Free Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah by Nigel Cawthorne Page B

1895 the Nikola Tesla Company was set up. Not only was Tesla working on wireless and remote control, he was putting his mind to cheap refrigeration, the production of liquid air, the manufacture of fertilizers and nitric acid from the air, and artificial intelligence.
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    Electrifying Buffalo
    Construction of the first power station at Niagara took 5 years. It was a headache for investors throughout. The outlay was huge and no one knew whether it would work as the plans lay principally in Tesla’s three-dimensional imagination. However their worries evaporated when the switch was thrown and the first power reached Buffalo at midnight on 16 November 1896. The Niagara Gazette reported: ‘The turning of a switch in the big powerhouse at Niagara completed a circuit which caused the Niagara River to flow uphill.’ The first 1,000 horsepower of electricity reaching Buffalo was taken by the street railway company, but already the local power company had orders from residents for 5,000 more. Within a few years the number of AC generators at Niagara Falls reached the planned ten, and power lines ran as far as New York City. Broadway was ablaze with lights. It powered streetcars and the subway system. Even Thomas Edison’s networks converted to alternating current.
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    Mesmerized by Mars
    While these developments were going on, Tesla was doing more experiments with wireless transmission. He set up a transmitter on the roof of his laboratory and using an aerial strung from a balloon, he could detect a signal on top of the Hotel Gerlach, thirty blocks away.
    As always, Tesla was a visionary. Walking up Fifth Avenue one fine Sunday afternoon in 1894, he said to his young assistant D. McFarlan Moore: ‘After we have signalled from any point to any point on the Earth, the next step we will be signalling other planets.’
    America was in the grip of Martian fever at the time. The noted astronomer Percival Lowell (1855 – 1916) was studying the ‘canals’ on Mars and John Jacob Astor (1864 – 1912) – the richest man to die on the Titanic – had just published A Journey to Other Worlds . He gave a copy to Tesla.
    For the time being, Tesla was planning to see if he could receive signals from a ferry on the Hudson River, but on 13 March 1895 his laboratory burnt down. While Tesla was wrestling with depression, Westinghouse was fighting over the patents for Tesla’s AC induction motors against GE and others. GE, of course, promulgated the theory that the fire at Tesla’s lab had been caused by the sparks emanating from one of his motors. In fact, it had started on the floor below.
    Tesla set about finding a new lab. In the meantime, Edison let him use a workshop in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, and, although uninsured, Tesla was confident that Westinghouse would pay for any new equipment he needed. However, Westinghouse was a hard-headed businessman and billed Tesla. Meanwhile, he announced that he was planning to use Tesla’s motors, whose patents he owned, to power locomotives.
    The following year, 1896, Tesla told the press that he was looking into the ‘possibility of beckoning Martians’ and, when Lord Kelvin arrived in America in 1897, he suggested using the lights of New York to flash a signal to the Martians. Meanwhile Edison was working on something even more outlandish – a telephone to contact the dead.
    But for Tesla contacting Mars was just an ‘extreme application of [my] principle of propagation of electric waves’. It was merely an extension of a more Earthly goal. He pointed out: ‘The same principle may be employed with good effects for the transmission of news to all parts of the Earth … Every city on the globe could be on an immense circuit … a message sent from New York would be in England, Africa and Australia in an instant. What a grand thing that would be.’
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    Electric Demon Duo
    Arthur Brisbane in The World newspaper