Nikola Tesla’s Strange Connection to East Tennessee

A showman at heart, Tesla announces, “Come, see the alternating current made possible by my polyphase system!”

Electricity flowing through fluorescent light bulbs creates visions of the future like nothing the thousands of fairgoers have ever seen before.

Ever ready and eager to impress the public, Tesla widely provides conversations and demonstrations. He walks through the fair’s grounds, enjoying the celebrations while observing and monitoring his lights and devices. His reputation as a mystic is understandable; he is known as the “Wizard of Electricity.”

The founding fathers of electricity famously battled for position at the Chicago World’s Fair: Thomas Edison, with his direct current system; and Nikola Tesla, with his alternating current system. The battle of the currents was decisively won at the World’s Fair. With a bid of $399,000, Westinghouse and Tesla won the privilege to provide electricity and illuminate the fair.

Because Thomas Edison would not allow his own lightbulbs to be used in conjunction with Tesla’s AC current, Tesla created and debuted a prototype fluorescent light bulb. Therefore the World’s Fair Committee received power, innovative light bulbs, and a bid over $150,000 less expensive than Thomas Edison’s. Tesla was in excellent standing with the Committee.

Can we imagine that, behind the scenes, the grateful committee shakes hands with Tesla, vowing to help him in his future endeavors?

1895

New York

Tesla’s New York laboratory is destroyed by fire. All at once, his many years of hard, meticulous labor are gone. Upon hearing Tesla’s predicament, his friend, lawyer Leonard Curtis, offers Tesla an opportunity to purchase discounted land in Colorado Springs.

The thinner air and electrical storms at Pike’s Peak would create perfect settings for his wireless energy experiments, and Curtis offers to provide for the cost of electricity. The possibilities grab the inventor’s attention. Nikola Tesla heads west for Colorado.

1899

Colorado Springs

Nikola Tesla arrives in Colorado Springs eager to continue his work.

Tesla recruits a local carpenter to build a laboratory. Enthusiastic, and pressed for time, Tesla pushes and expedites the local builder with his plans. A small shed with a retractable roof is built around a tall metal flag pole. At the top of this odd-looking pole is a copper sphere, a combination that will forever be synonymous with the inventor.

The 142-foot guyed metal mast and the copper ball provide experiments in high-voltage and high-frequency electricity. After injecting the ground around his Colorado laboratory with electricity, both Tesla and his assistant Fritz Lowenstein witness many phenomena, such as sparks coming off horses shoes as they walked the grounds. They witness a then-mysterious phenomena called St. Elmo’s fire, which occurs when a charged object creates a luminous electrical discharge in the atmosphere.

Tesla experiments in Colorado from 1899 to 1900, which leads him to conclude that the Earth and its ionosphere could form a channel for transmitting electrical energy. His time in Colorado Springs was one of the most productive and important spans in his career, as it helped him form some of the fundamental ideas for the wireless transfer of energy. After less than a year in Colorado, his findings see Tesla returning to New York.

1900

Shoreham, Long Island, New York

Nikola Tesla often visits high-end dining establishments such as Delmonico’s. He eats and keeps company with celebrities like author Mark Tain and preservationist John Muir. Tesla’s circle of friends is known as having its finger on the intellectual pulse of the country. This is especially true of Robert Underwood Johnson.

Having a mutual acquaintance through T.C. Martin, Johnson and his wife embrace Tesla and his fiery nature. Johnson likes to gather large groups of “big thinkers,” holding his symposiums at his home in New York, 327  Lexington Avenue. There, Tesla encounters cultural luminaries such as architect Stamford White, well-known for projects such as Madison Square Garden.

White asks, “Tesla my boy! A tower that holds wireless power? How can it be so?” White is a fan of the futuristic tech Tesla describes, and says, “We should continue this conversation at the players club. We’ll even get that JP Morgan to join us! Surely he’s always looking for investments.”

In 1900, the “Guzman Prize” is announced to the world in December. In memory of her son Pierre, who was himself an amateur astronomer, Madame Guzman of France proposes a prize of 100,000 francs to whoever can prove communication with the planets and stars. Communicating with distant worlds was a difficult challenge nonetheless petitioned by Nikola Tesla, who insisted communications could be achieved. To Tesla, the $100,000 prize money was invaluable in his ever-ongoing research on the wireless transmission of energy.

1901

Nikola Tesla meets with financier JP Morgan at Morgan’s office, who agrees to give Tesla a $150,000 grant towards his “wireless transmission of energy” tower concept. With Stamford White on board as the project’s architect, work begins immediately on the Wardenclyffe Tower, or as it is also known, “Tesla’s Tower.”

Here is where Tesla’s eerier ties with East Tennessee begin.

1906

Stamford White is murdered by Harry K. Thaw, an aristocrat of Pittsburgh.

Thaw goes after White in a fit of passion and jealousy. Thaw learned that White was involved with Thaw’s wife, model and actress Evelyn Nesbit. Nesbit is widely known as a “Gibson Girl,” and has modeled for numerous products, including Coca-Cola. Her face graces pages of magazines across the country. Thaw can’t stand the thought of another man occupying’s his beautiful wife’s attention and attacks and fatally shoots White at Madison Square Garden’s rooftop.

Wardenclyffe is famed architect Stamford White’s final project.

It is a national scandal. The court proceedings are sensationalized with daily news updates. Because of Evelyn Nesbit’s testimony in court, the final verdict finds Thaw not guilty by means of insanity. In an odd show of praise, Thaw is given a hero’s welcome home from prison. His mother, Mary Thaw, finances a parade in his honor. He is honored as “a husband who was brave,” because in killing White, he is put forth as saving his wife’s honor. Mary Thaw continues to honor her son and makes a very large donation to Maryville College in East Tennessee. The money is intended for a piece of land and a new building.

1923

Thaw Hall opens at Maryville College.

With Tesla’s AC generators now the standard, Tennessee’s “Lil River” is harnessed and used in supplying power to Alcoa’s aluminum plant (previously known as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, then the Aluminum Company of America, and finally abbreviated as Alcoa, from where Tesla most certainly purchased raw materials from) and other railroad projects in east Tennessee.

The Thaws, along with other wealthy patrons from Pittsburgh, donate large sums of money to East Tennessee’s Maryville College, which is only a three-minute drive away from Alcoa’s smelting plant.

It is possible Mary Thaw was given advice by steel capitalist Andrew Carnegie himself to donate her money for a new building at Maryville College. Carnegie was a prominent donor to philanthropic causes as he tried to smooth over some of the darker passages in his company’s history. Additionally, she and Carnegie were in-laws: Mary Thaw’s daughter, Margaret Copley, was married to Carnegie’s nephew, George Lauder Carnegie.

After Andrew Carnegie fell out of friendship with Henry Clay Frick over bad publicity from labor disputes, contributions began to Maryville College from Andrew Carnegie himself. Its relevant that Henry Clay Frick was friends with Nikola Tesla and an entrepreneur in gray coal, a fuel called “coke” used for the smelting process of steel.

1943

The world mourns the death of a titan. Nikola Tesla, famed and controversial inventor, responsible for our modern technological world suffers a heart attack and dies in his New York hotel room. A small ceremony is held, and a few days later Tesla’s remains are interred in Ferncliff Cemetery, New York. Part of Tesla’s ashes are sent to Belgrade where they rest on a pedestal in an urn in the shape of a golden sphere.

The sphere was Tesla’s favorite shape – he believed they represented the most harmonious way to distribute electricity as well as to access cosmic energy. Perhaps he could imagine a way to use spheres to achieve communication with other worlds.

1982
Knoxville Tennessee World’s Fair

Almost 100 years after Nikola Tesla introduced his AC system as standard form of electricity to the public at the 1893 Chicago’s World’s fair, we see the theme of energy at Knoxville’s World’s Fair with its slogan, “Energy turns the world.”

At the center of World’s Fair park is the Knoxville Sunsphere built specifically for these festivities. The structure is a towering 266-foot building, a pedestal topped by a giant, 75-foot diameter golden sphere. The Jetsons’s futuristic architecture comes to mind when one first sees the iconic building.

In his later years after the Wardenclyffe Tower loss, Nikola Tesla continued his efforts and field research in his pursuit of the transmission of wireless energy. Tesla made acquaintances and friendships through acquiring raw materials. He would find a friend in Titus de Bobula an architect who was married to Eurania Dinkey Mock of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, (a niece of the wife of Charles M. Schwab, president at times of the Carnegie Steel Company, U.S. Steel, and Bethlehem Steel).

De Bobula’s architectural illustration created for Tesla depicts a tall tower with a sphere on top, an advanced energy weapon system codenamed “teleforce.”

Wardenclyffe Tower in New York, De Bobula’s drawing, and the Knoxville Sunsphere were built in the name of energy and all share similar appearances. They even have steel made from Pittsburgh steel. The connection ties in even further with Maryville College being funded by the Thaw family from Pittsburgh, with tie-ins themselves to the steel business.

2018
Alcoa, Tennessee

In conjunction with the developers, RESIGHT of Denver Colorado, and former land owner, Arconic Inc. have announced the opening of 1.25-mile-long Tesla Boulevard located on the site of the former Aluminum Company of America Inc. (Alcoa) West Plant. The City names streets in this area for famous scientists.

Located close to Tesla’s street are other streets named after his bitter rivals, Marconi and Edison. What’s more, Tesla’s street is exactly three miles (three being a number of harmonious significance to Tesla) from Maryville College, where the building Thaw Hall sits, named after financier Harry K. Thaw, the murderer of Tesla’s friend Stamford White.

Is it a coincidence a Colorado reference is made, or that they chose that particular inventor? After all, the killing of architect Stamford White also killed the continuation of the Wardenclyffe tower. Stamford White had the ears and respect of his elite friends in a way Tesla never did. It also happened to fall into Tesla’s favor that White was a future enthusiast, so Tesla’s ideas were refreshing to White, who never charged Tesla for his work. They were best friends by the common ground they shared.

In fact, Stamford White always showed favor to the designs that incorporated tower-like buildings. He was infamous for them. White had the ability to make big time players like JP Morgan invest in big ideas. With White murdered, Tesla’s major source of support was gone.

The Terrestrial Night Light, a Nikola Tesla concept, creates light from the atmosphere. There is no bulb to speak of, and in fact no hardware at all. Imagine using this technology in advertising, for example, Coca-Cola.

In between Nikola Tesla Boulevard and Maryville College is a street called East Newton Road. There, an ultraviolet purple city street light casts a futuristic shade of light I call “metallic UVC purple light.”

Nikola Tesla invented UVC light and ozone both known for their sanitizing and germ-killing properties.

2023
Thaw Hall’s 100-year Anniversary

In 2023, a man in red jumpsuit begins mysteriously appearing on the small-town college campus advertising Coca-Cola, the well-known soft drink. The futuristic luminous advertising man takes the college by storm. In the days of smelting metals to create a cleaner process and less impurities in the metals, a certain type of fuel named “Coke” is used. Coke fuel is gray in color and is a purified version of coal. The Coca-Cola Man is seen as a controversial figure, bringing futuristic ideas about building architecture, clothing and advertising, what an artist is, and the overall presence on campus.

Compelled by the powers of multiple coincidences, I wrote this article. I can’t ignore the overwhelming personal coincidences I continue to see in these events.

For example, after Harry K. Thaw was done going in and out of prison, he finally settled down and even became a fireman. Incredible.

He was also a military school cadet and was in the “coking” business with friend Henry Clay Frick.

Initially, my interest in Maryville College was to take the ceramics course and study the process of brick making. Little did I know about the history of legendary student Kin Takahashi (1895), who led fellow classmates and alumni into creating over 300,000 bricks for what is now Bartlett Hall. That sold it for me.

My creation, Coca-Cola Man, carries in his red briefcase a brick I designed, which I call the brick of the future. This brick has a special solid coating of Cuverro, a self-sanitizing layer of specialized medical copper.

What if we constructed our buildings with these technologies in mind? I asked that very question to the leadership and designated professors at Maryville College. The snubbing, cold shoulder treatment, and abrupt rejection of my proposals ultimately led me to an even better, more eye-catching idea: the Coca-Cola Man. I used creative license to advertise Coca-Cola on the campus. The campus sells Coca-Cola; the company is a Maryville College sponsor. Once I retired from my firefighting career, I was free to chase my original childhood dreams, and create an original comic book.

The “brick of the future” is not my only design idea. The Coca-Cola Man is itself a proof of concept for the future of advertising: the use the human body as advertising space. Even more importantly, the Coca-Cola Man costume is a complete germ-killing design, in its materials and the UVC lights it projects. Coca-Cola Man as a concept already lives in the future.

I am Temis Guzman and I am the Coca-Cola Man.

Tesla’s version of a sphere on a pedestal to conduct his electrical experiments required very conductive metals, which is why he used copper for his spheres. It just so happens that the Knoxville Sunsphere’s glass panels are made out of the most electrically conductive material on the planet: 24k gold.

“Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.”

Stay tuned, there’s more to come! Check back with the blog for:

Jetson’s Theory Part 2
More of the Nikola Tesla/Knoxville Tennessee connection