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Tesla concentrated on larger projects. The most grandiose: a scheme for the wireless transmission of electric power. He proposed to charge the earth with tremendous voltages and make it "oscillate," thereby making it possible to tap electricity from any part of the globe. At his famed electrical tower in Colorado, Tesla produced a potential of 135,000,000 volts (still the highest ever achieved) and claimed that he lit 200 incandescent bulbs 26 miles away with wireless power.
Twain and Pigeon. Tesla's experiments, few of them ever finished, were financed by such backers as J. Pierpont Morgan, John Jacob Astor, John Hays Hammond, Thomas Fortune Ryan, Samuel Insull. During the last 20 years of his life, Tesla holed up in a Manhattan hotel room, dreaming of bigger & bigger projects. Before his death last year at 86, he had announced that he was on the verge of: 1) inventing a death ray, 2) communicating with other planets.
O'Neill does nothing to tarnish the lustre of Tesla's eccentricity. A meticulous dresser, he never used a handkerchief or collar more than once, could often be seen in white tie & tails feeding pigeons on the steps of the 42nd Street library or St. Patrick's Cathedral. Because of an intense germ phobia, he never shook hands if he could help it.
At meals in his hotel, two dozen napkins were stacked, by his orders, on his table; with them he wiped every dish and piece of silverware as it came from the kitchen. In his heyday, he lived at the Waldorf-Astoria and had a fabulous reputation as a host. He invariably took his guests to his laboratory and treated them to an electrical display, which included the then startling trick of passing 1,000,000 volts through his body.
A few days before he died, Tesla sent a messenger with an envelope addressed to "Mr. Samuel Clemens, 35 South Fifth Street, New York City." Inside the envelope was a blank sheet of paper wrapped around $100 in $5 bills. No one could persuade Tesla that his old friend Mark Twain was dead. Cried he: "He was in my room, here, last night."
The Author. Like his subject, Author O'Neill is something of a mystic, interested in spiritualism and the Society for Psychical Research. A onetime printer's devil, he was a page in the New York Public Library when he met Tesla, began to read the scientist's books and became a science reporter. For his coverage of Harvard's Tercentenary in 1936 he won a Pulitzer Prize.