Free Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer Page A

Tesla acquired a phobia which led him to shun unpurified water, scour his plates and utensils before eating, and refrain from frequenting unsavory restaurants. He would later write, “If you would watch only for a few minutes the horrible creatures, hairy and ugly beyond anything you can conceive, tearing each other up with the juices diffusing throughout the water—you would never again drink a drop of unboiled or unsterilized water.” 32
    In the spring of 1884, with funds for the journey supplied by Uncles Petar and Pajo, 33 Tesla packed his gear and caught the next boat for America. Although his ticket and money and some of his luggage were stolen, the young man was not deterred. “Resolve, helped by dexterity, won out in the nick of time…[and] I managed to embark for New York with the remnants of my belongings, some poems and articles I had written, and a package of calculations relating to solutions of an unsolvable integral and to my flying machine.” 34 The voyage appears not to have been a happy one; a “mutiny” of sorts occurred on board, and Tesla was nearly knocked overboard. 35
    In 1808, Sir Humphry Davy created artificial illuminescence by running an electric current across a small gap between two carbon rods. This simple device evolved into the arc lamp, used in English lighthouses in the 1860s and displayed at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 by Moses Farmer. By 1877 numerous investigators were exploring the possibility of placing the incandescent effect within glassed enclosures because they would be much safer this way for marketing to households, and a race developed between such inventors as Charles Brush, Thomas Edison, Moses Farmer, St. George Lane-Fox, Hiram Maxim, William Sawyer, and Joseph Swan.
    “I saw the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance,” Edison said. 36 And so he challenged William Wallace, Farmer’s partner, to a race asto who would be the first man to create an efficient electric light. Boasting that he would soon light up New York City with 500,000 incandescent lamps, Edison and his business manager, Grosvenor Lowery, were able to secure large amounts of capital from such investors as Henry Villard, owner of the first trans-American railroad, and financier J. Pierpont Morgan.
    In November 1878, after three years of research, a hard-drinking telegrapher by the name of William Sawyer and his lawyer-partner Albion Man, applied for a patent for an incandescent lamp with carbon rods (filaments) and filled with nitrogen. They proclaimed that they had beaten Edison. Joseph Swan, another competitor, removed the nitrogen and kept the carbon filament but created a low -resistance lamp. Realizing that the amount of power required to send electricity a few hundred feet was prodigious using the low-resistance design, Edison created, in September 1878, a high -resistance vacuum lamp that utilized considerably less power. Together with a revolutionary wiring called a feeder line, 37 his success was further augmented by a new Sprengel pump, which William Crookes had been recommending for the creation of vacuums in glass-enclosed tubes. It would be another six months—April 22, 1879—before he would file for a patent, but his new design would lower power requirements and thereby cut copper costs one hundredfold. 38
    The competition was fierce, and Edison’s financial backers were running scared. They suggested to Edison that they purchase the Sawyer patents and combine the two companies. Edison had not yet settled on carbon as a filament and was exhausting his working capital in experiments with boron, iridium, magnesium, platinum, silicon, and zirconia. At the same time, he had also sent explorers to the Amazon, Bolivia, Japan, and Sumatra in search of rare forms of bamboo, which he was also considering. It would not be until 1881 that he finally settled upon a form of carbonized paper.
    During this time, however, and without Edison’s knowledge, Sawyer and Man approached