Tesla drawn to Colorado's thin, dry air, and other electrifying challenges

Lab in Colorado Springs preceeded by AC success in Telluride

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Right at the very turn of the 20th Century (1899-1900), futurist and the odd, Serbian-American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, made quite a stir here in Colorado when he located his Colorado laboratory in Colorado Springs. But his work and projects influenced other parts of the state, long before that.

According to recent writings Kaushik Patowary of Amusing Planet, "Tesla was drawn to Colorado Springs by the same qualities that brought thousands of tuberculosis patients to the mountain city—the city’s thin and dry air. But unlike the city’s many residents, Tesla was not looking for a cure."

In the spring of 1899, he set up a laboratory on a small grassy hill in what is now known in some circles, as Knob Hill. 

To further study the conductive nature of "low-pressure air," Tesla set up an experimental station at high altitude in Colorado Springs during 1899. There he could safely operate much larger coils than in the cramped confines of his New York lab, and an associate had made an arrangement for the El Paso Power Company to supply alternating current free of charge (though, by some reports he was sued by the city later for power a bill for power, and eventually land and building materials of the lab were sold to satisfy a long-held debt to the City of Colorado Springs. 

To fund his experiments, he convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 (equal to more than $3 million in today's dollars) to become a majority shareholder in the Nikola Tesla Company. According later reports, Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system. Instead, Tesla used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments. Upon his arrival, he told reporters that he planned to conduct wireless telegraphy experiments, transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris. 

There, he conducted experiments with a large coil operating in the megavolts range, producing artificial lightning (and thunder) consisting of millions of volts and discharges of up to 135 feet in length, and, at one point, inadvertently burned out the generator in El Paso, causing a power outage. The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy."

"Tesla believed that electricity could be transmitted across vast distances through the atmosphere without using wires. To test his theories of wireless transfer of electrical energy, Tesla needed a place that was situated in the mountains where the air was thin and easy to ionize, and therefore more conductive to electricity. Tesla found Colorado Springs’s location at six thousand feet favorable for his research. The land was free and sparsely populated which gave him privacy. Also, the dryness of the air minimized leakage of currents, and as Tesla discovered to his delight," writes Patowary. 

Leonard E. Curtis, a lawyer and friend of Nikola Tesla, found him the necessary land and power needed for his research from the El Paso Power Company. With the help of several large donations from Tesla’s numerous wealthy friends, the inventor erected a small but powerful laboratory in the middle of the prairie, just east of Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, which still operates to this day.

"The laboratory was a peculiar structure, that looked like a barn but with an eighty-foot tall wooden lattice tower attached to its roof. This tower was surmounted by a 142-foot metal mast. At the top of the metal pole balanced a large copper ball. Hand-written signs hung at the entrance warning any curious onlookers— “Keep Out. Great Danger” it said, along with a quote from Dante's Inferno: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.,” says Patowary. 

"The ominous signs were not a ruse to deter unwanted visitors, although it did keep nosey people away. The laboratory posed genuine risk to anyone who ventured too close. Inside, the wooden building, Tesla built a monstrous coil, 52 feet across, that threw millions of volts of electricity through the air producing intense arcs of energy that threatened the very existence of the building in which it was housed. To prevent fire from consuming the building, Tesla devised a rolling roof that could be thrown back when experiments were on. " 

The experiments in the Colorado Springs lab were not without other problems, including knocking out the entire electrical system city-wide. "Tesla had inadvertently destroyed the power company’s dynamo. He pulled so many amperes from the electric generator that it went up in flames. The power company demanded that Tesla pay for the damage, which he did, and the generator was up in a few days."

But years prior to his Colorado Springs work, Tesla may have experienced one of his earliest and greatest victories in Telluride.

"Lucien L. Nunn, who was trained as lawyer at Harvard and schooled in Germany at Goettingen University, moved to Telluride in the late 1880s. As the manager of the Gold King Mine, located high above Telluride near today’s ghost town of Alta, Nunn was faced with dwindling profits and possible closure if he could not figure out how to power the mine and milling operations at a lower cost. The mine, which had already cut all the trees for fuel over the years, was now being powered by coal, which had to be brought in by mule trains. The cost was prohibitive," according to Alan Drew, who has articles about Nunn and the Ames power plant for years.

Nunn had read about the successes of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse with alternating current power and was impressed with their claims that it could be transmitted much longer distances than Direct Current. He was able to strike a deal with Tesla and Westinghouse to build the world’s first commercial grade alternating current power plant in Telluride. The Ames Power Plant in Telluride began operation in 1891.

Later the dustup between Thomas Edison and Tesla became known as the “War of the Currents.”  Edison, backed direct current or DC, and Nikola Tesla, who was promoting something different in the form alternating current or AC.

AC power worked in Telluride and it could be transmitted miles and power large equipment. As a direct result of the success of the power plant in Telluride, Tesla and Westinghouse were invited to demonstrate alternating current power right next to the Edison Electric Company’s demonstration of direct current at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. More than 30 million people in total attended the extravaganza and everyone witnessed for themselves the "'Battle of the Currents.'"

Another victory, the Niagara Falls Power Plant had been planned to be a direct current power plant, but was changed after the Chicago World’s Fair. The plant, which is still working today and has a statue of Nikola Tesla overlooking the falls, worked and supplied cheap, abundant power to the Northeast of America at a critical time in the Industrial Revolution.

The Telluride mine also had a river nearby—a fork of the San Miguel.  Lucien L. Nunn approached Westinghouse to try out Tesla’s idea for alternating current.

Tesla himself did not come to Telluride. Westinghouse sent a team of engineers to Colorado to build the Ames Hydroelectric Plant based on his designs for the generator and induction motor. On the 19th of June 1891, they flipped the switch and sent electricity along newly constructed transmission lines up to the Gold King, which was at 12,000 feet in elevation. Ames plant made history as the first hydroelectric facility to generate and transmit alternating current for industrial purposes in the U.S. The success at Ames proved that AC was a viable option, and, shortly after, the same design of the plant was built on a much larger scale at Niagara Falls.

Lucien Nunn went on to install similar systems at other mines and eventually provided electricity to Telluride—making it the first town in the country to be powered by alternating current. The Ames hydro plant runs to this day and is owned and operated by Xcel Energy. Mychal Raynes, a plant specialist, says it’s only needed a few improvements and otherwise is still using the original equipment.

In Lightning In His Hand: The Nikola Tesla Story, author Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper describes one of his experiments:

"The crackling and snap repeated and then came a tremendous upsurge of sound as the power built up. There was a crescendo of vicious snaps above. The noises became machine-gun staccato, then roared to artillery intensity. Ghostly sparks danced a macabre routine all over the laboratory. There was a smell of sulfur that might be coming from hell itself. A weird blue light spread all over the room. Flames began to jump from the ball at the top of the mast- first a few feet long- then longer and brighter- thicker, bluer. More emanations until they reached rod like proportions thick as an arm and with a length of over 130 feet. The heavens reverberated with a terrific thunder that could be heard 15 miles over the ridge to Cripple Creek."

During his time at his Colorado Springs laboratory, Tesla observed unusual signals from his receiver which he speculated to be communications from another planet. He mentioned them in a letter to a reporter in December 1899 and to the Red Cross Society in December 1900. Reporters treated it as a sensational story and jumped to the conclusion Tesla was hearing signals from Mars.  He expanded on the signals he heard in a February 9, 1901 Collier's Weekly article entitled "Talking With Planets,"where he said it had not been immediately apparent to him that he was hearing "intelligently controlled signals" and that the signals could have come from Mars, Venus, or other planets. It has been hypothesized that he may have intercepted Guglielmo Marconi's European experiments in July 1899—Marconi may have transmitted the letter S (dot/dot/dot) in a naval demonstration, the same three impulses that Tesla hinted at hearing in Colorado—or signals from another experimenter in wireless transmission.

Tesla had an agreement with the editor of The Century Magazine to produce an article on his findings. The magazine sent a photographer to Colorado to photograph the work being done there. The article, titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," appeared in the June, 1900,  edition of the magazine. He explained the superiority of the wireless system he envisioned but the article was more of a lengthy philosophical treatise than an understandable scientific description of his work, illustrated with what were to become iconic images of Tesla and his Colorado Springs experiments.

Working for about nine months in his Colorado Springs lab,  his popularity waned, as his findings were difficult to grasp for investors and others that followed his exploits. Increasingly, he was considered eccentric and perhaps a bit of a ‘nut job.’

Popular reports in the papers didn’t help at all to defuse that idea, as noted in the following account in the Rocky Mountain News in January of 1901 headlined “Tesla will talk with Mars from Pikes Peak.”
“… I have observed electrical actions which have appeared inexplicable, faint and uncertain though they were, and they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge that before long all human beings on this globe, as one will turn their eyes on the firmament above, with feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news:
“Brethren, we have a message from another world, unknown and remote. 

It reads:
One. One, two, three.” (signed) Nikola Tesla.