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Inventive Minds

What did Einstein, Tesla, Marconi and Wurster all discover? Long Island.

By Catherine Heusel | Staff Writer

Albert Einstein summered on LI in the '30s and on Aug. 2, 1939, wrote FDR a letter that is credited with launching the Manhattan Project to build an A-bomb. (AP Photo, 1993)

MAVERICKS. In some cases, legends of scientific invention. Innovative thinkers who challenged the status quo. A look at a few leaders who accomplished some of their life's work on Long Island and went on to make their marks on the world.

Albert Einstein Reluctant Father of the A-bomb

Although Albert Einstein is usually associated with Princeton, his home from 1933 until his death, the legendary physicist summered on Long Island throughout the late 1930s. In 1937 he rented a house on the waterfront in Huntington, and in subsequent years he stayed in a cottage on Old Cove Road in Peconic (now Cutchogue). It was there that Einstein signed the letter widely believed to have launched the Manhattan Project, the top-secret mission to develop an atomic bomb.

In August, 1939, Einstein was visited by fellow physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, who brought disturbing news. Researchers in France and the United States had shown that it was possible to "set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power . . . would be generated." To Einstein, the implications were clear. This discovery could also lead to the construction of new, immensely powerful bombs.

At the urging of Szilard and Wigner, Einstein put his signature on a letter alerting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the dangers of this discovery and its potential applications. A single nuclear bomb, he wrote "might very well destroy" a whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

Although the United States had relatively little uranium, German-held Czechoslovakia had a rich supply. The Germans had curtailed the sale of uranium from Czechoslovkian mines, wrote Einstein, and was presumably at work developing its own atomic weapons.

The letter, dated Aug. 2, 1939, had the desired effect. In 1940, the United States Advisory Committee (later to become the Manhattan Project) began work on developing an atomic bomb. Just five years later, the world's first atomic bomb was exploded at the Alamogordo testing range in New Mexico.

Guglielmo Marconi Linking America to Europe via Radio

It was little more than a shack filled with equipment and wires, and the inventor himself may never have set foot in it, but when the American branch of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. opened its Babylon shore station in 1901, Long Island's place in radio history was secured.

Guglielmo Marconi first came to the United States in 1899, to organize a newspaper telegraph service that would allow the New York Herald to cover an international yacht race in New York Harbor. Marconi and his men broadcast regular updates on the race from two ships nearby. For the first time, a paper was able to receive news as it happened. After nearly four years of success in Europe, Marconi had made his mark in the New World.

Over the next several years, Marconi established stations along the Eastern Seaboard, ranging from Newfoundland -- where the first trans-Atlantic radio signal was received in 1901 -- all the way down the coast of New York and New Jersey. The stations provided crucial communication links with ships along the coast and out into the Atlantic.

The Babylon station was established in 1901 shortly after Marconi received that transmission at Newfoundland. Although Marconi had a history of personally selecting the locations of his transmitter stations, it is unclear whether he actually visited the Babylon site. In a 1968 interview with Long Island Forum, radio pioneer Harold H. Beverage recalled a 1921 meeting with H.J. Round (a former technical director of the Marconi company), who had actually constructed the Babylon station. Years later Round relocated the unassuming shack, now a paint shop, for Edward Armstong, who purchased the historic building and presented it to Radio Corporation of America.

Although Marconi may not have been personally involved in his Babylon station, he was a frequent visitor to Rocky Point, home of RCA's Radio Central. From 1921 through the 1930s, the massive radio towers were the only means of direct communication with Europe.

Nikola Tesla The Wizard of Wardenclyffe

Of all of the scientific pioneers to leave their mark on Long Island, few were more ambitious than Nikola Tesla, the flamboyant Serbian inventor who feuded with Thomas Edison and Marconi, provided electricity for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, persuaded some of the richest men of his time to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in his work, yet died penniless in 1943 at the age of 86.

In 1900, as Marconi was using several of Tesla's patents to build his own reputation as the inventor and promoter of wireless communication across the seas, Tesla convinced millionaire industrialist J.P. Morgan to finance a gigantic transmitter for transoceanic communication. In Tesla's vision, this enormous station would transmit not only communication signals, but power -- providing electricity to people around the world -- and would employ up to 2,000 people, whose families would live near the plant. From Morgan's perspective, it was an opportunity to monopolize the radio broadcasting business.

Tesla decided to build his great transmitter on 200 acres in Shoreham, courtesy of James D. Warden, the manager and director of the Suffolk County Land Co. In tribute to Warden, Tesla named his proposed plant Wardenclyffe and enlisted noted architect Stanford White in designing the station and its transmitter tower. By fall, 1901, the design was finalized: Wardenclyffe would consist of a massive brick building topped by a 187-foot wooden tower, capped with a giant electrode and encasing a steel shaft that would drop 120 feet into the earth.

Construction of the tower was completed by 1903, and in the summer of that year The New York Sun reported the strange goings-on at Tesla's transmitter. On July 15, 1903, "all sorts of lightning were flashed from the tall tower and poles," the paper said, and "the air was filled with blinding streaks of electricity which seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand."

But the nightly electrical displays led nowhere. Tesla filed patent after patent -- including one titled "Apparatus for Transmitting Electrical Energy" -- yet produced nothing to encourage his wealthy investor or impress the scientific community. Eventually, Morgan refused to sink any more money into the Wardenclyffe project, and from 1903 through 1912, Tesla divided his time between avoiding bill collectors, soliciting new investors and continuing his mysterious experiments. In 1912 several companies that had outfitted Wardenclyffe repossessed the equipment remaining at the plant, ending Tesla's work there, and in 1915 Tesla signed over the deed to Wardenclyffe to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel to pay his debts.

The Waldorf-Astoria corporation had even less success with Wardenclyffe than Tesla. The War Department had no use for the abandoned plant, and private industry proved disinterested. When war broke out in 1917, it was rumored German spies were using the tower to send information on Allied shipping to submarines off the coast. Eventually, the Waldorf-Astoria corporation destroyed the tower and sold the steel for scrap. It received $1,750 for the remnants of Tesla's dream.