AtDTDA 107.11 Tesla Device

[David Casseres]

Marconi eventually built transmission towers on the West Coast of North
America, to relay signals from his New York station across the Pacific to
Asia. I've seen the concrete footings that remain of those towers at the
Marconi Conference Center, overlooking Tomales Bay in Northern California,
not far from Pynchon's old Marin County stomping grounds.  Besides that
convergence, there are others:

Tomales Bay overlies the rift zone of the San Andreas Fault, source of the
1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco.

The property where Marconi built his towers became the headquarters of the
Synanon cult during the Sixties. For those who don't know, this began as an
(allegedly) very successful drug-rehabilitation program which made the
discovery that actually, e-e-e-everything is an addiction, and you need to
be healed; at that point it became one of the most destructive cults ever
seen.  Synanon's old buildings remain derelict on what is now a state park.

Today, jackrabbits hop around the old tower footings, and a little cluster
of lodgings and a conference complex dot the hilltops.  The view down to
Tomales Bay and the Point Reyes Peninsula is stunning.

On 3/10/07, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>              Their only instructions were to steer southwest and
>           await course correction from a station unnamed, at
>           a distance indeterminate, which would be calling
>           in via the airship's new Tesla device, which had
>           remained siloent since the day it was installed,
>           though kept ever electrified and flawlessly calibrated.
>
>              The voices which arrived over the next ferw days
>           were difficult to credit with any origin in the material
>           sphere. Even the unimaginative Lindsay Noseworth
>           reported feeling a fine sustained chill across his
>           shoulders whenever the instrument began its hoarse
>           whispering. AtD 107
>
> The "Tesla Device" is of course a radio, one of the very first.
> This website---Tesla: Life and Legacy---has loads of fine,
> relevant material on Tesla. I'd point in particular to this
> little excerpt from the longer article below:
>
>              But Tesla's calm confidence was shattered in 1904,
>           when the U.S. Patent Office suddenly and surprisingly
>           reversed its previous decisions and gave Marconi a
>           patent for the invention of radio. The reasons for this
>           have never been fully explained, but the powerful
>           financial backing for Marconi in the United States
>           suggests one possible explanation.
>
> All of the following "connects":
>
>              With his newly created Tesla coils, the inventor soon
>           discovered that he could transmit and receive powerful
>           radio signals when they were tuned to resonate at the
>           same frequency. When a coil is tuned to a signal of a
>           particular frequency, it literally magnifies the incoming
>           electrical energy through resonant action. By early
>           1895, Tesla was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles to
>           West Point, New York... But in that same year, disaster
>           struck. A building fire consumed Tesla's lab, destroying
>           his work.
>
>           The timing could not have been worse. In England, a
>           young Italian experimenter named Guglielmo Marconi
>           had been hard at work building a device for wireless
>           telegraphy. The young Marconi had taken out the first
>           wireless telegraphy patent in England in 1896. His device
>           had only a two-circuit system, which some said could not
>           transmit "across a pond." Later Marconi set up
>           long-distance demonstrations, using a Tesla oscillator to
>           transmit the signals across the English Channel.
>
>           Tesla filed his own basic radio patent applications in 1897.
>           They were granted in 1900. Marconi's first patent application
>           in America, filed on November 10, 1900, was turned down.
>           Marconi's revised applications over the next three years were
>           repeatedly rejected because of the priority of Tesla and
>           other inventors.
>
>           The Patent Office made the following comment in 1903:
>
>           Many of the claims are not patentable over Tesla patent
>           numbers 645,576 and 649,621, of record, the amendment
>           to overcome said references as well as Marconi's
>           pretended ignorance of the nature of a "Tesla oscillator"
>           being little short of absurd... the term "Tesla oscillator"
>           has become a household word on both continents [Europe
>           and North America].
>
>           But no patent is truly safe, as Tesla's career demonstrates.
>           In 1900, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd.
>           began thriving in the stock markets—due primarily to
>           Marconi's family connections with English aristocracy.
>           British Marconi stock soared from $3 to $22 per share
>           and the glamorous young Italian nobleman was
>           internationally acclaimed. Both Edison and Andrew
>           Carnegie invested in Marconi and Edison became a
>           consulting engineer of American Marconi. Then, on
>           December 12, 1901, Marconi for the first time transmitted
>           and received signals across the Atlantic Ocean.
>
>           Otis Pond, an engineer then working for Tesla, said,
>           "Looks as if Marconi got the jump on you." Tesla replied,
>           "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using
>           seventeen of my patents."
>
>           But Tesla's calm confidence was shattered in 1904,
>           when the U.S. Patent Office suddenly and surprisingly
>           reversed its previous decisions and gave Marconi a
>           patent for the invention of radio. The reasons for this
>           have never been fully explained, but the powerful
>           financial backing for Marconi in the United States
>           suggests one possible explanation.
>
>           Tesla was embroiled in other problems at the time,
>           but when Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1911,
>           Tesla was furious. He sued the Marconi Company
>           for infringement in 1915, but was in no financial
>           condition to litigate a case against a major corporation.
>           It wasn't until 1943—a few months after Tesla's
>           death— that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's
>           radio patent number 645,576. The Court had a selfish
>           reason for doing so. The Marconi Company was suing
>           the United States Government for use of its patents in
>           World War I. The Court simply avoided the action by
>           restoring the priority of Tesla's patent over Marconi.
>
> http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_whoradio.html
>
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