Wardenclyffe Tower

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Wardenclyffe Tower - The Tesla Tower
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Wardenclyffe Tower - The Tesla Tower

Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower (also known as the Tesla Tower) is named after James S. Warden, a western lawyer and banker who had purchased land on Shoreham, Long Island. The area was in close proximity to Manhattan. Here he built a resort community known as Wardenclyffe-On-Sound. Warden believed that Tesla's system would establish a "Radio City" in the area, and offered Tesla 200 acres (81 hectares) of land close to a railway line to build a radio tower and facility.

The exact reasons for the construction of the tower and facility are not clear, but there are several theories as to what the actual goals might have been. These theories range from that of having a simple radio tower (such as a 200 kW wireless system), to wilder ideas, such as the tower being used to put a charge on the Earth itself. Other purposes that have been proposed include the attempted invention of a variant of wireless telecommunications and broadcasting to use as a power plant. Additionally, some have suggested the construction could have been used as a weapon.

Contents

History

In 1900, Nikola Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility, and in 1901, construction project began on the land near Long Island Sound. The architect Stanford White designed the Wardenclyffe facility main building. Funding for Tesla's project was provided by influential industrialists and other venture capitalists. The project was also initially backed by the wealthy J. P. Morgan (he had a substantial investment in the facility, initially investing an estimated sum in the range of $100,000 to $150,000).

In June 1902, Tesla moved his laboratory operations from his Houston Street laboratory to Wardenclyffe. However, in 1903, when the tower structure was near completion, it was still not yet functional due to a design error. When Morgan wanted to know "Where can I put the meter?", Tesla had no answer. Tesla's vision of free power did not agree with Morgan's worldview. Construction costs eventually exceeded the money provided by Morgan, and additional financiers were reluctant to come forth. By July 1904, Morgan (and the other investors) finally decided they would not provide any additional financing. Morgan also encouraged other investors to avoid the project. In May 1905, Tesla's patents on alternating current motors and other methods of power transmission expired, halting royalty payments and causing a severe reduction of funding to the Wardenclyffe Tower. In an attempt to find alternative funding, Tesla advertised the services of the Wardenclyffe facility, but he met with little success. By this time, Tesla had also designed the Tesla turbine at Wardenclyffe and produced Tesla coils for sale to various businesses. By 1905, since Tesla could not find any more backers, most of the site's activity had to be shut down. Employees were laid off in 1906, but parts of the building remained in use until 1907.

In 1908, the property was foreclosed for the first time and Tesla then procured a second mortgage from the Waldorf-Astoria proprietor, George C. Boldt. The facility was partially abandoned around 1911, the tower structure eventually becoming dilapidated and disheveled. Between 1912 and 1915, Tesla's finances unraveled, and when the funders wanted to know how they were going to recapture their investments, Tesla did not give sufficient answers. Newspapers commented that it was "Tesla's million-dollar folly." The facility's main building was broken into and vandalized around this time.

The Wardenclyffe's failure may have contributed to the mental breakdown Tesla experienced in this period. Coupled to the personal tragedy of Wardenclyffe was the previous 1895 unexplained fire in Tesla's Houston Street laboratory. In this fire, he lost many of his notes and documents. This produced a state of severe depression for Tesla. In 1915, legal ownership of the Wardenclyffe property was transfered to George Boldt for a $20,000 debt.

Demolition and salvaging of the tower occurred in 1917. However, the main building still stands today. Tesla was not in New York during the tower's destruction. George Boldt wished to make the property available for sale. New York papers reported that the tower had been destroyed by order of the government to prevent its use by foreign agents. In 1917, the United States government may have aided the destruction of the Wardenclyffe Tower, ostensibly because it was believed it could provide a navigational landmark for German submarines. The facts neither support nor discount either claim. On April 20, 1922 Tesla lost an appeal of judgment versus his backers in the second foreclosure. This effectively locked Tesla out of any future development of the facility.

In 1925, the property ownership was transferred to Walter L. Johnson of Brooklyn. On March 6, 1939, Plantacres, Inc. purchased the facility's land and subsequently leased it to Peerless Photo Products, Inc. (which is still established on a portion of that land).

On February 14, 1967, the nonprofit public benefit corporation Brookhaven Town Historical Trust was established. It selected the Wardenclyffe facility to be designated as an historic site and as the first site to be preserved by the Trust on March 3, 1967.

In the month of July in 1976, a plaque from Yugoslavia with an inscription was installed by the Brookhaven Town Historic trust near the entrance of the facility. It reads:

IN THIS BUILDING DESIGNED BY STANFORD WHITE, ARCHITECT
NIKOLA TESLA
BORN SMILJON, YUGOSLAVIA 1856, DIED NEW YORK, U.S.A. 1943
CONSTRUCTED IN 1901-1905 WARDENCLYFFE, HUGE RADIO STATION WITH
ANTENNA TOWER 187 FT. HIGH (DESTROYED 1917), WHICH WAS TO SERVE
AS HIS FIRST WORLD COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM.
IN MEMORY OF 120TH ANNIVERSARY OF TESLA'S BIRTH AND 200TH
ANNIVERSARY OF U.S.A. INDEPENDENCE - July 10, 1976

Also, in 1976, an application was filed to have the main building listed in the New York State Register and National Register of Historic Places. It failed to get approval. In 1994, a campaign was again started requesting the placement of the Wardenclyffe facility on the National Register of Historic Places. By October 1994, a second Application for formal nomination was undertaken which may result in placement of the Wardenclyffe on both the New York State Registers of Historic Places and the National Registers of Historic Places. The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation conducted inspections which established that the facility does meet New York's criteria for historic designation.

The present owners of the existing Wardenclyffe facility is AGFA-Gevaert.

Facility grounds

Wardenclyffe Tower located in Shoreham, Long Island, New York
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Wardenclyffe Tower located in Shoreham, Long Island, New York

Wardenclyffe is located near the Shoreham Post Office and Shoreham Fire House on Route 25A in Shoreham, Long Island, New York. Wardenclyffe was divided into two main sections. The tower, which was located in the back, and the main building compose the entire facility grounds.

The tower was 187 feet (57 meters) tall and 68 feet (20.7 meters)in diameter. It had a supporting structure that was built of wood. It had a 55-ton steel (some report it was a better conducting material, such as copper) hemispherical structure at the top (referred to as a cupola). The tower was designed by one of Stanford White's associates. The design of this structure was such as to allow each piece to be taken out if needed and replaced as necessary. Beneath the tower, a shaft sank 120 feet (36.6 meters) into the ground. Sixteen iron pipes were placed at the depth of 300 feet (94.4 meters) so that the telluric currents of the Earth could be transceived by them.

The main building occupied the rest of the facility grounds. The main building included Tesla's laboratory and other assorted devices for the facility. Inside the main building, there were electromechanical devices, electrical generators, electrical transformers, glass blowing equipment, a machine shop, X-ray devices, Tesla coils, a remote controlled boat, cases with bulbs and tubes, an instrument room, wires, cables, a library, and a office. It was constructed in the style of the Italian Renaissance (referred to as the "Shingle style").

Theories of operation

Various theories exist on how Tesla intended to achieve the goals of the facility, from the use of radio (such as a 200 kW wireless system) to putting a charge on the Earth itself. Wardenclyffe in operation may have allowed secure multichannel transceiving of information and may have allowed universal navigation, time synchronization, and a global location system. Wardenclyffe was developed in a different way than modern broadcasting stations.

According to Tesla's writings, the facility had a dual purpose. Tesla had planned more than what he initially revealed to his investors. His station could not only transceive communication signals, but transmit power. The site was to be used by Nikola Tesla as part of an experiment in creating a distribution system for electricity that would allow power to be transmitted over any distance without wires. The site's other purpose was global wireless telecommunications and broadcasting. The facility was meant to be the start of a national (and later global) system of towers broadcasting power to users as radio waves. Instead of supplying electricity through a current grid system, users would simply "receive" power through antennas on their roofs. At the time the power grid was quite limited in terms of who it reached and the Tower represented a way of significantly reducing the cost of "electrifying" the countryside.

In basic terms, the system could consist of a Tesla coil. Wardenclyffe may have used extremely low frequency signals with the higher frequency signal. Powered by an industrial alternator, the tower could transceive energy into a natural circuit. The transmission medium could have been the Earth. Tesla explained in his various writings that the Earth itself was an LC circuit that may be electrically resonated at predescribed frequencies and transceivers could be used to accomplish this. Also, a surface wave, similar to the zenneck wave or schumann resonance, could have been utilized. Wardenclyffe's transceiver system was organized in such a manner would make less complex radiated power. The earth currents and associated wave complex could have allowed wireless transceiving to any distance, with negligible loss due to radiation.

Quotes

"As soon as [the Wardenclyffe facility is] completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place ..." - Nikola Tesla, "The Future of the Wireless Art", Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony, 1908, pg. 67-71.
"It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! [...] Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." – Nikola Tesla (at the end of his dream for Wardenclyffe) [Wardenclyffe — A Forfeited Dream]

See also

External links, resources, and references


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