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422 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
MORGAN SABOTAGED TESLA DEALS
Instead, from that time onward Tesla was unable to build the technologies
which he believed would help humanity. Seifer mentions the influential men
whom Morgan paid a visit when they were ready to close a deal with Tesla.
"Morgan purposefully scuttled any future ways Tesla could raise money."
He was deeply in debt, having plowed all his resources into his experiments
and Wardenclyffe. Having a strong taste for the elegant life, he had
run up an outrageous tab in his more than twenty years of living at the
Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The hotel took the deed for Wardenclyffe in lieu of
payment. Seifer feels that one reason for Tesla handing over the property to
the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria is that he thought he could eventually resurrect
the project. His plan was to develop an invention that would be a big
money-maker, and his hopes were pinned onto his bladeless turbine/pump.
Tesla expected the bladeless turbine to replace the gasoline engine in automobiles,
ocean liners and airplanes and then he would use the subsequent
wealth to complete his project for world-wide wireless power.
Seifer concludes that one of Tesla's motivations for another invention,
a beam weapon which was also called a death ray, was to convince his
government that the Wardenclyffe tower should be saved for military use.
By attaching a beam weapon to it, he could have claimed that the tower
was a strategic property for shooting down incoming aircraft or submarines
during World War I.
His efforts were further scattered during this time by a lawsuit against
Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian who had hung around his laboratory
before the fire of March 13, 1885. In 1901 Marconi sent a signal across
the Atlantic which in the eyes of the public secured Marconi's claim to be
the inventor of radio. When Tesla had heard the news of the transatlantic
wireless signal, he reportedly said, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him
continue. He's using seventeen of my patents."
By the time Tesla tried to collect the hundreds of thousands of dollars
owed him so he could rescue Wardenclyffe, most of his patents had
elapsed. He did resurrect his main radio patent in 1914, Seifer said. Tesla
did not win his suit against Marconi, not because of the legal strength of
his case but because World War I interfered. The assistant attorney general
of the time, Franklin Roosevelt, and President Woodrow Wilson pushed
for a law saying there could be no patent disputes during the war. Seifer
added that by the time the war was over it was much more difficult
for Tesla to sue. (Eight months after his death, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that Tesla's radio-related patents preceded Marconi's. Even after the
court's decision, school history books continue to credit Marconi for in
venting radio.)