Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (52 page)

Aside from Tesla’s priority battle, Telefunken was also suing Marconi, who, in turn, was suing the U.S. Navy as well as Fritz Lowenstein for patent infringement.

During the following spring, Marconi was subpoenaed by Telefunken. Due to the importance of the case, he sailed off for America on the
Lusitania,
arriving in April 1915 to testify. “We sighted a German submarine periscope,” he told astonished reporters and his friends at dockside.” As three merchant ships had already been torpedoed without warning by the German U-boats the month before, Marconi’s inflammatory assertion was not taken lightly.

The
Brooklyn Eagle
reported that this suit brought “some of the world’s greatest inventors on hand to testify.”
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Declared a victor in the Lowenstein proceedings by a Brooklyn district-court judge, Marconi clearly had the press behind him. Nevertheless, he was beaten by the navy in his first go-around with them,
¹³
so this case against Telefunken, with all the heavyweights in town, promised to be portentous. Once and for all, it appeared, the true legal rights would be established in America.

Aside from Marconi, there was, for the defense, Columbia professor Michael Pupin, whose testimony was even quoted in papers in California. With braggadocio, Pupin declared, “I invented wireless before Marconi or Tesla, and it was I who gave it unreservedly to those who followed!”
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“Nevertheless,” Pupin continued, “it was Marconi’s genius who gave the idea to the world, and he taught the world how to build a telegraphic practice upon the basis of this idea. [As I did not take out patents on my experiments], in my opinion, the first claim for wireless telegraphy belongs to Mr. Marconi absolutely, and to nobody else.”
¹⁵
Watching his fellow Serb upon the stand, Tesla’s jaw dropped so hard, it almost cracked upon the floor.

When Tesla took the stand for Atlantic, he came with his attorney, Drury W. Cooper, of Kerr, Page & Cooper. Unlike Pupin, who could only state abstractly that he was the original inventor, Tesla proceeded to explain in clear fashion all of his work from the years 1891-99. He documented his assertions with transcripts from published articles, from the Martin text, and from public lectures, such as his well-known wireless demonstration which he had presented to the public in St. Louis in 1893. The inventor also brought along copies of his various requisite patents which he had created while working at his Houston Street lab during the years 1896-99.

C
OURT
: What were the [greatest] distances between the transmitting and receiving stations?

T
ESLA
: From the Houston laboratory to West Point, that is, I think, a distance of about thirty miles.

C
OURT
: Was that prior to 1901?

T
ESLA
: Yes, it was prior to 1897…

C
OURT
: Was there anything hidden about [the uses of your equipment], or were they open so that anyone could use them?

T
ESLA
: There were thousands of people, distinguished men of all kinds, from kings and greatest artists and scientists in the world down to old chums of mine, mechanics, to whom my laboratory was always open. I showed it to everybody; I talked freely about it.
¹⁶

As virtually no one knew about the West Point experiment, this statement was somewhat deceptive, although it was true that thousands of people had witnessed Tesla’s other wireless experiments, such as in St. Louis in 1893. Referring explicitly to Marconi’s system, having brought the Italian’s patent along with his own, the inventor concluded:

T
ESLA
: If you [examine these two diagrams]…you will find that absolutely
not a vestige
of that apparatus of Marconi remains, and that in all the present systems there is nothing but my four-tuned circuits.
¹⁷

Another jolt to Marconi came from John Stone Stone (his mother’s maiden name, by coincidence, was also Stone). Having traveled with his father, a general in the Union army, throughout Egypt and the Mediterranean as a boy, Stone was educated as a physicist at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 1890. A research scientist for Bell Labs in Boston for many years, Stone had set up his own wireless concern in 1899. The following year, he filed for a fundamental patent on tuning, which was allowed by the U.S. Patent Office over a year before Marconi’s.
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Stone, who never considered himself the original inventor of the radio, as president of the Institute of Radio Engineers and owner of a wireless enterprise, put together a dossier of inventor priorities in “continuous-wave radio frequency apparatus.” He wanted to determine for himself the etiology of the invention. Adorned in a formal suit, silk ascot, high starched collar, and pince-nez attached by a ribbon to his neck, the worldly aristocrat took the stand:

Marconi, receiving his inspiration from Hertz and Righi…[was] impressed with the
electric radiation aspect of the subject
…and it was a long time before he seemed to appreciate the real role of the earth…, though he early recognized that the connection of his oscillator to the earth was very material value…Tesla’s electric earth waves explanation was the more serviceable in that it explained [how]…the waves were enabled to travel over and
around hills and were not obstructed by the sphericity of the earth’s surface, while Marconi’s view led many to place an altogether too limited scope to the possible range of transmission…With the removal of the spark gap from the antenna, the development of earthed antenna, and the gradual enlargement of the size of stations…greater range could be obtained with larger power used at lower frequencies, [and] the art returned to the state to which Tesla developed it.

Attributing the opposition, and alas, even himself, to having been afflicted with “intellectual myopia,” Stone concluded that although he had been designing wireless equipment and running wireless companies since the turn of the century, it wasn’t until he “commenced with this study” that he really understood Tesla’s “trail blazing” contribution to the development of the field. “I think we all misunderstood Tesla,” Stone concluded. “He was so far ahead of his time that the best of us mistook him for a dreamer.”
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