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The Suppression of Fuel Savers and Alternate Energy Resources 421
WARDENCLYFFE
Satisfied that he knew enough to carry out his magnificent vision of a
world telegraphy system and wireless power, Tesla returned to New York.
He hired an architect to design a building with a 154 foot high wooden
tower, to be used as a huge transmitter. The tower was topped with a
doughnut-shaped copper electrode. As the design changed, the structure
evolved to the shape of a giant mushroom sprouting above the low hills of
Long Island. Tesla named the project Wardenclyffe, envisioning a station
to send out power as well as to broadcast communication channels of all
radio wavelengths. The tower was nearly finished in 1902, along with the
square brick building, 100 feet on each side, built below it for a powerhouse
and laboratory.
Tesla predicted that when people experience wireless transmission of
electrical power affecting their everyday lives, "humanity will be like an
ant heap stirred up with a stick." The excitement that he anticipated never
had a chance to develop, however. Work on the structure halted in 1906
after J. Pierpont Morgan stopped funding it.
Some historians believe that Morgan had been sincerely interested in
wireless broadcasting. Others argue that Morgan's motivation for briefly
funding Tesla's tower was to gain control over Tesla. As long as Tesla was
an uncontrolled loner, a wild card in the industrial world, his inventions
could threaten Morgan's investments in the electrical industry. If wireless
transmission of power worked, of course, the value of power utilities and
copper mines would plummet. Morgan's companies such as General
Electric could have toppled.
While Tesla's fortunes went downhill starting in 1906, Morgan would
not reply to Tesla's letters, and other financiers on Wall Street also turned
their backs on Tesla for the remainder of his life. In a letter begging an
associate for financial help, Tesla mentioned one of the tactics used to discredit
him. "My enemies have been so successful in representing me as a
poet and a visionary . .."
One of Tesla's biographers is Dr. Marc Seifer, a psychology professor
who researched a psycho-biography of Tesla for his doctoral thesis. Seifer
believes that Tesla sowed the seeds of his own financial ruin by not
making clear to J. P. Morgan, Sr. his intention to broadcast power from
Wardenclyffe as well as to send communications. However, Seifer also
thinks that Morgan could have transcended his own limitations and given
Tesla the money to complete at least the radio portion of the tower "and
the world would have evolved in a totally different way."