THE Pittsburgh Press newspaper told baffled American readers in July 1902 that the eccentric electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla had built a “large power house” at Wardenclyffe (Long Island), and was busy creating other strange towers across the USA. His “World Telegraphy” system, Tesla told journalists, was designed to work with at least one other overseas tower in Scotland.
Tesla’s Scottish project was completely unknown until I made a public presentation on two pivotal 1902 headlines from the Dubuque Telegraph Herald and Toledo Sunday Bee. Both newspapers proudly reported that “Mr. Tesla asserted that there is a similar powerhouse in Scotland and said that this one is almost entirely completed”. A third newspaper (the Babylon Signal) repeated Tesla’s assertion a few weeks later in August 1902.
With the help of his Scottish tower, Tesla promised to create “electric currents of sufficient voltage to enable steamships and railroads to draw all their power” from the earth and atmosphere.
The Dubuque Telegraph Herald (1902) added that Tesla’s creation could also “send wireless messages for thousands of miles without wires” and allow electric trains to “carry passengers 100 miles an hour by drawing their power from the air”.
The Scottish tower was then largely forgotten for the next 100 years. The late 20th century biographer (Margaret Chaney, 1981) said Tesla “had agents in England scouting the coastline for a suitable location on that side of the ocean”, in March 1901, but subsequent research shows that the mind of the inventor had settled on Scotland instead.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the “Man Who Invented The 20th Century” decided to construct his first and only overseas Power Tower in an innovative hyper-industrial country like Scotland.
Skilled radio operators have known for more than a century that our west coast is uniquely suited to the transmission and reception of transatlantic signals.
For the 1921 Transatlantic Tests, the radio engineer Paul Godley built his radio base on the coast of Ardrossan in Ayrshire. The electrical pioneer Reginald Fessenden selected the Mull of Kintyre in 1905 for a series of ocean-spanning data transmission tests.
Tesla only partially understood the problems of high-energy wireless transmission of power but maintained a life-long scientific conviction that low-energy near-global “intelligence transmission”, recognised today as data transmission, was not only possible but relatively straightforward.
His system, Tesla declared, would “prove very efficient in enlightening the masses”, particularly in more remote regions. He said future high-speed information exchange would “add materially to general safety, comfort, and convenience” and ensure the “maintenance of peaceful relations”.
Tesla didn’t just predict mobile internet technology. He tried to invent it. In 1904 he declared that “a cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one’s pocket” could one day be used to access “the world’s news” or receive/transmit “special messages”, or set clocks to the correct time, anywhere in the world.
We may never know if or when Tesla began construction on his Scottish tower, or where he decided to build it, but in August 1901, just a few months after Tesla requested a set of generators and transformers from Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company acquired a Westinghouse license to supply Tesla’s Alternating Current to a significant part of southwest Scotland.
According to biographers of the time, George Westinghouse “took a deep and personal interest in the whole scheme, and was visiting the works [in Scotland] shortly before the opening of Yoker Power station in 1905”.
The power company was initially the “only one operating in the west of Scotland” and “a very large concern”, comprising “three power stations, having 72,500 kilowatts of generating plant”, either in use or undergoing construction.
Scots were already aware of Tesla. The Scottish physicist and mathematician Sir William Thompson (Baron Kelvin of Largs) was passionate about the future of communication technology and helped develop the Transatlantic cable between the UK and USA. In 1896, he admitted that Tesla had “contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time”. Thompson lived in Largs until his death in 1907.
Tesla’s Wardenclyffe project quickly dissolved around 1906, along with his World Telegraphy system. By 1911 the US site was largely abandoned.
The location of Tesla’s Scottish tower is still unknown.
