisy sparks with the aid of step-up transformers
tuned to resonance (the famous Tesla coil) and he seems to have really believed
that, since Marconi used sparks in his wireless work, then he too must be a
wireless pioneer. There is, however, not a shred of credible evidence that Tesla
did anything more than just talk about radio (in 1901, for example, he claimed
that two years before he had received radio signals from Mars), and nothing in
the historical record supports his grandiose claims. It is clear, in fact, from what
he did write, that Tesla actually had only the slightest (if that) understanding of
electromagnetic radio physics; he claimed, for example, that "his" electric
waves were both immune to the inverse-square law and that they traveled faster
than light. Tesla does appear to have sincerely believed his own outrageous
statements; he lived in a delusional world of self-aggrandizement that became
increasingly cut off from reality. His only human joy seems to have been
feeding the pigeons of New York City, where he died in a hotel room a lonely,
bitter man. Modern biographers of Tesla (none of whom have any technical
training) continue to muddy the historical record, however, and so let me be
quite clear Tesla did not invent radio, although his flowery talk about it no
doubt inspired many youngsters at the start of the twentieth century to become
interested in "the new wireless." -- Paul J. Nahin, The Science of Radio, 2001,
pages 9-10.

Even today, the National Inventors Hall of Fame is under the impression that
"Marconi's radio was the first to demonstrate workable wireless radio
communication." And the National Association of Broadcasters annually
recognizes outstanding achievements with Marconi Awards.

Interesting Trivia: John Stone Stone admired Nikola Tesla -- reviewing Tesla's
early work with high-frequency currents, he testified that Tesla's investigation of
"alternating current phenomena... did more to excite interest and create an
intelligent understanding of these phenomena in the years 1891-92-93 than anyone
else". In turn, Tesla admired John Stone Stone, stating at his acceptance of the 1916
Edison Medal that Stone was a person "whom I consider, if not the ablest, certainly
one of the ablest living experts". However, in the mid-1910s Stone was guilty of
being overly effusive while praising Tesla, by crediting Tesla with being vastly
more influential and knowledgeable about early radio development than was really
the case. It appears that what happened was that Stone projected his own extensive
and accurate knowledge about radio signalling onto Tesla. However, if it was
Stone's intent to move his friend into the physics and engineering mainstream, it
proved unsuccessful, for a few years later, in "The True Wireless", Tesla

11
contradicted most of what Stone had said he believed, and showed how misguided
he actually was. This would be far from the last time that an admirer would give far
more credit to Tesla than was actually due. It also highlights the need to carefully
review Tesla's actual words, rather than what an enthusiastic admirer wished he
said or believed. Nota Bene: Sometimes, when repeating Stone's comment about
Tesla, the qualifier in the years 1891-92-93 is edited out, making Tesla appear
more influential than Stone actually stated. And while we are at it, it is also
common, when referring to the quote from the 1943 Supreme Court case that says
Marconi's "reputation, however well deserved, does not entitle him to a patent for
every later improvement which he claims in the radio field", to omit the subsequent
clarifying phrase "the Court of Claims was right in deciding that Stone anticipated
Marconi", in order make it appear that instead of Stone, it is Tesla being referenced
by this statement.

John Stone Stone was best known for promoting "one-wavedness" -- employing the "loose-coupling" of
transformers so that transmissions were sent on a single radio frequency, avoiding the "double-hump" of two
frequencies which resulted when the transformers were arranged too closely together. Historic references to
Stone also are "one-wave", peaking around the time of his death and the 1943 Supreme Court decision.

Informative Anecdote: A college classmate attended what appeared to be a

standard supplementary physics lecture. Unfortunately, the lecturer turned out to be
a community local, sharing his own unique ideas about reality. The "lecture"
opened with the claim that, contrary to its long-accepted value of 3.14159
etc., pi was actually equal to exactly 3. His audience evaporated at this point,
although at the time I thought it might have been interesting if they had stayed
awhile to find where this no doubt carefully constructed fantasy was leading. I
bring this up because if you are a fan of fiercely held, but wildly incorrect, physics
theories, plus cryptic and archaic language, some of Tesla's crazier ideas, especially
his personal concept of "The True Wireless", are most interesting.

Historic Background
12
The invention of the telegraph and the telephone were major advances, but both had
an important limitation -- you needed a physical connection between the transmitter
and receiver. And soon there were efforts to eliminate these annoying wires.
Although today "wireless" almost always means "radio" -- even modern "wireless
telephones" transmit and receive using extremely high frequency radio signals -- in
the late 1800s "wireless" still referred to a number of competing technologies, and
thus did not always mean radio waves. You could write a book about the various
pre-radio "wireless" communication technologies, and in 1899 J. J. Fahie did just
that -- A History of Wireless Telegraphy (1901 edition), which covers numerous
approaches developed for wireless signaling, none of which, prior to Marconi's
successful demonstration of signalling using radio, had proved commercially
practical for long distance communication, although some came close.

Radio, formally defined, is the transmission and reception of electromagnetic

radiation -- also known as "radio waves" -- for signalling or other forms of
transmitted information. Two of the most celebrated scientific achievements of the
1800s were Clerk Maxwell's mathematical prediction, and Heinrich Hertz's
subsequent experimental proof, of the existence of electromagnetic radiation (i.e.
radio signals). These two scientific giants showed that a high-frequency alternating
electrical current, when sent through an electrical conductor such as a wire antenna,
produces electromagnetic radiation, identical to visible light, but with much lower
frequencies. A key characteristic of all electromagnetic radiation is that it travels
through space as a "transverse wave", usually represented mathematically as the
repeating up-and-down tracings of a sine-wave.

Hertz's groundbreaking experiments are best known for showing that radio waves
could travel through the air. (Although at the time most scientists still believed in
the existence of "the ether", so sometimes they were called "ether waves"). Less
well known is that Hertz also showed that, unlike light, radio waves also could
travel along the surface of an electrical conductor, such as a wire -- one of his
publications was a March, 1889 paper, "On the Propagation of Electric Waves
along Wires". In other words, this means that an electrical conductor can act as a
"wave guide" for radio signals. It was later discovered, initially by Marconi, that
the ground, and especially sea water, also act as waveguides for longwave and
mediumwave radio signals, and these "ground waves" (also known as "surface
waves", or, in the early days, as "gliding waves") made distant signalling possible,
initially to the far side of hills, and later over-the-horizon.

Nikola Tesla always dreamed big. It wasn't just telegraph and telephone wires that
offended him, but also electrical power lines, especially the ones running between
power stations and consumers. Another thing that made him unique was that, at
least through 1919, he didn't believe that the radio signals predicted by Maxwell
and experimentally shown by Hertz really existed. He was insistent that no form of
unguided "free radiation" could be successfully used for distant communication,
13
instead, what he later called "the true wireless" involved "transmission of electrical
energy through the natural medium".

Interesting Trivia: Often overlooked is that Tesla's unworkable idea to use ground
currents was merely a variation on earlier unsuccessful attempts to do the same. For
example, in 1882, Amos Dolbear applied for U.S. Patent No. 350,299, "Mode of
Electric Communication", for "establishing electric communication between two or
more places without the use of a wire or other like conductor". He reported
successful wireless transmissions of sound for about one-half mile (0.8 kilometers),
but was unable to achieve greater distances. And in 1885, Thomas Edison applied
for U.S. Patent No. 465,971, "Means For Transmitting Signals Electrically", which
proposed "electric telegraphing or signaling between distant points can be carried
on by induction without the use of wires connecting such distant points", but this
also proved unworkable, even after a trial using transmitter and receiver wires
connected to mile-high balloons.

Thomas Edison's 1885 patent application, for distant signalling using induction. A short-range "grasshopper
telegraph" version, for communicating with moving trains, was successfully tested, but for more distant
communication the system worked better on paper than in practice.

In 1891 through 1893, Tesla gave a series of lectures in the United States, London,
and Paris. Prominently featured as part of his presentation was the demonstration of
the "wireless" lighting of Geissler tubes over short distances. Geissler tubes were
glass bulbs from which most, but not all, of the air had been removed. Beginning in
the mid-1800s, it was known that the residual gas would light up when an electrical
current passed through the bulbs. Tesla hoped to develop Geissler tubes into a form
14
of wireless filament-less lighting -- the July 9, 1891 New York Times, reviewing
Tesla's work, noted that "The use of alternating currents of very high frequency
makes it possible to transfer by electrostatic or electromagnetic induction through
the glass of a lamp sufficient to do away with the lead-in wires." Tesla was
ultimately unsuccessful in creating a commercial product, but that has not stopped
some of his more enthusiastic admirers from proclaiming him to be the "inventor of
the fluorescent lightbulb". (I'll leave it to someone else to write "Nikola Tesla: The
Guy Who DIDN'T Invent Fluorescent Lighting", plus the other things he didn't
invent, including lasers and computers. I'll put together a signup sheet.)

Tesla demonstrating wireless lighting over short distances to Parisians in 1892. But in this case
"wireless" did not mean "radio waves". According to the description in Scientific American, this
illustration portrays his use of ordinary induction (not radio signals) to cause Geissler tubes to glow.

Because Tesla used high-frequency electrical currents in these demonstrations, it is

sometimes claimed that he had employed radio signals to illuminate the tubes. But
it is clear from his descriptions at the time that he was actually using both
conduction through the ground and induction -- two examples of technologies that
are "wireless", but not the same as "electromagnetic radiation" or radio.

Interesting Trivia: Some earlier experimenters actually had employed the tubes
for detecting radio signals, although the device would remain mostly a curiosity in
radio development. The first person to use a Geissler tube to detect radio signals
appears to have been E. J. Dragoumis, who reported in Note on the Use of
Geissler's Tubes For Detecting Electrical Oscillations in the April 4,

15
1889 Nature that the previous month, following Oliver Lodge's recommendation,
he had successfully repeated Hertz's experiments using a Geissler tube as a
detector. This in turn led to Richard Threlfall's January, 1890 suggestion that
"These tubes have already been successfully applied in Dr. Lodge's laboratory, and
if it be permissible to prophesy wildly, we may see in this observation the germ of a
great future development. Signalling, for instance, might be accomplished secretly
by means of a sort of electric ray flasher, the signals being invisible to anyone not
provided with a properly tuned tube."

A publicity article, carried by a number of newspapers in early 1893, provided an

expanded report on Tesla's bold proposal for transmitting electrical currents
through the ground to great distances -- "Now, at Niagara, for instance, which is
destined to be a marvelous center of electrical force for America, enough force can
be secured to supply all the needs of the human race twice over. By shaking the
entire earth with the mighty power to be obtained there this earth electricity could
be started. With this earth force in vibration the next problem would be to build
machines able to catch and respond to the earth motion. There would have to be
synchronism between the electrical swinging of the earth and the machine. For
example, I hold a glass to my mouth and speak. The glass is shattered. My voice to
do this must have the same resonance as the glass. Such I conceive to be the secret
of all nature--resonance. Then, setting this machine at any point in the world, the
message transmitted through the earth can be received and read at Paris, at Hong-
Kong--anywhere. Distance no longer exists. I am convinced that I today can send a
message to a ship at sea, and that those on board can understand it. If I cannot, I am
willing to lay my head on the guillotine."

Tesla never made good on this boast, despite that, his head remained attached to the
rest of his body. Assuming that he had made any real attempt at this time at
transmitting messages using high-frequency alternating currents, he would have
soon found that the easy part was setting up "oscillators" to produce the currents.
The far more difficult tasks were modulating, detecting and converting these high-
frequency currents into information -- especially full audio -- which would take
years of engineering work to perfect. Nothing in these demonstrations or his patents
indicate he had the ability to do this, and years later he would write that at the time
he had no specific idea how to design something that would "receive intelligence",
noting that -- "A specific form of receiving device was not mentioned, but I had in
mind to transform the received currents and thus make their volume and tension
suitable for any purpose." (This falls into the "easier said than done" and/or "the
devil is in the details" category).

Tesla's other widely-publicized proposal was based on a (wild) idea, first put
forward by Mahlon Loomis, that a portion of the atmosphere could be employed as
a naturally occurring transmission line. Like Loomis, Tesla was under the mistaken
impression that an upper layer of the sky was usable as an electrical conductor to
replace terrestrial power lines. The main difference between Loomis and Tesla was
16
the former also thought that the upper atmosphere could be treated like a battery
that would provide unlimited amounts of electrical power. Tesla added the idea
that, like a Geissler tube, the rarified air in the upper atmosphere would glow,
providing outdoor nighttime illumination.

Tesla's U.S. patent 645,576, filed September 2, 1897, described in detail his
proposed "System of Transmission of Electrical Energy". The patent describes a
Loomis-like proposal to transmit electrical currents through a rarefied layer of the
sky. However, while Loomis thought it would be possible to draw down existing
atmospheric electricity, Tesla proposed using huge transformers to blast "electrical
impulses of sufficiently-high electromotive force to render elevated air strata
conducting, causing, thereby current impulses to pass, by conduction, through the
air strata". The patent specifies massive voltages, starting at 20 to 50 million volts,
in order to propel currents via "natural media" conduction. (The patent primarily
refers to transmission though rarefied air, but includes the ground as an alternate
transmission path). The described "four-circuit" transformer design reflected an
approach used for high voltage electrical distribution over wires, with a "step-up
transformer" at the transmitting end producing high voltages for the transmission,
and a "step-down transformer" at the receiving end, to reduce the voltages to the
levels used by electric appliances such as motors. Tesla's Latest Wonder, in the
November 13, 1898 San Francisco Call, provided the public an overview of
"Tesla's System of electric power transmission through natural media" which he
claimed would make it possible to transmit, through the sky, "electrical energy up
to practically any amount and to any distance". There is no evidence, however, that
Tesla actually ever tried to implement this aerial transmission proposal, and even
less that it could have worked. And again, nothing in this approach involved radio
signals, just very high voltage electrical currents.

If the sky couldn't replace wires for electrical transmissions, then maybe the Earth
could, so Tesla continued investigating the possibility of sending electrical currents
through the ground. However, this was not a promising field, since many
experimenters, dating back to Carl August von Steinheil in 1838, had found this
impossible to do for any significant distance. In 1899, Tesla repaired to Colorado,
in order to conduct experiments on the wide open plains. While there, he claimed to
have made an historic observation that he thought guaranteed success. He reported
developing exceptionally sensitive devices for sensing electrical currents, and
moreover said he had used them to detect the lightning flashes from thunderstorms
that were hundreds of kilometers away. In his view, this meant that, by creating his
own artificial lightning, it would be possible to transmit electricity through the
ground for unlimited distances.

Declaring that the time had finally come to convert his exuberant ideas into
practical and profitable application, next came the famous and disastrous
Wardencliff installation, on Long Island, New York. An enthusiastic Tesla
announced the impending commercial introduction of a "worldwide wireless
17
communications system", employing high-powered ground currents, at a time when
competing inventors, developing the legitimate, albeit fledgling, wireless
technology of radio, were still struggling to set up reliable point-to-point
telegraphic communication. John J. O'Neill's biography includes a sample company
promotion, circa 1903, of the revolutionary services that supposedly would be
provided:

1. Interconnection of the existing telegraph exchanges of offices all over

the World;
2. Establishment of a secret and non-interferable government telegraph
service;
3. Interconnection of all the present telephone exchanges or offices all
over the Globe;
4. Universal distribution of general news, by telegraph or telephone, in
connection with the Press;
5. Establishment of a World System of intelligence transmission for
exclusive private use;
6. Interconnection and operation of all stock tickers of the world;
7. Establishment of a world system of musical distribution, etc.;
8. Universal registration of time by cheap clocks indicating the time with
astronomical precision and requiring no attention whatever;
9. Facsimile transmission of typed or handwritten characters, letters,
checks, etc.;
10. Establishment of a universal marine service enabling navigators of all
ships to steer perfectly without compass, to determine the exact
location, hour and speed, to prevent collisions and disasters, etc.;
11. Inauguration of a system of world printing on land and sea;
12. Reproduction anywhere in the world of photographic pictures and all
kinds of drawings or records.

This was Tesla at his visionary best, moreover, according to him everything would
be ready in a few months, not 80 years in the future. Unfortunately for his financial
backers, who lost their investments instead of getting their promised 100-fold
returns, there is no evidence that Tesla made any significant progress in setting up
the needed infrastructure or perfecting this amazing technology, and the
Wardencliff installation never became operational for any use whatsoever, much
less for the heralded world-spanning applications. A few years later the abandoned,
unfinished tower was sold for scrap.

Antenna Systems: Compare and Contrast

18
 Tesla's failed Wardencliff "World System" at
Shoreham, New York, circa 1903. The
mushroom-shaped tower was just the "tip of the
iceberg" -- the most important system components
were deep underground. Tesla claimed a deep
connection was needed to "grip the earth" in order
to transmit electrical currents through the ground.
It wasn't radio and this endeavor turned out to be a
worthless pit into which was poured J. Pierpont
Morgan's money. Note that this design didn't have
the full above-ground antenna system needed had
Tesla been attempting radio signalling, not
surprising given that Tesla claimed that what he
called "Hertzian longitudinal space waves" were
only capable of limited line-of-sight transmissions.
In contrast, in 1920 the Radio Corporation of
America -- successor to American Marconi -- very
much believed that radio waves existed, and
construction of its Radio Central site -- also located
on Long Island, New York -- included the type of
massive above-ground antenna system needed to
effectively fling longwave signals into the
atmosphere for trans-Atlantic transmissions.
Moreover, it actually worked like it was supposed to.

Undeterred by the inability to convert his ground and sky conduction ideas into
actual working practice, Tesla soldiered on with increasingly expansive
proclamations. Physicists and electrical engineers pointed out that if you injected
electrical currents into the ground, they would spread out in all directions, quickly
becoming too diffuse to be usable. Never one to let cruel reality get in the way,
Tesla had a ready answer for this, claiming his system had the magical (by
scientific standards) ability to directly seek out its targets -- "A popular error which
I have often opportunity to correct is the belief that the energy of such a plant
would dissipate in all directions. This is not so. Electricity is displaced by the
transmitter in all directions equally through the earth and air, but the energy is
expended only where it is collected and used to perform some work. A plant of
10,000 horsepower might be running full blast at Niagara, and one flying machine
of 50 horsepower might be in another place. Only 50 horsepower would be
19
furnished by the plant." In addition, he continued to stress that his system did not
use radio waves (electromagnetic radiation), which he considered a useless waste
product, akin to heat, to be suppressed as much as possible -- "Apart from the
transmitting and receiving apparatus the only loss incurred is the energy radiated in
the form of Hertzian or electro-magnetic waves which can be reduced to an entirely
insignificant quantity." (Tesla and His Wireless Age, Popular Electricity, June,
1911).

Always hungry for publicity, newspaper and magazine articles regularly reviewed
Tesla's predictions of extraordinary advances, including wirelessly-powered
aërocars and weather control -- plus, on the more morbid side, the destruction of
whole cities, with their inhabitants consumed by electric flame:

Wireless power can be transmitted with absolutely the same facility to the
antipodes as it can to a distance of a few blocks.

Neither will the energy or power decrease in efficiency as the distance of

transmission increases, as in the case with electrical energy transmitted by wire.

When my system is complete, a crewless ship may be sent from any port in the
world to any other port on the Seven Seas, propelled by wireless energy from a
power plant anywhere on the face of the earth, and controlled and maneuvered
absolutely and positively by telautomatics.

The time will come, as a result of my discovery when one nation may destroy
another in time of war through this wireless force; great tongues of electric
flame made to burst from the earth of the enemy's country might destroy not
only the people and the cities, but the land itself.

The airship of Tesla's invention will neither be aëroplane nor dirigible, nor will
it have wings or gasbags or propeller blades. All these things, he says, are
impossible in the construction of a commercially practicable airship. The
aëroplane he classes as no more than an amusing toy, a vehicle for exhibition
by the venturesome sportsman; nor will it be anything more, because in its
essential principles it has irremediable flaws that are absolutely fatal to
commercial success. Tesla's airship will be proportionately as substantial, as
stanch and dependable, and altogether as airworthy as the steamship of today is
seaworthy. It will maintain a steady, even keel, and will not be in the least
affected by air currents or any sort of weather conditions.
The size of these ships of the air may be limited only by the area of
accommodations provided for the landing. Or they may be made small enough,
being so easily and simply handled, that the school girl and boy may ride them
to and from school, and in greater safety than walking in the streets. The single
or double or triple passenger aërocar of Professor Tesla's type will be more
popular, too, for individual and independent transit, either for business or
pleasure, than was the bicycle in its heyday, or the gasolene automobile at its
best. Then the city commuter of the future may go and come between business
and residence on his wireless aërocar, and he may go many miles father afield,

20
 into the uncrowded hills and valleys and sea and lake shore, to make his home.

It is claimed, too, as one of the advantages of wireless electricity, that it will be

possible to control the weather in any locality to the extent of either preventing
or producing rainfall to meet soil and crop requirements. -- Wireless
Power, New-York Tribune Sunday Magazine, March 3, 1912.

Editorial Comment: Tesla Motors -- named after Nikola -- started selling

automobiles in 2008. However, contrary to Tesla's aërocar specifications, these
were vehicles that ran on batteries instead of beamed wireless power, and worse,
they couldn't fly. I can't help wondering whether Tesla would be disappointed that
something so technically backward was named after him. (For more on the sad
state of flying car development, see The Onion's Mean Automakers Dash Nation's
Hope for Flying Cars).

Tesla's "True Wireless" Manifesto

Tesla's theatrical demonstrations and promotion of "wireless power" yielded plenty

of "freak-show" attention. Meanwhile, in the real world, the development of actual
working wireless communication, using radio signals, was making people like
Marconi famous. (After the April, 1912 Titanic disaster, the New York Times,
writing about Marconi, said the survivors "owed life itself to his knowledge as a
scientist and his genius as an inventor".) A jealous and frustrated Tesla, annoyed
that his bizarre visionary appeals had been ignored and "even at this very day, the
majority of experts are still blind to the possibilities which are within easy
attainment", wrote The True Wireless for the May, 1919 issue of The Electrical
Experimenter magazine (a Hugo Gernsback publication), to chastise his skeptics
and provide a detailed review of his eccentric ideas about "wireless" power and
communication.

Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. Done? Okay, confused? I'll do my best to interpret
and explain.

A good percentage of this article is complete nonsense -- albeit, because of Tesla's

elliptical writing style, difficult to decipher nonsense -- showcasing his confused
ideas accumulated over the previous three decades, and, to repeat the quote that
would appear in his Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers obituary, the
reasons why his "theory of the transmission of radio-frequency energy is at
variance with that now accepted". Nota Bene: The fact that the same high-
frequency electrical currents Tesla experimented with are now called "radio-
frequency" (or "RF") is because it was recognized (by others) that their most
valuable use is in creating radio signals. You don't see Tesla using this term, again
because he didn't think radio waves even existed, and he stated his high-frequency
alternating currents needed a conductor to travel any distance.

21
Tesla opens with an erroneous analysis of the famous experiments by Heinrich
Hertz that had proved the existence of electromagnetic radiation, as predicted by
Clerk Maxwell. Tesla claimed that Hertz had made a major mistake about the
radiation produced by his equipment, in that he only "apparently gave an
experimental proof that they were transversal vibrations". Although not detailed in
this article, Tesla had long declared that what was actually being emitted by Hertz's
experiments were longitudinal phenomena. In other words, according to Tesla,
what was produced by Hertz's apparatus were actually compression "space waves"
(similar to sound waves), moreover, they had an extremely limited usefulness for
wireless signalling -- "The best that might have been expected was a method of
communication similar to the heliographic and subject to the same or even greater
limitations." (Heliographs, which signalled using light beams, could only be used
for line-of-sight communication.) In truth, Tesla's "longitudinal space waves" were
his own personal fallacy, and it was Hertz who was correct all along, for it was
radio signals, travelling as transverse waves, that were being produced by his
experiments.

Editorial Comment: Tesla's terminology can cause confusion. When other

scientists and experimenters referred to "Hertzian Waves", they generally meant the
transverse waves of electromagnetic radiation, or what we now call "radio waves".
But Tesla's idea of "Hertzian waves" as "longitudinal space waves" (which actually
existed only in his imagination) means his definition of "Hertzian waves" (and
electromagnetic radiation) was completely different from the rest of the world.

Following this unconvincing attempt to debunk Hertz, Tesla describes his

misguided conception of "The True Wireless" -- "The idea presented itself to me
that it might be possible, under observance of proper conditions of resonance, to
transmit electric energy thru the earth, thus dispensing with all artificial
conductors." Tesla had consistently stated that a physical conductor was always
required for long distance electrical transmissions, either via a wire, or by
employing the "wireless" option of using the earth or a rarefied layer of the
atmosphere as a natural conductor. (He himself noted: "This mode of conveying
electrical energy to a distance is not 'wireless' in the popular sense, but a
transmission through a conductor." -- The Future of the Wireless Art section
of Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony Popularly Explained, 1908). It is important
to note that Tesla never claims to be the "inventor of radio", since in his view
electromagnetic radiation was nearly useless for wireless communication. Instead,
it was his belief that Marconi, and everyone who followed, had merely stumbled
across a feeble version of his own method of transmitting high-frequency electrical
currents through the ground. Thus, Tesla believed that what others were calling
radio stations were actually inadvertent, albeit poorly engineered, adaptations of his
"ground currents", and if people would just listen to him, properly designed
"oscillators" could be used to transmit electrical currents through the ground that
were billions of times more powerful.

22
Reviews of Tesla's "true wireless" ideas generally concentrate on the transmission
side, where he excelled in developing high-power devices. He most commonly
used high speed alternators, which were rapidly spinning mechanical systems,
capable of producing alternating currents with frequencies up to about 20 kilohertz.
(Irony Alert: The scientific term used for denoting cycles-per-seconds is "Hertz",
evidence that the scientific community was more impressed with his experiments
than was Nikola). By wire transmission standards, 20,000 cycles-per-second was an
extremely high frequency, however, for radio communication this was actually
only the lowest tiny sliver of the available spectrum. Tesla, believing that radio
stations were actually employing his system of electrical ground-currents,
concentrated on the stations that were using frequencies comparable to those which
he had experimented with, declaring -- "It occurs to me here to ask the question--
why have the Hertz waves, been reduced from the original frequencies to those I
have advocated for my system". But this was only a coincidence. Radio stations
using extremely low frequencies had superior groundwave signals (although Tesla
didn't believe that groundwaves existed -- more on that later), which meant some of
the most prominent stations, providing transoceanic service, operated on these
frequencies. However, Tesla was ignoring the fact that even at the time this article
appeared there had already been an expansion of radio services operating on higher
frequencies. And this trend was accelerating, with the revolutionary expansion into
shortwave frequencies and above just a few years away. Today, only an extremely
small number of radio stations, offering specialized services -- for example,
submarine communication and "atomic clock" time services (notice the transmitter
tower configuration looks a lot more like RCA's Radio Central than Tesla's
Wardencliff) -- operate on the extremely low frequencies that Tesla "advocated" for
his ground-current transmissions. One example is literally a museum piece --
station SAQ at Grimeton, Sweden.

And it is clear that Tesla was almost exclusively concentrating on transmitting

electrical energy. His patents are explicitly for electrical currents, with nothing
covering modulation methods or the reception of signals or sounds. In the article,
the diagrams include symbols labeled "receivers", but in his work these just were
the transformer coils used to collect alternating current. Although he mentioned
"transmitting intelligence" in passing, he confesses that "A specific form of
receiving device was not mentioned, but I had in mind to transform the received
currents and thus make their volume and tension suitable for any purpose." The
article does mention a vaguely defined phenomenon Tesla calls a "rotating brush",
which he claimed was "the most delicate wireless detector known". Tesla had
actually been promoting this as The Next Great Thing for nearly three decades,
without making any measurable progress, and even after all this time had passed,
the best he could now say was that he was still hopeful to find it useful in the
future, stating only that -- "I am looking to valuable applications of this device".
(For a review of the detectors that actually had been successfully developed during
the last thirty years for radio reception, see Radio Detector Development, from the
January, 1917 issue of The Electrical Experimenter.)
23
Bizarrely, even though Tesla himself states that the "rotating brush" phenomenon
had not yet been developed for any practical use, this article describes it as
somehow being "the forerunner of the Audion". ("Audion" was the name Lee
DeForest used for his three-element vacuum-tube). In fact, the invention of the
Audion and other vacuum-tube detectors was a very well documented -- and
completely separate -- line from the never used "rotating brush". The origins began
with the "Edison effect", discovered in 1883 by Thomas Edison, who found that
lightbulb filaments emitted weak electrical currents. John Ambrose Fleming later
added a "plate" element, which allowed him to "rectify" (convert into direct
current) the high-frequency currents produced by radio signals. In 1906 Lee
DeForest added a third, intervening, "grid" element, to create the Audion, which, in
conjunction with later electrical circuits, would provide a far superior method both
for receiving transmissions, and for creating high-frequency electrical currents.
(Bulky mechanical alternator-transmitters, like Tesla's "oscillators", would soon
would be described as "dinosaurs" and replaced by vacuum-tube designs.) Instead
of lumping everything together under the broad term of "vacuum tubes", the British
commonly use "thermionic valve" to describe the type of vacuum tubes used in
radio, which makes clearer the distinction between the three-element vacuum tubes
used for radio, and the very different -- both in form and function -- Geissler tubes
and "rotating brush" phenomenon promoted by Tesla.

Interesting Trivia: Two classic texts on the history of radio detectors are Gerald
Tyne's encyclopedic Saga of the Vacuum Tube and Vivian J. Phillips'
comprehensive Early Radio Wave Detectors. Neither has any references to the
"rotating brush", or to Tesla at all, for that matter.

In reviewing the adoption of electrical transformers, even here Tesla overstates his
own contributions. It is sometimes claimed that effective radio communication
didn't exist until Tesla-style transformers were incorporated to create four-circuit
configurations. However, radio communication was already making impressive
strides before four-circuit designs were developed. A commonly repeated
misstatement about Marconi's two-circuit efforts is "some said it could not transmit
across a pond", which has the same credibility as "some said the moon landings
were faked". For example, Marconi used a two-circuit configuration when he
reported the America's Cup race reports in October, 1899, and the G. Marconi's
Method chapter in A History of Wireless Telegraphy notes a number of successful
transmissions for more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) with the older "two-circuit"
design. Moreover, although four-circuit configurations were more efficient, they
were not absolutely required. The Federal Telegraph Company of California was
sufficiently intimidated by Marconi's legal department to avoid using a four-circuit
configuration. Even with this constraint, in 1912 Federal was able to successfully
establish a radiotelegraph link between California and Hawaii, spanning 2,350
miles (3,780 kilometers.) (See Federal Telegraph's 1920 Manual of Radio
Telegraphy for Radio Operators for more information about their engineering.)
24
It was true that adopting a four-circuit transformer configuration for tuning was a
significant advance for radio technology in the early 1900s. (Sometimes it is
implied that all modern radio communication still uses this configuration, but if you
open up your wireless telephone expecting to find tiny little Tesla coils, well, you
are in for a disappointment). This helped to improve signal strength and, properly
configured, narrow the bandwidth of electrical transmissions. But transformers
were just one example of a whole series of improvements -- by far the greatest
advance would be vacuum tube transmitters and receivers, and the development of
audio transmissions, none of which can be traced to Tesla's work. The overall
concept of electrical tuning was nothing new -- examples go back to the days of the
telegraph, and the development of the harmonic telegraph. From the days of Hertz's
experiments it was obvious that synchronizing transmitters and receivers to the
same operating frequency would be a valuable step in maximizing efficiency.
However, Tesla wasn't the only person involved in the development of tuning (or
"syntony", as it was sometimes called). Also, since Tesla didn't believe in the
existence of radio waves -- the 1943 case even noted "Tesla in fact did not use
Hertzian waves" -- the courts had to determine how much of Tesla's work with high
frequency electrical currents applied to radio technology. With his concentration on
power transmission, Tesla appears to have been unaware that unless the
transformers were properly engineered, the primary and secondary circuits interact,
causing the transmissions to be sent on two separate frequencies, while Stone was
careful to specify "loose coupling" in order to limit transmissions to a single
frequency. Reviewing the Stone tuning patent in 1943, the Supreme Court
commended his "intimate understanding of the mathematical and physical
principles underlying radio communication and electrical circuits in general", as
Stone fully recognized the need for radio transmitters and receivers that could
easily change operating frequencies.

For the next few paragraphs Tesla dons an oversized ignorance jacket, and (in his
mind) debunks commonly accepted facts about signal propagation. In 1919, it had
been well established -- by the scientists and engineers who knew that radio was a
valuable technology for wireless communication -- that signals transmitted by
longwave and mediumwave stations travelled using two different mechanisms.
First were "surface waves" which followed the terrain of the land (the term "gliding
wave" was also in common use at the time). But Tesla was incredulous that anyone
could possibly believe that such a thing existed -- "I can hardly think of anything
more improbable than this 'gliding wave' theory and the conception of the 'guided
wireless' which are contrary to all laws of action and reaction. Why should these
disturbances cling to a conductor where they are counteracted by induced currents,
when they can propagate in all other directions unimpeded?" However, it turned out
that the fact that Tesla "didn't think" something existed did nothing to change
reality.

Editorial Comment: Two similar terms -- ground currents and ground waves are
25
sometimes confused. Ground currents are merely standard electricity traveling
through the ground -- this is what Tesla proposed to use. Ground waves (also
known as surface and gliding waves) are radio signals that use the planet's surface
as a waveguide to travel to distant points. Tesla didn't believe that ground waves
even existed. He was wrong.

Apparently deciding he
had not yet embarrassed
himself enough, Tesla
takes on the second
transmission mechanism
-- signals reflected by the
ionosphere -- or, as it was
commonly known at the
time, the "Heaviside
layer". At the time that
this article appeared, it Unlike Tesla, the 1906 edition of Lieutenant-Commander S. S.
had also been well Robison's Manual of Wireless Telegraphy got it right: "Fig. 18g shows
established that longwave the approximate path of an ether wave started from the earth's surface
and reflected from the upper atmosphere. It will be seen that even if the
and mediumwave radio earth's surface did not guide the waves they might be detected at points
signals travelled below the horizon."
significantly farther at
night than during the day. This was known to be due to an ionized layer, around 60
kilometers above the Earth, which reflected radio signals back to Earth after the sun
went down. (The "Heaviside layer" name was due to the fact that Oliver Heaviside
was one of the first persons to predict the existence of the ionosphere and its effect
on radio transmissions). Tesla, however, remained thoroughly unconvinced --
"Terrestrial phenomena which I have noted conclusively show that there is no
Heaviside layer, or if it exists, it is of no effect." Tellingly, Tesla never bothers to
try to explain why radio stations had greater nighttime coverage, presumably
because it is completely unexplainable by "ground currents". (He had, however, a
few years earlier made the odd pronouncement that, based on his "ground currents"
orientation, the culprit was water evaporation due to the effect of sunlight).

Moreover, as a visionary, Tesla missed out on a technical revolution that was just a
few short years away. In the mid-1920s, it would be discovered that shortwave
radio transmissions, using frequencies far higher than what Tesla promoted using,
had world spanning capabilities, which in no way could be confused as being the
result of "ground currents". Their tremendous range was actually the result of the
transmissions being reflected by the very Heaviside layer that Tesla had dismissed
as either imaginary or inconsequential. (The ionosphere is composed of layers with
differing characteristics. In the case of shortwave transmissions -- and unlike
longwave and mediumwave -- in some cases it is even more reflective during the
day than at night). So, in this case, Marconi was the true visionary, as he would be
a major contributor to the development of shortwave radio transmissions.
26
Radio engineers had successfully designed equipment that provided wireless
communication between ground stations and airplanes, and to the engineers it was
obvious that radio signals were being sent directly between the two. But Tesla,
clinging to his erroneous concept of "longitudinal space waves" and their
uselessness for long-distance communication, claimed this was impossible, and
said that communication instead was actually via a more circuitous route, with
ground currents spreading out horizontally until they were beneath the airplanes,
followed by his old favorite, induction, bridging the vertical gap from the ground to
the planes. But Tesla's explanation makes no sense and shows the kind of
convoluted "logic" he employed in order to try to deny the existence of radio
signals. It is notable that he doesn't even try to explain how transmissions could be
exchanged between two airplanes not in sight of each other, using his "ground
currents" ideas.

This has been a review of most of the main points of the article. There are
additional sections which are beyond my ability to figure out what in the world
Tesla was talking about. Anyway, enough is enough. Whatever Tesla thought he
was doing, it was highly speculative (i.e. not grounded in reality), mostly wrong-
headed, and his "true wireless" fantasies were a wild tangent far removed from
actual radio communication development. Which explains why Tesla was only a
minor figure in the 1943 Supreme Court case, and in no way was declared by same
to be "the inventor of radio".

So, to summarize some of the key points:

"The True Wireless", by Nikola Tesla, May, 1919, The Electrical

Experimenter
Tesla's Wild Claims
Heinrich Hertz's famous
experiments had met with wide
acclaim by scientists, accepted as
having proved not only that radio
signals existed, but that they were a
form of transverse radiation. In
contrast, Tesla thought that this
acceptance had "stifled creative
effort in the wireless art and retarded
it for twenty-five years" for the
"Hertz wave theory of wireless
transmission" was "one of the most
remarkable and inexplicable
aberrations of the scientific mind
which has ever been recorded in
history". In reality, according to
Mundane Reality
Hertz's proof that alternating
electrical currents produce
transverse radio waves was correct,
and in fact a landmark scientific
discovery. Unlike Tesla's mythical
"longitudinal space waves", radio
signals aren't all limited to "line of
sight" transmissions, and in some
cases are capable of travelling
around the world.

27
Tesla, the "Hertzian radiation"
produced by the experiments was
what he called "space waves", which
travelled through the air (or
sometimes "the ether" -- he wasn't
consistent on this point)
as compression waves (similar to
sound waves); moreover, these
"longitudinal space waves" were
incapable of traveling more than
very short line-of-sight distances.
Tesla claimed that it was illogical to
even believe that "gliding waves" --
longwave and mediumwave radio
signals that used the earth as a
waveguide to travel to the far side of
hills or over-the-horizon -- could
exist, because the mere idea was
"contrary to all laws of action and
reaction". He was dismissive of a
series of historic measurements
made by Dr. L. W. Austin in 1909
and 1910 -- reviewed in detail by a
Bureau of Standards bulletin, Some
Quantitative Experiments in Long
Distance Radio Telegraphy.
Stated that his "true wireless"
system could use the Earth as a
electrical conductor to transmit
"earth currents", for "transmission
thru the earth is in every respect
identical to that thru a straight wire",
and "the amount of energy which
may be transmitted is billions of
times greater".
Dismissed the value of the
Heaviside layer (ionosphere) in
aiding long-distance wireless
transmission, claiming that his
researches "conclusively show that
28
Knowledge that conductors can act
as waveguides for radio signals goes
back to Hertz's early experiments
with wires and were confirmed for
land by some of Marconi's earliest
experiments. The Federal
Communications Commission still
uses refined versions of the Austin
charts -- Kenneth A. Norton and
Arnold Sommerfeld in particular
added valuable ground wave
research -- to calculate the
groundwave coverage of AM
(mediumwave) stations. The use of
conductors as waveguides for
electromagnetic radiation was
eventually extended to the
development of coaxial cable.
Electrical currents actually cannot
be transmitted effectively through
the ground for long distances, it is
very inefficient and dangerous, and
in doing so you would risk
electrocuting vast numbers of people
-- much as Tesla would have been
electrocuted had he really been
sitting that close to those huge
sparks in his double-exposure
publicity photos. (During the
Colorado Springs experiments,
nearby horses reportedly received
shocks through their shod feet).
It was well known at the time this
article appeared that longwave and
mediumwave radio signals travelled
significantly farther at night than
during the day, due to the signals
 there is no Heaviside layer, or if it
exists, it is of no effect".
"Rotating brush" is somehow
simultaneously both the "forerunner
of the audion [three-element vacuum
tube]" and a completely
undeveloped technical phenomenon
which shows great promise for the
future.
"Wireless" communication really
didn't exist until four-circuit
transformer designs were utilized.
bouncing off the Heaviside layer
(ionosphere) back down to Earth.
(The absence of solar radiation at
night changes the structure of the
ionosphere, which causes it to
become reflective.) The first
evidence that this was a factor in
transmissions dated back to
Marconi's 1902 S. S.
Philadelphia tests. There was no
way to explain this phenomenon
according to Tesla's ground currents
ideas, so he doesn't even try to
provide an alternative explanation.
The "rotating brush" phenomenon
was never developed into anything
useful. Moreover, three-element
vacuum tubes, which were already
coming into extensive use for both
radio transmitters and receivers,
were completely unrelated to the
"rotating brush", and in fact had
their origins in developments that
predated Tesla's first experience
with the phenomenon.
The original two-circuit spark-
transmitter radio designs, used by
Marconi and others, while less
efficient, were sufficient to establish
radiotelegraphy as a viable
communications technology. The
initial stage of most technologies is
primitive in comparison with later
developments. In the case of radio,
four-circuit transformers were just
one of a multitude of improvements
made over the years.

Irony Alert: Shortly after Tesla wrote "The True Wireless", the Westinghouse
Electric and Manufacturing Company, which had built its electrical transmission
systems around Tesla's alternating current patents, saw the need to invest in radio
communication, i.e. the "fake wireless" in Tesla's view. In 1920, the company
bought the International Radio Telegraph Company, in order to obtain numerous
important Reginald Fessenden radio patents, and to this it added rights to a number
of important patents issued to Edwin Howard Armstrong. In early November, 1920,
Westinghouse inaugurated a radio broadcasting service from station KDKA in East

29
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shortly thereafter, Tesla offered his "wireless" services to
Westinghouse, but the company declined the offer, happy with the radio version of
wireless communication. In November, 1921, the company invited Tesla to speak
over one of its radio stations, but the petulant inventor refused, offended because
the Westinghouse was not using his (unworkable) "world-system". Although
Westinghouse was not the first to make radio broadcasts, the company did do the
most to introduce broadcasting in the United States. Its radio investments were
soon parlayed into 40% ownership of the Radio Corporation of America. By mid-
1920s, it was a pioneer in shortwave transmissions, sending signals around the
world using the same Heaviside layer that just a few years earlier Tesla had
declared "is of no effect". In 1995, Westinghouse purchased CBS, and two years
later it formally changed its entire corporate name to CBS. It still owns KDKA
among many other radio stations,[Note: CBS subsequently sold its radio stations to
Entercom in 2017] so that "fake wireless" stuff actually turned out to work pretty
well.

Further Information

Many biographical sources about Tesla are factually challenged -- their timelines
and antecdotes make for compelling stories, but, to echo Tesla's words from The
True Wireless -- "they have always imprest me like works of fiction". Below is a
short list of some well researched information about the early development of radio
communication. Unfortunately, most of it is not available online.

• Syntony and Spark--The Origins of Radio, Hugh G. J. Aitken, 1976.

(Detailed technical review of how the initial experiments of Heinrich Hertz,
Oliver Lodge's further development, plus Marconi's improvements, resulted
in the first commercially viable radiotelegraph system.)

• Wireless: From Marconi's Black Box to the Audion, Sungook Hong, 2001.

• The Life of John Stone Stone, George H. Clark, 1946.

• "Marconi v. British Radio Telegraph and Telephone Company: The Patent

Case That Changed the World" by Graeme Bartram, in Volume 13 (2000)
of The Antique Wireless Association Review. (Covers in detail the successful
British defense of the British version of Marconi's tuning patent (7777) in
1911. This case included review of Tesla's patents but not John Stone
Stone's, although the decision in the 1943 U.S. Supreme Court case stated
that Stone would have prevailed had his work been included in the review).

• "The History of Radio Wave Propagation Up to the End of World War I" by
Charles R. Burrows, Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, May,
1962. (Overview of the various experimenters and mathematicians
30
 involved).

• "The Ancient and Modern History of EM Ground-Wave Propagation" by

James R. Watt, IEEE Antenna and Propagation Magazine, October, 1998.
(Detailed mathematical descriptions of radio signal propagation).

Question: So, that takes care of that, right? The "Tesla invented radio" myth has
now been fully debunked, and we shall hear of it no more?

Gut Reaction: Are you joking??? There is an endless supply of so-called proofs of
Tesla's alleged stupendous achievements -- Example: Of course he never received
signals from Mars, he must have actually detected signals from Jupiter, making
Tesla the World's First Radio Astronomer! So, think "Titanic vs. The Iceberg" -- at
best, before it sinks into oblivion, this webpage might leave a few scrape marks on
the Teslaberg.

A More Dignified Response: As noted earlier, the bland assertion "everybody

knows" that "Tesla invented radio" can be intimidating, if you don't know the facts.
But, like the guy who claimed that "pi is equal to three", Tesla was hopelessly
confused on most matters when it came to his concept of "The True Wireless".
However, unlike the single "pi lecture", Tesla made decades of expansive
proclamations covering, in varying degrees of understandability, far too many
subjects to enumerate. Thus, it is all too tempting for his admirers to take some of
these vague pronouncements, often out of context, and piece together a supposedly
coherent tale (including conspiracy theories) to "prove" that "Tesla invented radio"
or some other marvelous achievement decades before anyone else. Or give him the
credit for inspiring advances by others that, in fact, are actually far beyond what
Tesla had conceived, or even contradict what he had claimed.

There is often a less-than-subtle attempt to use arbitrary terms and dates to make it
appear that Marconi (and everyone else, for that matter) were merely copying
Tesla's work. If you discount all radio development that came before the adoption
of four-circuit tuning, and decide all four-circuit electrical tuning patents, whether
they described a use for communication or not, as somehow being radio, and gloss
over the fact that sometimes the "wireless" being referred to is a completely
different type of technology, such as induction or conduction through the ground
(sometimes to the point of rewriting a quote to substitute the
word radio for wireless), and you restrict the review to only patents in the United
States, ignoring earlier patents in other countries, then eventually you get enough
qualifiers to make it appear that Tesla somehow was radio's inventor. (Example:
Often ignored is that fact that Marconi's "Provisional Specification" for a system of
radio communication, filed in Britain on June 2, 1896, was prior to the Tesla filings

31
for patents which actually were primarily for power transmission and didn't involve
radio communication).

At this point I have no expectation that there is anything substantial to the claims
made on Tesla's behalf as the "inventor of radio". So, this webpage is my way to
document, for my own self, some of the reasons why it just doesn't make any sense
to credit Tesla for radio's invention or even development, and make less
intimidating the so-called "proofs" that he did. And maybe give some belated
recognition to the unheralded John Stone Stone. But as for convincing some who
wants to believe in Tesla's priority, that seems impossible -- there will always be
another wild goose chase of a so-called proof consisting of convoluted logic to
chase down.

Interesting Trivia: Based on some of his later behavior, Guglielmo Marconi is a

difficult person to celebrate as the inventor of radiotelegraphy. He pretty much
abandoned his family from his first marriage, and became a capital-f Fascist and
firm supporter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. (An urban legend has even
arisen that Mussolini acted as "best man" at Marconi's second wedding, even
though there is no evidence that the high-society ceremonies included a "best man",
or that Mussolini was even in attendance.) But most people have their own flaws.
So, in closing, here's a few Tesla quotes you probably haven't seen before:

This taste for the sensational has always been one of Tesla's commanding
characteristics. He prides himself on it. Others may criticise Tesla for this love
of the sensational, but he himself will sit for hours talking about some of his
seemingly impossible exploits, while the mention of one of his inventions
which, as he says, "the world calls practical", will fail to elicit so much as a
wink of the eyelash. As he himself told me, it is doubtful if anyone ever
performed so many dramatic, hair-raising experiments as he. He is as proud of
them as a boy. The zest with which he tells of how, after showing Sarah
Bernhardt his most dare-devil exploits, she hurried away almost in a state of
nervous collapse, is equalled only by the off-hand manner in which he mentions
currents of 80,000,000 vibrations a second, and his descriptions of sparks and
flames in his laboratory experiments which rival, if not equal, the lightning
itself. -- Arthur B. Reeve, "Tesla and His Wireless Age", Popular Electricity,
June, 1911.

Some animal is now brought out from a cage, it is tied to a platform, an electric
current is applied to its body and in a second the animal is dead. The tall young
man calls your attention to the fact that the indicator registers only one
thousand volts, and the dead animal being removed, he jumps upon the
platform himself, and his assistants apply the same current to the dismay of the
spectators. -- Chauncey Montgomery M'Govern, "The New Wizard of the
West", Pearson's Magazine, May, 1899.

32
 By exposing the head to a powerful [X-ray] radiation, strange effects have been
noted. For instance, I find that there is a tendency to sleep, and the time seems
to pass away quickly. There is a general soothing effect, and I have felt a
sensation of warmth in the upper part of the head. -- Nikola Tesla, "On
Roentgen Rays", Electrical Review, March 11, 1896.

Laxity of morals is a terrible evil, which poisons both mind and body, and
which is responsible for a general reduction of the human mass in some
countries. Many of the present customs and tendencies are productive of similar
hurtful results. For example, the society life, modern education and pursuits of
women, tending to draw them away from their household duties and make men
out of them, must needs detract from the elevating ideal they represent,
diminish the artistic creative power, and cause sterility and a general weakening
of the race. -- Nikola Tesla, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy", The
Century Magazine, June, 1900.

You ask me about atomic energy? I experimented with the atom, and
achieved similar ends, long before the wave of ballyhoo swept over the country
in recent years. The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken a
powerful hold on the mind and there are still some who believe it be be
realizable.
I have disintegrated atoms in my experiments with a high potential vacuum
tube I brought out in 1896 which I consider one of my best inventions...
But as to atomic energy, my experimental observations have shown that the
process of disintegration is not accompanied by a liberation of such energy as
might be expected from the present theories. -- Modern Mechanix, July, 1934.

Source: https://s117.servername.online/~earlyr2/tesla.htm

33