Experimental wireless transmission station (1901–1917)
Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917), also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early experimental wireless transmission station designed and built by Nikola Tesla on Long Island in 1901–1902, located in the village of Shoreham, New York. Tesla intended to transmit messages, telephony, and even facsimile images across the Atlantic Ocean to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals. His decision to increase the scale of the facility and implement his ideas of wireless power transfer to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's radio-based telegraph system was met with refusal to fund the changes by the project's primary backer, financier J. P. Morgan. Additional investment could not be found, and the project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
In an attempt to satisfy Tesla's debts, the tower was demolished for scrap in 1917 and the property taken in foreclosure in 1922. For 50 years, Wardenclyffe was a processing facility producing photography supplies. Many buildings were added to the site and the land it occupies has been trimmed down from to but the original, , brick building designed by Stanford White remains standing.
In the 1980s and 2000s, hazardous waste from the photographic era was cleaned up, and the site was sold and cleared for new development. A grassroots campaign to save the site succeeded in purchasing the property in 2013, with plans to build a future museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. In 2018, the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Design and operational principles.
Origin.
Tesla's design for Wardenclyffe grew out of his experiments beginning in the early 1890s. His primary goal in these experiments was to develop a new wireless power transmission system.
Tesla discarded the idea of using the newly discovered Hertzian waves (radio waves), detected in 1888 by German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Tesla doubted they existed. Like most other scientists from that period, Tesla believed that if they did exist, the basic physics of such waves showed that they would only travel in straight lines the way visible light did, meaning they would travel straight out into space and be "hopelessly lost".
In laboratory work and later large-scale experiments at Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1899, Tesla developed his own ideas on how a worldwide wireless system would work. He theorized from these experiments that if he injected electric current into the Earth at just the right frequency he could harness what he believed was the planet's own electrical charge and cause it to resonate at a frequency that would be amplified in "standing waves" that could be tapped anywhere on the planet to run devices or, through modulation, carry a signal. His system was based more on 19th century ideas of electrical conduction and telegraphy instead of the newer theories of electromagnetic waves, with an electrical charge being conducted through the ground and being returned through the air.
Tesla's design used a concept of a charged conductive upper layer in the atmosphere, a theory dating back to an 1872 idea for a proposed wireless power system by Mahlon Loomis. Tesla not only believed that he could use this layer as his "return path" in his electrical conduction system, but that the power flowing through it would make it glow, providing night time lighting for cities and shipping lanes.
In February 1901, in a "Collier's Weekly" article titled "Talking With Planets", Tesla described his "system of energy transmission and of telegraphy without the use of wires" as:
(using) the Earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors ... a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the Earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the Earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits. In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects for the purposes of signaling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.
Although Tesla demonstrated wireless power transmission at Colorado Springs, lighting electric lights mounted outside the building where he had his large experimental coil, he did not scientifically test his theories. He believed he had achieved Earth resonance which, according to his theory, would work at any distance.
Financing.
Tesla was back in New York in January 1900. He had convinced his friend Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of "The Century Magazine", to allow him to publish an article covering his work and Johnson had even sent a photographer to Colorado Springs the previous year to photograph Tesla's experiments. The article written by Tesla, titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy", appeared in the June 1900 edition of "Century Magazine".
Instead of the understandable scientific description Johnson had hoped for, it was more of a lengthy philosophical treatise where Tesla described his futuristic ideas on harnessing the sun's energy, control of the weather with electricity, wireless control, and how future inventions would make war impossible. It also contained what were to become iconic images by photographer Dickenson Alley of Tesla and his Colorado Springs experiments.
Tesla made the rounds in New York trying to find investors for his system of wireless transmission, wining and dining them at the Waldorf-Astoria's Palm Garden (the hotel where he was living at the time), The Players Club and Delmonico's. Tesla first went to his old friend George Westinghouse for help. Westinghouse seemed like a natural fit for the project given the large-scale AC equipment Westinghouse Electric manufactured and Tesla's need for similar equipment.
Tesla asked Westinghouse to "meet me on some fair terms in furnishing me the machinery, retaining the ownership of the same and interesting yourself to a certain extent". Though Westinghouse declined to buy into the project, he did agree to lend Tesla $6,000 . Westinghouse suggested Tesla pursue some of the rich venture capitalists. Tesla talked to John Jacob Astor, Thomas Fortune Ryan, and even sent a cabochon sapphire ring as a gift to Henry O. Havemeyer. No investment was forthcoming from Havemeyer and Ryan, but Astor did buy 500 shares in Tesla's company. Tesla gained the attention of financier J. P. Morgan in November 1900.
Morgan was impressed by Guglielmo Marconi's feat of sending reports from the America's Cup yacht races off Long Island back to New York City via radio-based wireless the previous year, and he was dubious about the feasibility and patent priority of Tesla's system.
In several discussions, Tesla assured Morgan his system was superior to, and based on patents that superseded, that of Marconi and of other wireless inventors, and that it would far outpace the performance of its main competitor, the transatlantic telegraph cable. Morgan signed a contract with Tesla in March 1901, agreeing to give the inventor $150,000 to develop and build a wireless station on Long Island, capable of sending wireless messages to London as well as ships at sea. The deal also included Morgan having a 51% interest in the company as well as a 51% share in present and future wireless patents developed from the project.
Design changes and financial problems.
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"Tesla Ready for Business", a "New-York Tribune" article on August 7, 1901
Tesla began working on his wireless station immediately. As soon as the contract was signed with Morgan in March 1901, he placed an order for generators and transformers with Westinghouse Electric. Tesla's plans changed radically after he read a June 1901 "Electrical Review" article by Marconi titled "Syntonic Wireless Telegraph".
At this point, Marconi was transmitting radio signals beyond the range most physicists thought possible (over the horizon) and the description of the Italian inventor's use of a "Tesla coil" "connected to the Earth" led Tesla to believe Marconi was copying his earth resonance system to do it. Tesla, believing a small pilot system capable of sending Morse code yacht race results to Morgan in Europe would not be able to capture the attention of potential investors, decided to scale up his designs with a much more powerful transmitter, incorporating his ideas of advanced telephone and image transmission as well as his ideas of wireless power delivery.
In July 1901, Tesla informed Morgan of his planned changes to the project and the need for much more money to build it. He explained the more grandiose plan as a way to leap ahead of competitors and secure much larger profits on the investment. With Tesla basically proposing a breach of contract, Morgan refused to lend additional funds and demanded an account of money already spent. Tesla claimed a few years later that funds were also running short because of Morgan's role in triggering the stock market Panic of 1901, making everything Tesla had to buy much more expensive.
Morgan stated no additional funds would be supplied, but Tesla continued on with the project. He explored the idea of building several small towers or a tower and even tall to transmit the type of low-frequency longwaves that Tesla thought were needed to resonate the Earth. His friend, architect Stanford White, who was working on designing structures for the project, calculated that a 600-foot tower would cost $450,000 and the idea had to be canceled.
Plant at Wardenclyffe.
Tesla purchased of land close to a railway line from New York City in Shoreham on Long Island Sound from land developer James S. Warden who was building a resort community known as Wardenclyffe-On-Sound. Tesla would later state his plans were to eventually make Wardenclyffe a hub "city" in his plans for a worldwide system of 30 "wireless plants", sending messages and media content and broadcasting electrical power. The land surrounding the Wardenclyffe plant was intended to be what Tesla would later in life refer to as a "radio city" with factories producing Tesla's patented devices. Warden expected to build housing on the part of his remaining land for the expected 2,000–2,500 Tesla employees. At the end of July 1901 Tesla closed a contract for the building of the wireless telegraph plant and electrical laboratory at Wardenclyffe.
The final design Tesla started building at Wardenclyffe consisted of a wood-framed tower tall and the cupola in diameter. It had a 55-ton steel (some report it was a better conducting material, such as copper) hemispherical structure at the top (referred to as a cupola). The structure was such as to allow each piece to be taken out and replaced as necessary.
The main building occupied the rest of the facility grounds. Stanford White designed the Wardenclyffe facility main building. It included a laboratory area, instrumentation room, boiler room, generator room and machine shop. Inside the main building, there were electromechanical devices, electrical generators, electrical transformers, glass blowing equipment, X-ray devices, Tesla coils, a remote controlled boat, cases with bulbs and tubes, wires, cables, a library, and an office. It was constructed in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The tower was designed by W.D. Crow, an associate of White.
There was a great deal of construction under the tower to establish some form of ground connection but Tesla and his workers kept the public and the press away from the project so little is known. The descriptions (some from Tesla's 1923 testimony in foreclosure proceedings on the property) include that the facility had a ten by twelve foot wood and steel lined shaft sunk into the ground beneath the tower with a stairway inside it. Tesla stated that at the bottom of the shaft he "had special machines rigged up which would push the iron pipe, one length after another, and I pushed these iron pipes, I think sixteen of them, three hundred feet, and then the current through these pipes takes hold of the earth." In Tesla's words, the function of this was "to have a grip on the earth so the whole of this globe can quiver". There is also contemporaneous and later descriptions of four 100 foot long tunnels, possibly brick lined and waterproofed, radiating from the bottom of the shaft north, south, east, and west terminating back at ground level in little brick igloos. Speculation on the tunnels ranges from them being for drainage, acting as access