rs on the first day), but all the
Russians would say in reply was that they were carrying out an
experiment. At first nobody seemed to know what they were doing
because it was obviously not intended as another form of jamming of
foreign broadcasts, an old Russian custom as we all know.

It is believed that in the pursuit of his life's ambition to send
power through the earth without the use of wires, Tesla had achieved a
small measure of success at E.L.F. (extremely low frequencies) of the
order of 7 to 12 Hz. These frequencies are at present used by the
military for communicating with submarines submerged in the oceans of
the world.

Tesla's career and private life have remained something of a
mystery. He lived alone and shunned public life. He never read any
of his papers before academic institutions, though he was friendly
with some journalists who wrote sensational stories about him. They
said he was terrified of microbes and that when he ate out at a
restaurant he would ask for a number of clean napkins to wipe the
cutlery and the glasses he drank out of. For the last 20 years of his
life until he died during World War II in 1943 he lived the life of a
semi-recluse, with a pigeon as his only companion. A disastrous fire
had destroyed his workshops and many of his experimental models and
all his papers were lost for ever.

Tesla had moved to Colorado Springs where he built his largest
ever coil which was 52 feet in diameter. He studied all the different
forms of lightning in his unsuccessful quest for the transmission of
power without wires.

In Yugoslavia, Tesla is a national hero and a well-equipped museum
in Belgrade contains abundant proof of the genius of this
extraordinary man.

CHAPTER TWO

THE BIRTH OF RADIO COMMUNICATIONS

By 1850 most of the basic electrical phenomena had been
investigated. However, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), Professor of
Experimental Physics at Cambridge then came up with something entirely
new. By some elegant mathematics he had shown the probable existence
of electromagnetic waves of radiation. But it was twenty four years
later (eight years after Maxwell's death) that Heinrich Hertz
(1857-1894) in Germany gave a practical demonstration of the accuracy
of this theory. He generated and detected electromagnetic waves
across the length of his laboratory on a wavelength of approximately
one metre