Pro Tesla

Your Winter 1992 issue is so interesting that it was difficult to know which article to read first—until I found Curt Wohleber’s “The Work of the World.” I cannot express enough appreciation to Mr. Wohleber and your magazine for bringing to the public an appreciation of Nikola Tesla, certainly one of the most underrated geniuses who ever lived.

I am a professional musician with fifty-eight students. My residence is equipped with pianos, a large pipe organ, and a three-quarters-of-a-millionvolt Tesla coil. My young students delight in operating it and producing lightning displays. I take the time to explain just what Tesla did and how they benefit from his AC polyphase system, and what it has meant to the world. In addition, I have written a fivemovement symphonic suite for organ based on five events in Tesla’s life.

Raymond A. Brubacher
Olney, Md.

Pro Tesla

It was a pleasure to read Curt Wohleber’s story about Tesla. Toward the end of Tesla’s life, when he was living a hand-to-mouth existence in various New York hotel rooms, one of the Westinghouse headquarters staff members traveled frequently from Pittsburgh to New York to be certain that the old man had food and a comfortable place to live. The Westinghouse management did not feel that all its responsibilities had ended with the payment to Tesla of $216,000 in 1896.

Tesla was both a practical genius and a totally impractical dreamer. He was so ignorant of many aspects of engineering that he wanted to transmit large amounts of electric power over great distances by radio transmission from his Wardenclyffe tower. But his polyphase systems did work to the great benefit of mankind. He should be remembered.

Frank W. Godsey, Jr.
Beech Mountain, N.C.

Making Rope

I found Barbara A. Merry and Ben Martinez’s article on ropemaking (“Rope,” Fall 1991) extremely interesting and informative. An important aspect of the story that they didn’t mention is the role of the United States Navy in ropemaking at the Charlestown Navy Yard, in Boston. The quarter-mile-long ropewalk there, which still stands intact, produced practically all the Navy’s rope from 1837 to 1971. It was designed by the noted architect Alexander Parris, who also designed Boston’s Quincy Market, and originally used the most advanced steam-powered ropewalk machinery, made by the local inventor Daniel Treadwell.

The Navy got into the business of ropemaking because of the varied quality of the rope then produced in private ropewalks. The building is not now open to the public, but the Boston Redevelopment Authority, in cooperation with the National Park Service, hopes to restore it, converting part of it for adaptive reuse and the rest for public exhibits. This effort should go far in preserving the last full-length historic ropewalk in America.

Louis P. Hutchins
Historian
Boston National Historical Park
Charlestown Navy Yard
Boston, Mass.

At Ground Zero

As the White Sands Missile Range coordinator for the semiannual open houses at Trinity Site, I was pleased to see the article on Jumbo in your Fall 1991 issue (“A Few Words About This Picture,” by Stanley Goldberg). We had our fall open house on October 5, and Jumbo again attracted crowds of curious visitors. It sits in the Trinity Site parking lot, about three hundred yards from Ground Zero.

Visitors were not always able to see what is left of Jumbo. It used to sit in a ditch outside the fenced area where visitors are allowed. In 1979 the missile range moved the cylinder up to the parking lot. Since it probably weighs more than a hundred tons, we had no way to lift it onto a trailer. Instead our engineers dug a ramp below it and backed a large flatbed under it. A bulldozer then pushed Jumbo onto the trailer. The process was reversed in the parking lot using a ramp bladed into the sandy soil.

At the time, one of our safety people visited the site and worried some small child might roll Jumbo over onto himself. He had timbers placed on either side of the cylinder to prevent it from moving. I thought some of the crew might hurt themselves laughing after the official left.

In the article Goldberg states, “Today Jumbo rests at Alamogordo a few yards from the Ground Zero monument.” Actually Trinity and Jumbo are about an eighty-five-mile drive from Alamogordo. This is a common error that has its beginnings in 1942, when the Army needed a cover story for the bright flash of light and shock wave from the test. Groves put out a news release saying there had been an accident at the Alamogordo Bombing Range involving high explosives. Socorro is actually the closest city to the site.

Trinity Site is a National Historic Landmark in the middle of the White Sands Missile Range’s active firing areas. We open it to the public on the first Saturdays in April and October.

Jim Eckles
Public Affairs Specialist
U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range
White Sands Missile Range, N.Mex.