Electric Mind
(continued 3/5)

You then formed a partnership with another powerful household name - Westinghouse.

George Westinghouse was a man with tremendous potential energy of which only part had taken kinetic form. Like a lion in the forest, he breathed deep and with delight the smoky air of his Pittsburgh factories. Always affable and polite, he stood in marked contrast to the small-minded financiers I had been trying to negotiate with before I met him. Yet, no fiercer adversary could have been found when aroused. Westinghouse welcomed the struggle and never lost confidence. When others would give up in despair, he triumphed.

Particularly in buying your patent that trumped Edison's "commutator."

Westinghouse told me he simply "could not afford to have others own the patents." Mr. Westinghouse recognized that my system, which made the commutator obsolete, was the solution to the problem of distributing power by means of electrical currents.

AC is just one of dozens of inventions credited to you. Another is wireless technology. But you never went commercial with it.

I demonstrated the procedure in my laboratory and in lecture halls before scientists and the public in New York City, Saint Louis, Philadelphia, London, and Paris, and long distance experiments from one end of New York City to another, up the Hudson to West Point and over hundreds of miles at my experimental station in Colorado Springs. I knew my system would work. I had the fundamental patents. So rather than waste time setting up additional demonstrations for the press or public, I simply set my sights on constructing a working wireless transmission tower.

At your Wardenclyffe Tower headquarters on Long Island. What happened?

It was never finished. I thought it would take a year to establish commercially my wireless girdle around the world. Had this been achieved when it was planned, in 1903, the public would have clamored to send their messages to Europe or receive their dispatches from any other corner of the globe.

Wasn't Marconi already ahead of you on this?

Marconi was essentially trying to send pulsed frequencies, Morse code, dots and dashes. But he was using outmoded equipment, and Hertz's outmoded ideas, even if he did pirate my oscillators. Marconi tried to claim priority, but this was overturned in courts around the world.

Now, you wanted to go way beyond mere data transmission - getting rid of power lines altogether and sending electricity through the air from Wardenclyffe.

If a similar tower were placed, say, in England, which was my plan, then energy could be jumped by means of wireless over the Atlantic to that receiving tower. From there the electricity could be transmitted either by means of wireless to the local dwellings or by conventional means, that is, but using wires. Mostly, the idea would be to locate receiving plants at distant places that were not near sources of power, like waterfalls.

You've always been keen on alternative energy.

No matter what we attempt to do, no matter to what fields we turn our efforts, we are dependent on power. We have to evolve means of obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations.

OK - we've heard that speech before. What do you propose?

A far better way to obtain power would be to avail ourselves of the sun's rays, which beat the Earth incessantly and theoretically supply energy at a rate of over 1 million horsepower per square mile.

Solar? We've got a storage problem there.