Canada Slim and the Chocolate Factory of Unhappiness

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 30 January 2019

This is not India, but nonetheless there are a few sacred cows in Switzerland one would be wise to not offend.

First, one should never question Switzerland’s superiority….

In anything.

Just as the laws of physics decree that the bumblebee cannot possibly fly, so the laws of economics similarly decree that Switzerland should not be doing so sickeningly well.

It is land-locked, has a home market smaller than London, speaks four languages, has no natural resources other than hydroelectric power, a little salt and few fish, no colonies nor membership in any major trading block, Switzerland should have faded from existence centuries ago.

Instead the Swiss are the only nation to make the Germans appear inefficient, the French undiplomatic and Texans poor.

Thus their mountains are higher, their tunnels longer, their watches superior, their cheese holey, their chocolate legendary and their gold real.

Second, appearances are deceiving.

Switzerland is not really a nation but rather a collection of 26 nations (or cantons) which finance themselves, raise their own taxes and spend them as they want.

Or one could also easily argue that it is not a collection of 26 cantons but rather an assemblage of 3,000 totally independent communities each making their own decisions about welfare, gas, electricity, water, roads and public holidays.

They are successful and proud of what they have accomplished yet simultaneously refuse to believe they are doing well and are convinced that tomorrow they will lose everything they have worked for.

They are officially quadlingual polyglots.

Yet not only have I never heard of anyone who can speak all four (French, German, Italian and Rumanisch) languages, I have rarely encountered outside of Freiburg/Freibourg and Biel/Bienne anyone who is bilingual in even two of the four.

In the Bundeshaus in Bern (the national/federal parliament in the capital) one sees a minor miracle of one member speaking in one language while the other member responds in a different one with no loss of comprehension or pause in conversation.

But beyond Bern, when the Swiss have to communicate in an official language not their own, then in all likelihood the French speaker will address his German counterpart in English and vice versa.

The Swiss Army doesn’t actually use the Swiss Army knives the tourists buy.

Swiss cheese is not called Swiss but Emmentaler.

Swiss fondue is simply (cheese) fondue while a meat fondue is inexplicably called a Chinese fondue.

Two Swiss national heroes are also problematic puzzlers.

Heidi, everyone’s favourite Swiss Miss, though created by a Swiss writer, was actually a German girl who moved to Switzerland to live with her Swiss grandfather in Frau Johanna Spyri’s books.

William Tell (or Wilhelm) is a proud Swiss symbol of independence but whether he actually existed or whether he was invented by those who were not Swiss (Germans Goethe and Friedrich Schiller / Italy’s Rossini) is debatable.

The cuckoo clock is not Swiss.

It is German from the Black Forest, despite what Orson Wells would have us believe.

Trains are not as punctual as the legend suggests that folks could use their stopwatches to predict a train’s exact arrival.

The S8 connecting Schaffhausen with St. Gallen is, in my personal experience of using it on an almost daily basis, more often tardy rather than timely.

The Swiss are world class diploments who make the world believe that they want the world to love them, but they have a problem with not loving the world in return but not liking other Swiss as well.

They are famous for their neutrality yet armed to the teeth.

And much like my fellow Canadians, they are proud of their homeland yet would be hard-pressed to say what exactly that identity is of which they are proud.

They are conservative to the extreme, yet Switzerland has harboured radicals of every political ideology imaginable (including Mussolini and Lenin), has surprised with artistic movements (like Dadaism and Bauhaus) and has sheltered movie and music legends who revolutionized the world with their creativity and talent (like Freddy Mercury, Charlie Chaplin and Tina Turner).

Switzerland is dull and uninspiring.

Even though Mary Shelley was English her Frankenstein‘s Monster was as Swiss as the Matterhorn.

James Bond is the product of a Swiss mother and a Scottish father and much of Bond lore (movies and literature) has taken place within Switzerland.

A land of contradictions with an identity as firmly guarded as a bank vault.

Let us consider Swiss chocolate.

The world over, chocolate is the foodstuff most readily identifiable with Switzerland.

Chocolate is everywhere.

It is the afternoon pick-me-up, the sensual indulgence, the accoutrement to seduction.

The ancient Aztecs believed that chocolate was an aphrodisiac and Emperor Montezuma would gorge himself on chocolate in advance of his trysts as a type of non-prescription Viagra.

The solid, moldable chocolate “bar” was developed by the Bristol confectioner Joseph Fry in 1847.

But many early pioneers of chocolate-making were Swis:

• Francois-Louis Cailler, who started production of what was then largely sold as a restorative tonic at Vevey in 1819.

• He was soon followed by Philippe Suchard in Neuchâtel.

• Until 1875, all chocolate was dark and bitter, but in that year Vevey-based Daniel Peter, a candlemaker who married Cailler’s daughter, became involved in chocolate-making, invented milk chocolate, aided by his neighbour Henri Nestlé.

• Nestlé started his firm (now one of the world’s largest food multinationals) by manufacturing condensed milk, which Peter used in chocolate manufacture in preference to the too-watery ordinary milk, creating a concoction that was not only more palatable than previously available but less expensive as well.

• In 1879 Rodolphe Lindt of Bern invented “conching“, a process which creates the smooth melting chocolate familiar today.

• Jean Tobler, also of Bern, was another pioneer and today every one of the seven billion triangles of Toblerone eaten annually are still produced in that city.

Today, more chocolate is sold in Switzerland per head of population than any other country.

The seeds of the cacao tree have an intense bitter taste and must be fermented to develop the flavor.

After fermentation, the beans are dried, cleaned, and roasted.

The shell is removed to produce cacao nibs, which are then ground to cocoa mass, unadulterated chocolate in rough form.

Once the cocoa mass is liquefied by heating, it is called chocolate liquor.

The liquor also may be cooled and processed into its two components: cocoa solids and cocoa butter.

Baking chocolate, also called bitter chocolate, contains cocoa solids and cocoa butter in varying proportions, without any added sugar.

Powdered baking cocoa, which contains more fiber than it contains cocoa butter, can be processed with alkali to produce Dutch cocoa.

Much of the chocolate consumed today is in the form of sweet chocolate, a combination of cocoa solids, cocoa butter or added vegetable oils, and sugar.

Milk chocolate is sweet chocolate that additionally contains milk powder or condensed milk.

White chocolate contains cocoa butter, sugar, and milk, but no cocoa solids.

Chocolate is one of the most popular food types and flavors in the world, and many foodstuffs involving chocolate exist, particularly desserts, including cakes, pudding, mousse, chocolate brownies, and chocolate chip cookies.

Many candies are filled with or coated with sweetened chocolate, and bars of solid chocolate and candy bars coated in chocolate are eaten as snacks.

Gifts of chocolate molded into different shapes (such as eggs, hearts, coins) are traditional on certain Western holidays, including Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day and Hanukkah.

Chocolate is also used in cold and hot beverages, such as chocolate milk and hot chocolate, and in some alcoholic drinks, such as creme de cacao.

Chocolate is big business.

In 2005 the global market was approximately $100 billion.

Each year, the world consumes close to three million tons of chocolate and other cocoa products.

One Swiss firm alone, Lindt & Sprüngli had a revenue of CHF 4.088 billion in 2017.

It was my discovery that Lindt has their headquarters and outlet shop in Kilchberg (near Zürich) and a separate visit to Maestrani’s Chocolarium outside the town of Flawil (near St. Gallen) that made me curious about the actual production of chocolate….

Bern, Switzerland, 12 March 2013:

Lindt produces the Gold Bunny, a hollow milk chocolate rabbit in a variety of sizes available every Easter since 1952.

Each bunny wears a small coloured ribbon bow around its neck identifying the type of chocolate contained within.

The milk chocolate bunny wears a red ribbon, the dark chocolate bunny wears a dark brown ribbon, the hazelnut bunny wears a green ribbon, and the white chocolate bunny wears a white ribbon.

Other chocolates are wrapped to look like carrots, chicks, or lambs.

The lambs are packaged with four white lambs and one black lamb.

During the Christmas season, Lindt produces a variety of items, including chocolate reindeer (which somewhat resemble the classic bunny), Santa, snowmen figures of various sizes, bears, bells, advent calendars and chocolate ornaments.

Various tins and boxes are available in the Lindt stores, the most popular colour schemes being the red and blue.

Other seasonal items include Lindt chocolate novelty golf balls.

For Valentine’s Day, Lindt sells a boxed version of the Gold Bunny, which comes as a set of two kissing bunnies.

Other Valentine’s Day seasonal items include a selection of heart-shaped boxes of Lindor chocolate truffles.

They are the symbol of Easter in Switzerland, but the golden Lindt bunnies aren’t Swiss.

As revelations go, this one is up there with Heidi was German and Switzerland isn’t neutral in terms of shock value.

How can those cute little gold-wrapped bunnies not be Swiss?

They are made by Lindt & Sprüngli, one of the oldest and most famous chocolate makers in Switzerland.

Except they are made by Lindt & Sprüngli in Germany.

Diccon Bewes discovered this thanks to a friend from Helvetica LA who bought a Lindt bunny in Los Angeles only to find it was made in Germany.

Fair enough, Bewes thought, as America is an export market.

But surely the ones in Switzerland would be made here?

Wrong.

All the ones in the supermarkets in Bern are made in Germany, although you have to have good eyesight to discover that.

On the back of the bunny the ingredients are listed in German, French and Dutch but down at the bottom are the words:

Fabriqué par / Geproduceerd door: Lindt & Sprüngli GmbH (Allemagne/Deutschland) D-52072 Aachen.

Oddly this isn’t written in German given that they are sold in Germany.

Obviously they don’t want to have that anywhere for fear of scaring away canny Swiss consumers – even though most of them can understand the French anyway!

To reassure anyone who does cotton on to the fact that the bunny isn’t Swiss, there are the words:

Garantie de Qualité Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli Kilchberg/Suisse.

In other words, Lindt in Switzerland is the distributor for the German Lindt products.

At a time when “Swissness” is being debated in the Federal Parliament, it is interesting to see that this Swiss icon is not Swiss at all.

Bewes checked the shelves and Lindt very carefully marks their chocolate bars with SWISS MADE where it applies (so the bunny does not get that stamp of approval).

There was a proposal that foodstuffs get the SWISS MADE stamp only if 80% of their ingredients are Swiss, unless they include things that cannot possibly be Swiss because they are not grown here….

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 29 January 2019

But here’s the thing.

Not only is much of Swiss chocolate production reliant on imported sugar, but cocoa, the raw material of chocolate, itself isn’t grown in Switzerland.

Although cocoa originated in the Americas, West African countries, particularly Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, are the leading producers of cocoa in the 21st century, accounting for some 60% of the world cocoa supply.

Thousands of miles away from the American and European homes, where the majority of the world’s chocolate is devoured – Europe accounts for 45% of the world’s chocolate revenue – lies the denuded landscape of West Africa’s Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest producer of cocoa.

As the nation’s name suggests, elephants once abundantly roamed the rain forests of the Côte d’Ivoire.

Today’s reality is much different.

Only 200 – 400 elephants remain from an original population of hundreds of thousands.

Much of the country’s national parks and conservation lands have been cleared of their forests to make way for cocoa operators to feed demand from large chocolate companies like Nestlé, Cadbury and Mars.

Washington DC, 15 September 2017

NGO Mighty Earth released the results of an in-depth global investigation into the cocoa cartel that produces the raw material for chocolate.

The chocolate companies purchase the cocoa for their chocolate production from large agribusiness companies like Olam, Cargill and Barry Callebaut, who together control half the monopoly of global cocoa trade.

Most strikingly, the investigation found that for years the world’s major chocolate companies have been buying cocoa grown through the illegal deforestation of national parks and other protected forests, in addition to driving extensive deforestation outside of protected areas.

In the world’s two largest cocoa producing countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the market created by the chocolate industry has been the primary driver behind the destruction of forests.

Much of Côte d’Ivoire’s national parks and protected areas have been entirely or almost entirely cleared of forest and replaced with cocoa growing operations.

In the developed world, chocolate is seen as an affordable luxury that gives ordinary people a taste of sensuous delight at a modest cost.

But in West Africa, chocolate is rare and unaffordable to the majority of the population.

Most Ivorian cocoa farmers have never even tried chocolate.

Much of Côte d’Ivoire was densely covered by forests when it achieved independence in 1960, making it prime habitat for forest elephants and chimpanzees.

Elephants are on the verge of total disappearance.

13 of 23 Ivorian protected areas have lost their entire primate populations.

Chimpanzees are now considered an endangered species.

Côte d’Ivoire once boasted one of the highest rates of biodiversity in Africa, with thousands of endemic species.

Pygmy hippos, flying squirrels, pangolins, leopards and crocodiles are rapidly losing their last habitats.

Today less than 12% of the country remains forested and less than 4% remains densely forested.

The cocoa industry in Côte d’Ivoire has not been content with landscapes it was able to clear legally.

In recent years, it has pushed large-scale growing operations into the country’s national parks and other protected areas.

Needless to say, clearing forest to produce cocoa within protected areas violates Ivorian law.

Above: Flag of Côte d’Ivoire

A study conducted by Ohio State University and several Ivorian academic institutions examined 23 protected areas in Côte d’Ivoire and found that seven of them had been entirely converted to cocoa.

More than 90% of the land mass of these protected areas was estimated to be covered by cocoa.

Mighty Earth investigated Goin Débé Forest, Scio Forest, Mt. Péko National Park, Mt. Sassandra Forest, Tia Forest and Marahoué National Park.

Three of the world’s largest cocoa traders – Olam, Cargill and Barry Callebaut – buy cocoa grown illegally in protected areas.

They sell this cocoa to the world’s largest chocolate companies like Mars, Hershey, Mondelez, Ferrero, Lindt and others.

Other traders engage in similar practices.

Illegal deforestation for cocoa is an open secret throughout the entire chocolate supply chain.

Between five and six million people, largely small landholders, grow cocoa around the world.

In Côte d’Ivoire, cocoa farmers, who produce 43% of the world’s cocoa, earn around US 50 cents per day, 6.6% of the value of a chocolate bar.

By comparison, 35% goes to chocolate companies and 44% goes to retailers.

Additionally, the chocolate industry is notorious for labour rights abuses including slave labour and child labour.

According to the US Department of Labor:

“21% more children are illegally laboring on cocoa farms in Ghana and the Ivory Coast than five years ago.”

An estimated 2.1 million West African children are still engaged in dangerous, physically taxing cocoa harvesting.

Rather than eliminate the problem, the industry has merely pledged to reduce child labour in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana by 70% by 2020.

The investigation implicates almost every major chocolate brand and retailer, including Lindt & Sprüngli and my employer Starbucks.

Mighty Earth shared the findings with 70 chocolate companies.

None denied sourcing cocoa from protected areas.

None disputed any of the facts presented.

Kilchberg, Switzerland, 12 August 2018

This bedroom community of Zürich has only 8,470 people, but it is a significant place for three reasons:

• It was the final home and resting place for Nobel Prize German author Thomas Mann as well as his wife and most of his children.

Above: Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955)

(See Canada Slim and the Family of Mann of this blog.)

• It was also the final home and resting place of Swiss author Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, in whose honour Kilchberg has a Museum.

Above: Conrad Meyer (1825 – 1898)

(See Canada Slim and the Anachronistic Man of this blog.)

• It was the final home and resting place of Swiss chocolatier David Sprüngli-Schwartz and his son Rudolf Sprüngli-Ammann, and it remains the headquarters location of the company they founded, today’s Lindt & Sprüngli.

In 1836 David and Rudolf bought a small confectionery in the old town of Zürich, producing chocolates under the name David Sprüngli & Son.

Two years later, a small factory was added that produced chocolate in solid form.

With the retirement of Rudolf in 1892, the business was divided between his two sons.

The younger brother David received two confectionery stores that became known under the name Confiserie Sprüngli.

The elder brother Johann received the chocolate factory.

To raise the necessary finances for his expansion plans, Johann converted his private company into publicly traded Chocolat Sprüngli AG in 1899.

That same year, Johann acquired the chocolate factory of Rodolphe Lindt in Bern and the company changed its name to Aktiengesellschaft (AG) Vereingte Berner und Züricher Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli (the United Bern and Zürich Lindt and Sprüngli Chocolate Factories Ltd.).

In 1994, Lindt & Sprüngli acquired the Austrian chocolatier Hofbauer Österreich and integrated it, along with its Küfferle brand, into the company.

In 1997 and 1998, respectively, the company acquired the Italian chocolatier Caffarel and the American chocolatier Ghirardelli, and integrated both of them into the company as wholly owned subsidiaries.

Since then, Lindt & Sprüngli has expanded the once-regional Ghirardelli to the international market.

On 17 March 2009, Lindt announced the closure of 50 of its 80 retail boutiques in the United States because of weaker demand in the wake of the late-2000s recession.

On 14 July 2014, Lindt bought Russell Stover Candies, maker of Whitman’s Chocolate, for about $1 billion, the company’s largest acquisition to date.

In November 2018, Lindt opened its first American travel retail store in JFK Airport’s Terminal 1 and its flagship Canadian shop in Yorkdale Shopping Centre, Toronto.

Above: Lindt Yorkdale

Lindt & Sprüngli has twelve factories: Kilchberg, Switzerland; Aachen, Germany; Oloron-Sainte-Marie, France; Induno Olona, Italy; Gloggnitz, Austria; and Stratham, New Hampshire, in the United States.

The factory in Gloggnitz, Austria, manufactures products under the Hofbauer & Küfferle brand in addition to the Lindt brand.

Caffarel’s factory is located in Luserna San Giovanni, Italy, and Ghirardelli’s factory is located in San Leandro, California, in the United States.

Furthermore, there are four more factories of Russell Stover in the United States.

Lindt has opened over 410 chocolate cafés and shops all over the world.

The cafés’ menu offers mostly focuses on chocolate and desserts.

They also sell handmade chocolates, macaroons, cakes, and ice cream.

Above: “The Little Wash House“, Lindt Café, Zürich

Originally, Lindor was introduced as a bar in 1949 and later in 1967 in form of a ball.

Lindor is a type of chocolate produced by Lindt, which is now characterized by a hard chocolate shell and a smooth chocolate filling.

It comes in both a ball and a bar variety, as well as in a variety of flavours.

Each flavour has its own wrapper colour.

Most of the US Lindor truffles are manufactured in Stratham, New Hampshire.

Lindt sells at least 29 varieties of chocolate bars.

Lindt’s “Petits Desserts” range embodies famous European desserts in a small cube of chocolate.

Flavours include: Tarte au Chocolat, Crème Brulée, Tiramisu, Creme Caramel, Tarte Citron, Meringue, and Noir Orange.

Lindt makes a “Creation” range of chocolate-filled cubes: Milk Mousse, Dark Milk Mousse, White Milk Mousse, Chocolate Mousse, Orange Mousse, Pistachio and Cherry/Chili.

Bâtons Kirsch are Lindt Kirsch liqueur-filled, chocolate-enclosed tubes dusted in cocoa powder.

In Australia, Lindt manufactures ice cream in various flavours:

• 70% Dark Chocolate
• White Chocolate Framboise
• Sable Cookies and Cream
• Chocolate Chip Hazelnut
• White Chocolate and Vanilla Bean

The curious visitor and chocolate lover can have a guided tour of the Lindt production facilities by contacting Zürich Tourism in the Zürich Main Station.

Tours take place from May to September, Monday to Saturday and last 40 minutes for individuals or groups up to 16 people.

(http://www.lindt-experience.ch)

The factory outlet shop outside the factory is open from Monday to Friday 1000 – 1900, and Saturday 1000 – 1700.

The shop is seductive, the chocolate sinful.

In 2009, Swiss tennis star Roger Federer was named as Lindt’s “global brand ambassador” and began appearing in a series of commercials endorsing Lindor.

Roger Federer has huge popularity in the world of sport, to the point that he has been called a living legend in his own time.

Given his achievements, many players and analysts have considered Federer to be the greatest tennis player of all time.

No other male tennis player has won 20 major singles titles in the Open Era and he has been in 30 major finals, including 10 in a row.

He has held the world No. 1 spot in the ATP rankings for longer than any other male player.

He was also ranked No. 1 at the age of 36.

Federer has won a record eight Wimbledon titles and a joint-record six Australian Open titles.

He also won five consecutive US Open titles, which is the best in the Open Era.

He has been voted by his peers to receive the tour Sportsmanship Award a record thirteen times and voted by tennis fans to receive the ATP Fans’ Favorite award for fifteen consecutive years.

Federer has been named the Swiss Sports Personality of the Year a record seven times.

He has been named the ATP Player of the Year and ITF World Champion five times and he has won the Laureus World Sportsman of the Year award a record five times, including four consecutive awards from 2005 to 2008.

He is also the only individual to have won the BBC Overseas Sports Personality of the Year award four times.

Federer helped to lead a revival in tennis known by many as the Golden Age.

This led to increased interest in the sport, which in turn led to higher revenues for many venues across tennis.

During this period rising revenues led to exploding prize money.

When Federer first won the Australian Open in 2004 he earned $985,000, compared to when he won in 2018 and the prize had increased to AUD 4 million.

Upon winning the 2009 French Open and completing the career Grand Slam, Federer became the first individual male tennis player to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated since Andre Agassi in 1999.

He was also the first non-American player to appear on the cover of the magazine since Stefan Edberg in 1992.

Federer again made the cover of Sports Illustrated following his record breaking 8th Wimbledon title and second Grand Slam of 2017, becoming the first male tennis player to be featured on the cover since himself in 2009.

Federer is one of the highest-earning athletes in the world.

He is listed at No. 1 on the Forbes “World’s Highest Paid Athletes” list.

He is endorsed by Japanese clothing company Uniqlo and Swiss companies Nationale Suisse, Credit Suisse, Rolex, Lindt, Sunrise, and Jura Elektroapparate.

In 2010, his endorsement by Mercedes-Benz China was extended into a global partnership deal.

His other sponsors include Gillette, Wilson, Barilla, and Moët & Chandon.

Previously, he was an ambassador for Nike, NetJets, Emmi AG and Maurice Lacroix.

In 2003, he established the Roger Federer Foundation to help disadvantaged children and to promote their access to education and sports.

Since May 2004, citing his close ties with South Africa, including that this was where his mother had been raised, he began supporting the South Africa-Swiss charity IMBEWU, which helps children better connect to sports as well as social and health awareness.

Later, in 2005, Federer visited South Africa to meet the children that had benefited from his support.

Also in 2005, he auctioned his racquet from his US Open championship to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina.

At the 2005 Pacific Life Open in Indian Wells, Federer arranged an exhibition involving several top players from the ATP and WTA tour called Rally for Relief.

The proceeds went to the victims of the tsunami caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.

In December 2006, he visited Tamil Nadu, one of the areas in India most affected by the tsunami.

He was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador by UNICEF in April 2006 and has appeared in UNICEF public messages to raise public awareness of AIDS.

In response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Federer arranged a collaboration with fellow top tennis players for a special charity event during the 2010 Australian Open called ‘Hit for Haiti‘, in which proceeds went to Haiti earthquake victims.

He participated in a follow-up charity exhibition during the 2010 Indian Wells Masters, which raised $1 million.

The Nadal vs. Federer “Match for Africa” in 2010 in Zürich and Madrid raised more than $4 million for the Roger Federer Foundation and Fundación Rafa Nadal.

In January 2011, Federer took part in an exhibition, Rally for Relief, to raise money for the victims of the Queensland floods.

In 2014, the “Match for Africa 2” between Federer and Stan Wawrinka, again in Zurich, raised £850,000 for education projects in Southern Africa.

On 24 November 2017, Federer received an honorary doctorate awarded to him by his home university, the University of Basel.

He received the title in recognition for his role in increasing the international reputation of Basel and Switzerland and also his engagement for children in Africa through his charitable foundation.

But is he aware of the damage that Lindt’s demand for cocoa is doing to West Africa in regards to the destruction of both human lives and the environment?

Or, if he is aware, is he like many things Swiss – deceptive in appearance?

Flawil, Switzerland, 16 January 2018

As you pull into St. Gallen train station, you can’t miss the huge Chocolat Maestrani sign suspended above the tracks.

The local firm in nearby Flawil and the chocolate factory is within easy reach west of St. Gallen.

The name Maestrani has stood for exquisite chocolate creations since 1852.

At Maestrani’s Chocolarium – the Chocolate Factory of Happiness – the history of chocolate is brought alive in a fascinating Experience World for young and old alike.

Whether independently or on a guided tour, guests can explore the interactive zone and discover where chocolate comes from and how it is produced.

They also have the chance to view chocolate being produced live.

What’s more, sampling is actively encouraged!

At the end of the tour, for a small surcharge, a show confiseur will mold a fresh bar of chocolate, which guests can decorate as they wish.

Besides a movie theater, a cafe and chocolate molding courses, during which guests can make their own chocolate creations, sweet-toothed visitors can purchase their favorite chocolate products from the factory shop.

“He who sees the world through the eyes of a chocolate lover will find true beauty and happiness.” Aquilino Maestrani, founder and chocolate pioneer, (1814-1880)

The Chocolarium at Toggenburgerstrasse 41, Flawil, is open Monday to Friday 0900 – 1800, Saturday 0900 – 1700, Sunday 1000 – 1700, the last tour is one hour before closing.

The tour includes a gallery above the factory floor to watch the production lines.

To get there, take a train to Flawil from St. Gallen (12 minutes) then switch to a bus for the five-minute ride to “Flawil Maestrani” bus stop.

(http://www.maestrani.ch)

Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, 30 January 2019

It is a stunner, shingled with starfish-studded sands, palm tree forests and roads so orange they resemble strips of bronzing powder.

This is a true tropical paradise.

Above: Azuretti Beach, Grand Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire

In the south, the Parc National de Tai hides secrets, species and nut-cracking chimps under the tree boughs.

Above: Parc National de Tai, Côte d’Ivoire

The peaks and valleys of Man offer a highland climate, fresh air and fantastic hiking opportunities through tropical forests.

Above: Dent de Man, Côte d’Ivoire

The beach resorts of Assinie and Grand Bassam are made for weekend retreats from Abidjan, capital in all but name, where lagoons wind their way between skyscrapers and cathedral spires pierce the heavens.

Above: Images of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

Assinie and Dagbego have surf beaches.

In Yamoussoukro, the capital’s basilica floats on the landscape like a mirage.

Above: Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire

Sacred crocodiles guard the Presidential Palace.

Tourists gather as they are fed in the afternoon.

Above: Lac aux Crocodiles, Presidential Palace, Yamoussoukro

This is a culture rich with festivals and some of the most stunning artwork in Africa.

This is what the tourist sees.

The process of deforestation starts with settlers who invade parks and other forested areas.

They progressively cut down or burn existing trees.

Trunks are denuded of their crowns and are left as ghostly reminders of the great forests that once reigned.

With the forests gone, the settlers plant cocoa trees, which take years before they are ready to harvest.

Each cocoa tree bears two harvests of cocoa pods per year.

Farmers hack off the ripe cocoa pods from the trees with machetes.

They split open the pods to remove the cocoa beans, which are sorted and placed into piles.

The beans are left in the sun to ferment and dry and turn brown.

It is at this point that a first level of middlemen called “pisteurs” buy the cocoa beans from the settlers, transport it to villages and towns across the cocoa-growing region and sell them onto another set of middlemen, known as cooperatives.

The cooperatives then either directly or through a third set of middlemen bring the cocoa to the coastal ports of San Pedro and Abidjan, where it is sold to cocoa traders Olam, Cargill and Barry Callebaut, who ship the cocoa companies in Europe and North America.

Illegal towns and villages called “campements” have sprung up inside Côte d’Ivoire’s national parks and protected forests.

Some campements boast tens of thousands of residents, along with public schools, official health centres, mosques, churches, stores and cell phone towers in plain sight of government authorities.

There is an excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides that is killing the country’s biodiversity.

Deforestation and exposure to the fullness of the sun makes the environment suspectible to disease.

Over two million children are victims of the worst forms of child labour.

This is a land of child workers, slaves and low wages.

Low pay foments food insecurity and low school enrollment and attendance rates.

Inadequate prices paid for the coffee means farmers live under the poverty line.

Chemicals pollute the waterways, killing wildlife and harming communities.

This is a true tropical hell.

And what of the future?

Demand for chocolate continues to rise by 5% every year.

The chocolate industry has aggressively expanded to other rainforest nations around the world – Indonesia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru – exporting the same bad practices that are contributing to the destruction of West Africa’s forests and the creation of a living hell for its people.

Deforestation for cocoa has a significant impact on climate.

Tropical rainforests have among the highest carbon storage of any ecosystem on the planet.

When they are cleared, they release enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

A single dark chocolate bar made with cocoa from deforestation produces the same amount of carbon pollution as driving 4.9 miles in a car.

In Switzerland, life is rich and sweet.

In Côte d’Ivoire, life is poor and sour.

In Canada, a remembered jingle asks:

“When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?

Do you suck them very slowly or crunch them very fast?

It’s candy and milk chocolate, so tell me when I ask:

When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?”

An important question for these dark and bitter times, eh?

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / Facebook / The Rough Guide to Switzerland / Lonely Planet The World / Lonely Planet Africa on a Shoestring / Etelie Higonnet, Marisa Bellantonio and Glenn Hurowitz, Mighty Earth, Chocolate’s Dark Secret: How the Cocoa Industry Destroys National Parks / http://www.dicconbewes.ch / http://www.lindt-experience.ch / http://www.maestrani.ch

Canada Slim and the Man Who Invented the Future

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 21 January 2019

(Continued from Canada Slim and the Visionary & Canada Slim and the Current War)

“Imagine a man a century ago, bold enough to design and actually build a huge tower with which to transmit the human voice, music, pictures, press news and even power, through the Earth to any distance whatever without wires!

He probably would have been hung or burnt at the stake.”

(Hugo Gernsback, Preface to Nikola Tesla’s My Inventions: 5. The Magnifying Transmitter, Electrical Experimenter, June 1919)

Such was the high regard that Gernsback, Tesla’s greatest admirer, had for the Serbian inventor.

Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943) was one of the greatest scientists and innovators during the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

The Serbian genius went to America in 1884 and would be followed by his Luxemburger admirer Hugo Gernsback (1884 – 1967) twenty years later.

 

Both men would come to America to bring realization to their visionary ideas.

 

Tesla is the creative genius behind many great inventions which are today utilized in radio, industrial and nuclear technology.

Gernsback’s contributions as a publisher were so significant that, along with the novelists H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, that he is sometimes called the Father of Science Fiction, and it is in his honour that the annual awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention are named the Hugos.

 

For me there is an irony that Tesla was discovered by the world through Gernsback while I discovered Gernsback through the world of Tesla.

 

Belgrade, Serbia, 5 April 2018

A week’s vacation where boys will be boys in a part of the world far removed from our respective spouses found me visiting my Serbian friend Nesha in his home city of Belgrade.

Sadly, Nesha had more obligations in Serbia than just playing host to this Canadian blogger so half my stay involved me on my own.

I had arrived the previous day, travelling with Nesha from his home in Herisau, Switzerland, to his childhood house in the Serbian capital.

After breakfast the following morning, the dateline above, I set out to explore the city.

Krunska Street runs parallel to the Bulevar (King Aleksander Boulevard, one of the longest streets in Belgrade) and, in contrast, is a relatively quiet street and makes for a very pleasant stroll.

At Krunska 51, the Raska style villa of politician Dorde (George) Gencic, built in 1929, the Nikola Tesla Museum is engaged in educating and informing the public about the life and inventions of this Serbian scientist who died in Manhattan in 1943.

 

(Gernsback would die in the same city twenty-four years later.)

 

The Museum was founded when Sava Kosanovic, Tesla’s heir….

 

(Tesla never married.

He explained that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities.

He once said in earlier years that he felt that he could never be worthy enough for a woman, considering women superior in every way.

His opinion started to sway in later years when he felt that women were trying to outdo men and make themselves more dominant.

 

(I know how he feels!)

 

This “new woman” was met with much indignation from Tesla, who felt that women were losing their feminity by trying to be in power.

In an interview with The Galveston Daily News on 10 August 1924, he stated:

“In place of the soft voiced, gentle woman of my reverant worship, has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies in making herself as much as possible like man – in dress, voice and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind.

The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me.”

 

(Clearly his confusion has carried on into the modern age where the ongoing internal struggle between a woman defining herself and letting herself be defined by others still remains.)

Although he told a reporter in later years that he sometimes felt that by not marrying, he had made too great a sacrifice to his work, Tesla chose to never pursue or engage in any known relationships, instead finding all the stimulation he needed in his work.)

 

(Unlike Tesla, Gernsback would marry three times.)

 

Kosanovic brought Tesla’s effects and legacy to Belgrade.

These mainly consist of sketches of his unrealized works, his scientific journal, personal notes and also an urn containing his ashes.

Also at the Museum are thematic rooms, categorized according to different periods of his life.

The most interesting area is certainly that containing models which explain the functioning principles behind his inventions.

Above: Tesla two-phase induction motor

 

Though quite small the Museum has several interesting items on display and an interactive exposition that will capture your attention.

It holds more than 160,000 original documents, over 2,000 books and journals, over 1,200 historical technical exhibits, over 1,500 photographs and photo plates of original, technical objects, instruments and apparatus, and over 1,000 plans and drawings.

Above: Nikola Tesla’s baptismal certificate (24 July 1856)

 

The Museum is also of interest to researchers since it keeps almost all belongings left by the eccentric scientist.

Due to the importance that Tesla’s writings still have for science, the archive of the Museum has been added to the UNESCO Memory of the World list.

The Museum is divided into two parts.

The historical part is where one can see many of Tesla’s personal belongings, exhibits illustrating his life, awards and decorations bestowed.

The second presents the path of Tesla’s discoveries with models of his inventions in fields of electricity and engineering.

Guided tours in English and Serbian with fascinating demonstrations on how Tesla’s inventions work take place every hour on the hour.

 

Though Tesla never had great financial success, he nonetheless registered over 700 patents worldwide – examples of his best known discoveries being rotating magnetic fields, wireless communication (the foundation of remote control and radio) and rotary transformers.

During his life Tesla was recognized as a striking but sometimes eccentric genius.

Today he is praised for his great achievements:

In 1895 he designed the first hydroelectric power plant at the Niagara Falls.

Above: Schoellkopf Stations 3, 3B and 3C, Niagara Falls

 

His alternating current (AC) induction motor is considered one of the greatest discoveries of all time.

Tesla’s name has been honoured with the International Unit of Magnetic Flux Density, the Tesla (T).

 

Nevertheless I cannot help but wonder whether Tesla’s genius would be as well-known to the average man had it not been for Gernsback or whether he would have gone down in history as simply a clever eccentric without the additional fame Gernsback provided him.

And, to be fair, I wonder whether Gernsback would have found the inspiration for founding “scientifiction” had it not been for the scientific wonders that Tesla invented.

To bring these two men together I need to continue with Tesla’s story first.

 

From the 1890s through 1906, Tesla spent a great deal of time and fortune on a series of projects trying to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires.

It was an expansion of his idea of using coils to transmit power that he had been demonstrating in wireless lighting.

He saw this as not only a way to transmit large amounts of power around the world but also, as he had pointed out in his earlier lectures, a way to transmit worldwide communications.

 

At the time Tesla was formulating his ideas, there was no feasible way to wirelessly transmit communication signals over long distances, let alone large amounts of power.

 

By the mid 1890s, Tesla was working on the idea that he might be able to conduct electricity long distance through the Earth or the atmosphere, and began working on experiments to test this idea including setting up a large resonance transformer magnifying transmitter in his East Houston Street lab.

Above: Tesla’s East Houston Street lab, New York City

 

Seeming to borrow from a common idea at the time that the Earth’s atmosphere was conductive, he proposed a system composed of balloons suspending, transmitting, and receiving, electrodes in the air above 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in altitude, where he thought the lower pressure would allow him to send high voltages (millions of volts) long distances.

To further study the conductive nature of low pressure air, Tesla set up an experimental station at high altitude in Colorado Springs during 1899.

The Experimental Station was located on empty land on the highest local point (Knob Hill) between the 1876 Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind and the Union Printers Home, where Tesla conducted the research described in the Colorado Springs Notes, 1899-1900.

A few papers of the times listed Tesla’s lab as about 200 feet east of the Deaf and Blind School and 200 feet north of Pikes Peak Ave.

This put it on top of the hill at E. Kiowa St. and N. Foote Ave (facing west); as documented by Pikes Peak Library District.

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.

 

Tesla was focused in his research for the practical development of a system for wireless transmission of power and a utilization system.

Tesla said, in “On electricity“, Electrical Review (27 January 1897):

“In fact, progress in this field has given me fresh hope that I shall see the fulfillment of one of my fondest dreams; namely, the transmission of power from station to station without the employment of any connecting wires.“

 

Tesla went to Colorado Springs in mid-May 1899 with the intent to research:

1. Transmitters of great power.
2. Individualization and isolating the energy transmission means.
3. Laws of propagation of currents through the earth and the atmosphere.

Tesla spent more than half his time researching transmitters.

Tesla spent less than a quarter of his time researching delicate receivers and about a tenth of his time measuring the capacity of the vertical antenna.

Also, Tesla spent a tenth of his time researching miscellaneous subjects.

J. R. Wait’s commented on Tesla activity:

“From an historical standpoint, it is significant that the genius Nikola Tesla envisaged a world wide communication system using a huge spark gap transmitter located in Colorado Springs in 1899.

A few years later he built a large facility in Long Island that he hoped would transmit signals to the Cornish coast of England.

In addition, he proposed to use a modified version of the system to distribute power to all points of the globe”.

 

To fund his experiments he convinced John Jacob Astor IV to invest $100,000 to become a majority share holder in the Nikola Tesla Company.

Above: John Jacob Astor IV (1864 – 1912)(died on the Titanic)

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.

Above: Pike’s Peak, 12 miles / 19 km west of Colorado Springs

 

The lab possessed the largest Tesla coil ever built, 49.25 feet (15 m) in diameter, which was a preliminary version of the magnifying transmitter planned for installation in the Wardenclyffe Tower.

He produced artificial lightning, with discharges consisting of millions of volts and up to 135 feet (41 m) long.

Thunder from the released energy was heard 15 miles (24 km) away in Cripple Creek, Colorado.

People walking along the street observed sparks jumping between their feet and the ground.

Sparks sprang from water line taps when touched.

Light bulbs within 100 feet (30 m) of the lab glowed even when turned off.

Horses in a livery stable bolted from their stalls after receiving shocks through their metal shoes.

Butterflies were electrified, swirling in circles with blue halos of St. Elmo’s fire around their wings.

While experimenting, Tesla inadvertently faulted a power station generator, causing a power outage.

In August 1917, Tesla explained what had happened in The Electrical Experimenter:

“As an example of what has been done with several hundred kilowatts of high frequency energy liberated, it was found that the dynamos in a power house 6 miles (10 km) away were repeatedly burned out, due to the powerful high frequency currents set up in them, and which caused heavy sparks to jump through the windings and destroy the insulation!“

 

There he conducted experiments with a large coil operating in the megavolts range, producing artificial lightning (and thunder) consisting of millions of volts and up to 135 feet (41 m) long discharges 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.

 

During his time at his 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.

Above: Mars

 

He expanded on the signals he heard in a 9 February 1901 Collier’s Weekly article “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 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.

Above: Guglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937)

 

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.

 

Tesla made the rounds in New York trying to find investors for what he thought would be a viable system of wireless transmission, wining and dining them at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Palm Garden (the hotel where he was living at the time), The Players Club and Delmonico’s.

 

On 7 January 1900 Tesla made his final entry in his journal while in Colorado Springs.

In 1900 Tesla was granted patents for a “system of transmitting electrical energy” and “an electrical transmitter.”

 

When Guglielmo Marconi made his famous first-ever transatlantic radio transmission in 1901, Tesla quipped that it was done with 17 Tesla patents, though there is little to support this claim.

Above: Marconi watching his associates raising the kite used to lift the antenna, St. John’s, Newfoundland, 12 December 1901

 

In 1904, Tesla was sued for unpaid debts in Colorado Springs.

His lab was torn down and its contents were sold two years later at auction at the court house to satisfy his debts.

 

In March 1901, Tesla obtained $150,000 ($4,517,400 in today’s dollars) from J. Pierpont Morgan in return for a 51% share of any generated wireless patents and began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility to be built in Shoreham, New York, 100 miles (161 km) east of the city on the North Shore of Long Island.

Tesla’s design for Wardenclyffe grew out of his experiments beginning in the early 1890s.

 

His primary goal in these experiments was to develop a new wireless power transmission system.

 

He discarded the idea of using the newly discovered Hertzian (radio) waves, detected in 1888 by German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz since Tesla doubted they existed and basic physics told him, and most other scientists from that period, that they would only travel in straight lines the way visible light did, meaning they would travel straight out into space becoming “hopelessly lost“.

Above: Heinrich Hertz (1857 – 1894)

 

In laboratory work and later large scale experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899, Tesla developed his own ideas on how a worldwide wireless system would work.

He theorized from these experiments that if he injected electric current into the Earth at just the right frequency he could harness what he believed was the planet’s own electrical charge and cause it to resonate at a frequency that would be amplified in “standing waves” that could be tapped anywhere on the planet to run devices or, through modulation, carry a signal.

His system was based more on 19th century ideas of electrical conduction and telegraphy instead of the newer theories of air-borne electromagnetic waves, with an electrical charge being conducted through the ground and being returned through the air.

 

Tesla’s design used a concept of a charged conductive upper layer in the atmosphere, a theory dating back to an 1872 idea for a proposed wireless power system by Mahlon Loomis.

Above: Mahlon Loomis (1826 – 1886)

 

Tesla not only believed that he could use this layer as his return path in his electrical conduction system, but that the power flowing through it would make it glow, providing night time lighting for cities and shipping lanes.

 

In a February 1901 Collier’s Weekly article titled “Talking With Planets” Tesla described his “system of energy transmission and of telegraphy without the use of wires” as “using the Earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors … a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the Earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the Earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits.

In this manner I was able to transmit to a distance, not only feeble effects for the purposes of signaling, but considerable amounts of energy, and later discoveries I made convinced me that I shall ultimately succeed in conveying power without wires, for industrial purposes, with high economy, and to any distance, however great.”

 

Although Tesla demonstrated wireless power transmission at Colorado Springs, lighting electric lights mounted outside the building where he had his large experimental coil, he did not scientifically test his theories.

He believed he had achieved Earth resonance which, according to his theory, would work at any distance.

Tesla began working on his wireless station immediately.

 

As soon as the contract was signed with Morgan in March 1901 he placed an order for generators and transformers with the Westinghouse Electric Company.

 

Tesla’s plans changed radically after he read a June 1901 Electrical Review article by Marconi entitled SYNTONIC WIRELESS TELEGRAPH.

At this point Marconi was transmitting radio signals beyond the range most physicists thought possible (over the horizon) and the description of the Italian inventor’s use of a “Tesla coil” “connected to the Earth” led Tesla to believe Marconi was copying his earth resonance system to do it.

Tesla, believing a small pilot system capable of sending Morse code yacht race results to Morgan in Europe would not be able to capture the attention of potential investors, decided to scale up his designs with a much more powerful transmitter, incorporating his ideas of advanced telephone and Image transmission as well as his ideas of wireless power delivery.

Above: J.P. Morgan (1837 – 1913)

 

In July 1901 Tesla informed Morgan of his planned changes to the project and the need for much more money to build it.

He explained the more grandiose plan as a way to leap ahead of competitors and secure much larger profits on the investment.

With Tesla basically proposing a breach of contract, Morgan refused to lend additional funds and demanded an account of money already spent.

Tesla would claim a few years later that funds were also running short because of Morgan’s role in triggering the stock market panic of 1901, making everything Tesla had to buy much more expensive.

Despite Morgan stating no additional funds would be supplied, Tesla continued on with the project.

 

He explored the idea of building several small towers or a tower 300 feet and even 600 feet tall in order to transmit the type of low-frequency long waves that Tesla thought were needed to resonate the Earth.

 

His friend, architect Stanford White, who was working on designing structures for the project, calculated that a 600-foot tower would cost $450,000 and the idea had to be scrapped.

Above: Stanford White (1853 – 1906)

 

By July 1901, Tesla had expanded his plans to build a more powerful transmitter to leap ahead of Marconi’s radio based system, which Tesla thought was a copy of his own system.

He approached Morgan to ask for more money to build the larger system but Morgan refused to supply any further funds.

A month after Marconi’s success, Tesla tried to get Morgan to back an even larger plan to transmit messages and power by controlling “vibrations throughout the globe“.

Over the next five years, Tesla wrote more than 50 letters to Morgan, pleading for and demanding additional funding to complete the construction of Wardenclyffe.

 

Tesla continued the project for another nine months into 1902.

The tower was erected to its full 187 feet (57 m).

In June 1902, Tesla moved his lab operations from Houston Street to Wardenclyffe.

 

In 1906 the financial problems and other events may have led to a nervous breakdown on Tesla’s part.

 

The mentally unstable multimillionaire Harry Kendall Thaw shot and killed the prominent architect and New York socialite Stanford White in front of hundreds of witnesses at the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on the evening of 25 June 1906, leading to what the press would call the “Trial of the Century“.

During the trial, Nesbit testified that five years earlier, when she was a stage performer at the age of 15 or 16, she had attracted the attention of White, who first gained her and her mother’s trust, then sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious, and then had a subsequent romantic and sexual relationship with her that continued for some period of time

Above: Evelyn Nesbit (1884 – 1967)

 

In October, long time investor William Rankine died of a heart attack.

 

Things were so bad by the fall of that year George Scherff, Tesla’s chief manager who had been supervising Wardenclyffe, had to leave to find other employment.

The people living around Wardenclyffe noticed the Tesla plant seemed to have been abandoned without notice.

 

In 1904 Tesla took out a mortgage on the Wardenclyffe property with George C. Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, to cover Tesla’s living expenses at the hotel.

Above: George Boldt (1851 – 1916)

 

In 1908 Tesla procured a second mortgage from Boldt to further cover expenses.

The facility was partially abandoned around 1911, and the tower structure deteriorated.

Between 1912 and 1915, Tesla’s finances unraveled, and when the funders wanted to know how they were going to recapture their investments, Tesla was unable to give satisfactory answers.

 

The 1 March 1916 edition of the publication Export American Industries ran a story titled “Tesla’s Million Dollar Folly” describing the abandoned Wardenclyffe site:

There everything seemed left as for a day — chairs, desks, and papers in businesslike array.

The great wheels seemed only awaiting Monday life.

But the magic word has not been spoken, and the spell still rests on the great plant.

 

Investors on Wall Street were putting their money into Marconi’s system, and some in the press began turning against Tesla’s project, claiming it was a hoax.

The project came to a halt in 1905.

 

Tesla mortgaged the Wardenclyffe property to cover his debts at the Waldorf-Astoria, which eventually mounted to $20,000 ($500,300 in today’s dollars).

He lost the property in foreclosure in 1915 and by mid-1917 the facility’s main building was breached and vandalized.

In 1917 the Tower was demolished by the new owner to make the land a more viable real estate asset.

Meanwhile….

Gernsback was an entrepreneur in the electronics industry, importing radio parts from Europe to the United States and helping to popularize amateur “wireless“.

In April 1908, he founded Modern Electrics, the world’s first magazine about both electronics and radio (“wireless“).

While the cover of the magazine itself states it was a catalog, most historians note that it contained articles, features and plotlines, qualifying it as a magazine.

Under its auspices, in January 1909, Gernsback founded the Wireless Association of America, which had 10,000 members within a year.

In 1912, Gernsback said that he estimated 400,000 people in the US were involved in amateur radio.

In 1913, he founded a similiar magazine, The Electrical Experimenter, which became Science and Invention in 1920.

It was in these magazines he began including scientific fiction stories alongside science journalism – including his own novel Ralph 124c 41+ which he ran for 12 months in Modern Electrics.

By playing a key role in the wireless industry, Gernsback secured a position and a significant influence on the adoption of new legal regulations.

At the same time, aware of the low level of education of radio amateurs, he founded several magazines covering radio and later also television.

It is widely believed that the term television appeared for the first time in the December 1909 issue of his Modern Electrics, in the article “Television and the Telephot“.

Gernsback began publishing articles with a futuristic view of scientific and technological developments very early.

When finishing the preparation of an issue of his magazine Modern Electrics in 1911, Gernsback discovered that some free space remained on one of the pages.

Since he was already used to writing his predictions for the future of radio and other technologies, which were well received by the readers, he decided to go one step further.

He wrote a short adventure story, focusing on the application of technology in the year 2660.

It was a spur of the moment thing that he wrote late at night in his office and the text was long enough to fit into the available space into the magazine.

The readers wanted to learn what happened next.

And so the next installment came about – 12 of them in total until the story was completed.

Encouraged by its popularity, Gernsback continued to publish this specific type of texts, which he called scientifiction, later to be known as science fiction.

As the publisher of successful magazines, Gernsback managed to draw the attention of leading scientists, including Tesla, Marconi, Fessenden, Edison and many others….

Above: Hugo Gernsback demonstrating his television goggles in 1963 for Life magazine

 

After Wardenclyffe closed, Tesla continued to write to Morgan.

After “the great man” died, Tesla wrote to Morgan’s son Jack, trying to get further funding for the project.

 

In 1906, Tesla opened offices at 165 Broadway in Manhattan, trying to raise further funds by developing and marketing his patents.

Above: City Investing Building, 165 Broadway, Manhattan

 

On his 50th birthday, in 1906, Tesla demonstrated a 200 horsepower (150 kilowatts) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine.

 

During 1910–1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100–5,000 hp.

Tesla worked with several companies including the period 1919–1922 working in Milwaukee for Allis-Chalmers.

He spent most of his time trying to perfect the Tesla turbine with Hans Dahlstrand, the head engineer at the company, but engineering difficulties meant it was never made into a practical device.

Tesla did license the idea to a precision instrument company and it found use in the form of luxury car speedometers and other instruments.

Tesla went on to have offices at the Metropolitan Life Tower from 1910 to 1914, rented for a few months at the Woolworth Building, moving out because he could not afford the rent, and then to office space at 8 West 40th Street from 1915 to 1925.

After moving to 8 West 40th Street, he was effectively bankrupt.

Above: Tesla working in his office, 8 W. 40th Street, New York City

Most of his patents had run out and he was having trouble with the new inventions he was trying to develop.

 

By 1915, Tesla’s accumulated debt at the Waldorf-Astoria was around $20 thousand ($495 thousand in 2018 dollars).

When Tesla was unable to make any further payments on the mortgages, Boldt foreclosed on the Wardenclyffe property.

Boldt failed to find any use for the property and finally decided to demolish the tower for scrap.

On 4 July 1917 the Smiley Steel Company of New York began demolition of the tower by dynamiting it.

The tower was knocked on a tilt by the initial explosion but it took till September to totally demolish it.

The scrap value realized was $1,750.

 

Since this was during World War I a rumor spread, picked up by newspapers and other publications, that the tower was demolished on orders of the United States government with claims German spies were using it as a radio transmitter or observation post, or that it was being used as a landmark for German submarines.

Tesla was not pleased with what he saw as attacks on his patriotism via the rumors about Wardenclyffe, but since the original mortgages with Boldt as well as the foreclosure had been kept off the public record in order to hide his financial difficulties, Tesla was not able to reveal the real reason for the demolition.

George Boldt decided to make the property available for sale.

 

When World War I broke out, the British cut the transatlantic telegraph cable linking the US to Germany in order to control the flow of information between the two countries.

They also tried to shut off German wireless communication to and from the US by having the US Marconi Company sue the German radio company Telefunken for patent infringement.

Telefunken brought in the physicists Jonathan Zenneck and Karl Ferdinand Braun for their defense and hired Tesla as a witness for two years for $1,000 a month.

The case stalled and then went moot when the US entered the war against Germany in 1917.

In 1915, Tesla attempted to sue the Marconi Company for infringement of his wireless tuning patents.

Marconi’s initial radio patent had been awarded in the US in 1897, but his 1900 patent submission covering improvements to radio transmission had been rejected several times, before it was finally approved in 1904, on the grounds that it infringed on other existing patents including two 1897 Tesla wireless power tuning patents.

Tesla’s 1915 case went nowhere, but in a related case, where the Marconi Company tried to sue the US government over WWI patent infringements, a Supreme Court of the United States 1943 decision restored the prior patents of Oliver Lodge, John Stone and Tesla.

The court declared that their decision had no bearing on Marconi’s claim as the first to achieve radio transmission, just that since Marconi’s claim to certain patented improvements were questionable, the company could not claim infringement on those same patents.

 

On 6 November 1915, a Reuters news agency report from London had the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

However, on 15 November, a Reuters story from Stockholm stated the prize that year was being awarded to Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg “for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays.”

There were unsubstantiated rumors at the time that either Tesla or Edison had refused the prize.

The Nobel Foundation said:

“Any rumor that a person has not been given a Nobel Prize because he has made known his intention to refuse the reward is ridiculous“.

A recipient could decline a Nobel Prize only after he is announced a winner.

There have been subsequent claims by Tesla biographers that Edison and Tesla were the original recipients and that neither was given the award because of their animosity toward each other, that each sought to minimize the other’s achievements and right to win the Award, that both refused ever to accept the award if the other received it first, that both rejected any possibility of sharing it, and even that a wealthy Edison refused it to keep Tesla from getting the $20,000 prize money.

In the years after these rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915 and Tesla did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1937).

 

On 20 April 1922, Tesla lost an appeal of judgment on Boldt’s foreclosure of Wardenclyffe.

This effectively locked Tesla out of any future development of the facility.

 

Tesla attempted to market several devices based on the production of ozone.

These included his 1900 Tesla Ozone Company selling an 1896 patented device based on his Tesla coil, used to bubble ozone through different types of oils to make a therapeutic gel.

He also tried to develop a variation of this a few years later as a room sanitizer for hospitals.

 

Tesla theorized that the application of electricity to the brain enhanced intelligence.

In 1912, he crafted “a plan to make dull students bright by saturating them unconsciously with electricity,” wiring the walls of a schoolroom and, “saturating the schoolroom with infinitesimal electric waves vibrating at high frequency.

The whole room will thus, Mr. Tesla claims, be converted into a health-giving and stimulating electromagnetic field or ‘bath.'”

The plan was, at least provisionally, approved by then superintendent of New York City schools, William H. Maxwell.

 

Before World War I, Tesla sought overseas investors.

After the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his patents in European countries.

 

In the August 1917 edition of the magazine Electrical Experimenter, Tesla postulated that electricity could be used to locate submarines via using the reflection of an “electric ray” of “tremendous frequency,” with the signal being viewed on a fluorescent screen (a system that has been noted to have a superficial resemblance to modern radar).

Tesla was incorrect in his assumption that high frequency radio waves would penetrate water.

 

Émile Girardeau, who helped develop France’s first radar system in the 1930s, noted in 1953 that Tesla’s general speculation that a very strong high-frequency signal would be needed was correct.

Girardeau said:

“Tesla was prophesying or dreaming, since he had at his disposal no means of carrying them out, but one must add that if he was dreaming, at least he was dreaming correctly.”

Above: Émile Girardeau (1882 – 1970)

 

In 1928, Tesla received U.S. Patent 1,655,114, for a biplane capable of taking off vertically (VTOL aircraft) and then of being “gradually tilted through manipulation of the elevator devices” in flight until it was flying like a conventional plane.

Tesla thought the plane would sell for less than $1,000, although the aircraft has been described as impractical.

Above: VTOL (vertical take-off/landing) Harrier

 

This would be his last patent and at this time Tesla closed his last office at 350 Madison Avenue, which he had moved into two years earlier.

Above: Borden Building, 350 Madison Avenue, New York City

 

Since 1900, Tesla had been living at the Waldorf Astoria in New York running up a large bill.

Above: Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

 

In 1922, he moved to St. Regis Hotel and would follow a pattern from then on of moving to a new hotel every few years leaving behind unpaid bills.

Above: St. Regis New York

 

Tesla would walk to the park every day to feed the pigeons.

He took to feeding them at the window of his hotel room and bringing the injured ones in to nurse back to health.

He said that he had been visited by a specific injured white pigeon daily.

Tesla spent over $2,000, including building a device that comfortably supported her so her bones could heal, to fix her broken wing and leg.

Tesla stated:

I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years.

But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings.

That one was different.

It was a female.

I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me.

I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.

As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.

 

 

Tesla’s unpaid bills, and complaints about the mess from his pigeon-feeding, forced him to leave the St. Regis in 1923, the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1930 and the Hotel Governor Clinton in 1934.

At one point, he also took rooms at the Hotel Marguery.

 

In 1934, Tesla moved to the Hotel New Yorker and Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company began paying him $125 per month as well as paying his rent, expenses the company would pay for the rest of Tesla’s life.

Accounts of how this came about vary.

Several sources say Westinghouse was worried (or warned) about potential bad publicity surrounding the impoverished conditions under which their former star inventor was living.

The payment has been described as being couched as a “consulting fee” to get around Tesla’s aversion to accept charity, or according to one biographer as a type of unspecified settlement.

 

Tesla worked every day from 9:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. or later, with dinner from exactly 8:10 p.m., at Delmonico’s restaurant and later the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Tesla would telephone his dinner order to the headwaiter, who also could be the only one to serve him.

“The meal was required to be ready at eight o’clock …

He dined alone, except on the rare occasions when he would give a dinner to a group to meet his social obligations.

Tesla would then resume his work, often until 3:00 a.m.”

 

For exercise, Tesla walked between 8 and 10 miles (13 and 16 km) per day.

He curled his toes one hundred times for each foot every night, saying that it stimulated his brain cells.

Tesla became a vegetarian in his later years, living on only milk, bread, honey and vegetable juices.

 

Tesla read many works, memorizing complete books and supposedly possessed a photographic memory.

He was a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.

 

Tesla claimed never to sleep more than two hours per night.

However, he did admit to “dozing” from time to time “to recharge his batteries.”

On one occasion at his laboratory, Tesla worked for a period of 84 hours without rest.

Kenneth Swezey, a journalist whom Tesla had befriended, confirmed that Tesla rarely slept.

Swezey recalled one morning when Tesla called him at 3 a.m.:

“I was sleeping in my room like one dead …

Suddenly, the telephone ring awakened me …

Tesla spoke animatedly, with pauses, as he worked out a problem, comparing one theory to another, commenting.

And when he felt he had arrived at the solution, he suddenly closed the telephone.”

 

Tesla was asocial and prone to seclude himself with his work.

However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of Tesla.

Writer Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a “distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force.”

Above: Robert Underwood Johnson (1853 – 1937)

 

His secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote:

“His genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul.”

 

Tesla’s friend, writer Julian Hawthorne, commented:

“Seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink.”

Above: Julian Hawthorne (1846 – 1934)

 

Tesla was a good friend of Francis Marion Crawford, Robert Underwood Johnson, Stanford White, Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff and Kenneth Swezey.

 

In middle age, Tesla became a close friend of Mark Twain.

They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere.

Twain notably described Tesla’s induction motor invention as “the most valuable patent since the telephone.”

Above: Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)(1835 – 1910)

 

At a party thrown by actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1896, Tesla met Indian Hindu monk Vivekananda and the two talked about how the inventors ideas on energy seemed to match up with Vedantic cosmology.

Above: Narendranath Datta (aka Swami Vivekananda)(1863 – 1902)

 

In the late 1920s, Tesla befriended George Sylvester Viereck, a poet, writer, mystic, and later, unfortunately, a Nazi propagandist.

Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife.

Above: George Viereck (1884 – 1962)

 

Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight.

He was quick to criticize clothing.

On several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress.

 

When Thomas Edison (b. 1847) died, in 1931, Tesla contributed the only negative opinion to The New York Times, buried in an extensive coverage of Edison’s life:

He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene …

His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of the labor.

But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.

 

Tesla was 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall and weighed 142 pounds (64 kg), with almost no weight variance from 1888 to about 1926.

His appearance was described by newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane as “almost the tallest, almost the thinnest and certainly the most serious man who goes to Delmonico’s regularly“.

He was an elegant, stylish figure in New York City, meticulous in his grooming, clothing, and regimented in his daily activities, an appearance he maintained as to further his business relationships.

He was also described as having light eyes, “very big hands“, and “remarkably big” thumbs.

Hugo Gernsback was literally spellbound with Tesla and believed that the ideas of the great inventor were the salvation for all of mankind.

This is how Gernsback describes Tesla in the February 1919 issue of Electrical Experimenter:

“The door opens and out steps a tall figure – over six feet high – gaunt but erect.

It approaches slowly, stately.

You become conscious at once that you are face to face with a personality of a high order.

Nikola Tesla advances and shakes your hand with a powerful grip, surprising for a man over 60.

A winning smile from piercing light blue-gray eyes, set in extraordinarily deep sockets, fascinates you and makes you feel at once at home.

 

You are guided into an office immaculate in its orderliness.

Not a speck of dust is to be seen.

No papers litter the desk.

Everything just so.

It reflects the man himself, immaculate in attire, orderly and precise in his every movement.

Dressed in a dark frock coat, he is entirely devoid of all jewelry.

No ring, stickpin or even watch-chain can be seen.

 

Tesla speaks – a very high almost falsetto voice.

He speaks quickly and very convincingly.

It is the man’s voice chiefly which fascinates you.

As he speaks you find it difficult to take your eyes off his own.

Only when he speaks to others do you have a chance to study his head, predominant of which is a very high forehead with a bulge between his eyes – the neverfailing sign of an exceptional intelligence.

Then the long, well-shaped nose, proclaiming the scientist….

 

His only vice is his generosity.

The man who, by the ignorant onlooker has often been called an idle dreamer, has made over a million dollars out of his inventions – and spent them as quickly on new ones.

But Tesla is an idealist of the highest order and to such men money itself means but little.”

I wonder if Tesla felt the same towards Gernsback….

 

Gernsback was noted for sharp (and sometimes shady) business practices,and for paying his writers extremely low fees or not paying them at all.

H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith referred to him as “Hugo the Rat“.

As Barry Malzberg has said:

Gernsback’s venality and corruption, his sleaziness and his utter disregard for the financial rights of authors, have been well documented and discussed in critical and fan literature

That the founder of genre science fiction who gave his name to the field’s most prestigious award and who was the Guest of Honor at the 1952 Worldcon was pretty much a crook (and a contemptuous crook who stiffed his writers but paid himself $100K a year as President of Gernsback Publications) has been clearly established.

 

Nonetheless, Gernsback earned Tesla’s sympathy and Gernsback became an important publisher of Tesla’s articles in his many publications.

In the August 1917 Electrical Experimenter, under the title “Tesla’s Views on Electricity and the War“, Tesla made the first technical description of radar.

The author of the article (H. Winfield Secor, the magazine’s Associate Editor) explained to his readers that “Dr. Tesla had invented, among other things, an electric ray to destroy or detect submarines under water at a considerable distance.

Mr. Tesla very courteously granted the writer an interview and some of his ideas on electricity’s possible role in helping to end the Great War.”

Later that year, in addition to Tesla’s autobiographical serial My Inventions, the Electrical Experimenter also published a number of other Tesla-authorized articles with considerable regularity:

• The Effect of Statics on Wireless Transmission
• Famous Scientific Illusions
• Tesla’s Egg of Columbus (or how Tesla performed the feat of Columbus without cracking the Egg)
• The Moon’s Rotation
• The True Wireless
• Tesla’s Bulbs
• Electrical Oscillators
• Can Radio Ignite Balloons?(or the Opinions of Nikola Tesla and Other Radio Experts)

 

Tesla and Gernsback started correspondence with one another from the end of 1918 and throughout 1919.

Tesla could not fit himself into the strict deadlines presented to him by the rules of periodical press and wrote to Gernsback at the end of July 1919:

“I think it well on this occasion to notify your readers, as a precaution, that I am not one of those who display the sign ‘Do it now.’ on their desks and office doors.

My motto is: ‘Do not do it now.  Think it over.‘ ”

 

Over the next several years, only a few letters were exchanged between Tesla and Gernsback, in which the famous publisher tried whatever he could to appease his most prominent writer and resume their cooperation, but as a reply received very cold letters, demonstrating Tesla’s injured pride and his objections to the egoism of the publisher.

In one of the last letters, Tesla wrote:

“I appreciate your unusual intelligence and enterprise but the trouble with you seems to be that you are thinking only of H. Gernsback first of all, once more and then again.”

 

Tesla wrote a number of books and articles for magazines and journals.

Among his books are My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla and The Tesla Papers.

Many of Tesla’s writings are freely available online, including the article “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” published in The Century Magazine in 1900 and the article “Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency” published in his book Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla.

 

In 1931, Kenneth Swezey, a young writer who had been associated with Tesla for some time, organized a celebration for the inventor’s 75th birthday.

Tesla received congratulatory letters from more than 70 pioneers in science and engineering, including Albert Einstein, and he was also featured on the cover of Time magazine.

The cover caption “All the world’s his power house” noted his contribution to electrical power generation.

The party went so well that Tesla made it an annual event, an occasion where he would put out a large spread of food and drink (featuring dishes of his own creation) and invite the press to see his inventions and hear stories about past exploits, views on current events, or sometimes odd or baffling claims.

 

(“Tesla is very fussy and particular about his food:

He eats very little, but what he does eat must be of the very best.

And he knows, for outside of being a great Inventor in science he is an accomplished cook who has invented all sorts of savory dishes.“

Hugo Gernsback, Electrical Experimenter, February 1919)

At the 1932 occasion, Tesla claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays.

 

In 1933, at age 77, Tesla told reporters that, after thirty-five years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy.

He claimed it was a theory of energy that was “violently opposed” to Einsteinian physics and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years.

He also told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.

At the 1934 party, Tesla told reporters he had designed a superweapon he claimed would end all war.

He would call it “teleforce“, but was usually referred to as his death ray.

Tesla described it as a defensive weapon that would be put up along the border of a country to be used against attacking ground-based infantry or aircraft.

Tesla never revealed detailed plans of how the weapon worked during his lifetime, but in 1984, they surfaced at the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade.

The treatise, The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media, described an open-ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allows particles to exit, a method of charging slugs of tungsten or mercury to millions of volts, and directing them in streams (through electrostatic repulsion).

Tesla tried to interest the US War Department, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in the device.

 

In 1935, at his 79th birthday party, Tesla covered many topics.

He claimed to have discovered the cosmic ray in 1896 and invented a way to produce direct current by induction, and made many claims about his mechanical oscillator.

Describing the device (which he expected would earn him $100 million within two years) he told reporters that a version of his oscillator had caused an earthquake in his 46 East Houston Street lab and neighboring streets in downtown New York City in 1898.

He went on to tell reporters his oscillator could destroy the Empire State Building with 5 lbs of air pressure.

 

He also explained a new technique he developed using his oscillators he called “Telegeodynamics“, using it to transmit vibrations into the ground that he claimed would work over any distance to be used for communication or locating underground mineral deposits.

 

At his 1937 celebration in the Grand Ballroom of Hotel New Yorker, Tesla received the “Order of the White Lion” from the Czechoslovakia ambassador and a medal from the Yugoslavian ambassador.

On questions concerning the death ray, Tesla stated:

“But it is not an experiment …

I have built, demonstrated and used it.

Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.”

 

In the fall of 1937, after midnight one night, Tesla left the Hotel New Yorker to make his regular commute to the cathedral and the library to feed the pigeons.

While crossing a street a couple of blocks from the hotel, Tesla was unable to dodge a moving taxicab and was thrown to the ground.

His back was severely wrenched and three of his ribs were broken in the accident.

The full extent of his injuries were never known.

Tesla refused to consult a doctor, an almost lifelong custom, and never fully recovered.

 

On 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel.

Above: Room 3327, New Yorker Hotel, Present day

 

His body was later found by maid Alice Monaghan after she had entered Tesla’s room, ignoring the “do not disturb” sign that Tesla had placed on his door two days earlier.

Assistant medical examiner H.W. Wembley examined the body and ruled that the cause of death had been coronary thrombosis.

 

Two days later the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the Alien Property Custodian to seize Tesla’s belongings.

John G. Trump, a professor at MIT and a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Tesla items, which were being held in custody.

Above: John G. Trump (1907 – 1985)(Donald’s paternal uncle)

After a three-day investigation, Trump’s report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating:

Tesla’s thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power, but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.

In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla’s “death ray“, Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box.

 

At the request of Gernsback, on 9 January 1943, two days after Tesla’s death, a death mask of the inventor was made by F. Moynihan.

 

On 10 January 1943, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia (1882 – 1947) read a eulogy written by Slovene-American author Louis Adamic live over the WNYC radio while violin pieces “Ave Maria” and “Tamo daleko” were played in the background.

 

On 12 January, two thousand people attended a state funeral for Tesla at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

After the funeral, Tesla’s body was taken to the Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York, where it was later cremated.

 

The following day, a second service was conducted by prominent priests in the Trinity Chapel (today’s Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sava) in New York City.

Above: Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sava, New York City

 

On the occasion of 100 years since Tesla’s birth, on 25 June 1956, the aforementioned death mask was placed on the business premises of Gernsback Publications in New York.

On a marble pedestal, in relief, were presented the symbols of Tesla’s greatest discoveries and ideas – the first induction motor, Tesla’s transformer, and the famous Wardenclyffe Tower at Long Island intended for the “World System” project….

An astonishly accurate prediction of the electronic and wireless world we live in today.

The symbol of Tesla’s great and unfulfilled dream.

 

In Hugo Gernback’s honour, the Hugo Awards or “Hugos” are the annual achievement awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention, selected in a process that ends with vote by current Convention members.

They originated and acquired the “Hugo” nickname during the 1950s and were formally defined as a convention responsibility under the name “Science Fiction Achievement Awards” early in the 1960s.

The nickname soon became almost universal and its use legally protected; “Hugo Award(s)” replaced the longer name in all official uses after the 1991 cycle.

In 1960 Gernsback received a special Hugo Award as “The Father of Magazine Science Fiction“.

Hugo Gernsback died at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City on 19 August 1967.

In late 2002 Gernsback Publications went out of business.

 

 

Tesla’s legacy has endured in books, films, radio, TV, music, live theater, comics and video games.

In Jim Jarmusek’s film Coffee and Cigarettes, Jack shows Meg his Tesla coil!

Tesla features prominently in the movies The Prestige (David Bowie as Tesla) and The Current War, as well as in Family Guy‘s Season 9, Episode 15.

Above: David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, The Prestige

 

Tesla appears in Ron Horsley’s and Ralph Vaughan’s re-imaginings of the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

 

In The Big Bang Theory, Tesla is referred to as “a poor man’s Sheldon Cooper“.

 

In 2011, Sesame Street introduced the world to grumpy Professor “Nikola Messla“.

 

The impact of the technologies invented or envisioned by Tesla is a recurring theme in several types of science fiction.

 

In science and engineering Tesla has given his name to the Tesla coil and the singing Tesla coil, Tesla’s Egg of Columbus, the Tesla Experimental Station, Tesla’s oscillator, the Tesla Principle, the Tesla Tower, the Tesla turbine, the Tesla unit and the Tesla valve.

Tesla is a 26-km wide crater on the far side of the Moon as well as a minor planet (2244 Tesla).

There is both the Nikola Tesla Award and the Nikola Tesla Satellite Award.

Tesla was an electrotechnical conglomerate in the former Czechoslovakia.

Tesla is an American electric car manufacturer, the Croatian affliliate of the Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Ericsson, a bank in Zagreb and two companies in the Serbian cities of Novi Sad and Plandiste.

His birthday (10 July) is celebrated every year in Croatia, in Vojvodina and in Niagara Falls.

Every year the annual Nikola Tesla Electric Vehicle Rally is held in Croatia.

In music, there is Tesla (US), Tesla Boy (Russia) and Tesla Coils (Australia) – all the names of band groups, while “Tesla Girls” is a song by the British pop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) released in 1984.

The groups They Might Be Giants released “Tesla“, The Handsome Family “Tesla’s Hotel Room” and the Polish band Silver Rocket‘s last album was named “Tesla“.

There is a Tesla STEM High School in Redmond, Washington.

Tesla is both an Airport and a Museum in Belgrade.

TPP Nikola Tesla is the largest power plant in Serbia.

And 128 streets in Croatia have been named after Nikola Tesla, making him the 8th most common street name in the country.

 

It took me a few hours, despite the Museum’s small size, for my eyes to absorb all that was revealed about Tesla here.

It has taken me months for my mind to absorb all that I have learned since my visit.

 

But of all of this I find myself drawn not to his inventions but to his character.

 

I walked away from the Museum that day, sat on a bench and watched a pigeon approach.

I thought of Tesla.

The pigeon and I looked at each other.

No words were needed.

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / Nikola Tesla, My Inventions / Vladimir Dulovic, Serbia In Your Hands / Marija Stosic, Belgrade

Canada Slim and the Station Sanctuary

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 19 January 2018

“Romance!“, the season tickets mourn,

“He never ran to catch his train,

But passed with coach and guard and horn –

And left the local – late again!”

Confound romance and all unseen

Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

Rudyard Kipling, “The King”

Above: Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

 

Paul Theroux, in the first book of his I ever read, The Old Patagonian Express, once wrote that “travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography, the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going“.

That Theroux would say these things does not surprise me as it seems from a reading of his works (many of which I have tried to collect) that many, if not all, of his journeys were done alone on his own, without spouse or offspring to distract him from his observations of fellow travellers and the landscape around him.

 

Travelling with your spouse is not the same as travelling by your lonesome, for the necessity to communicate significantly with strangers is drastically diminished as your beloved is beside you.

She won’t casually allow me to vanish into the surroundings nor blend into a crowd anonymously, and simplicity in our narrative is rarely achieved, as marriages, blissful as they might be, are always accompanied with their own complexities of opinions and tangled desires.

To travel with another human being one must learn to negotiate and compromise in your travel decisions.

To suggest a destination one must be prepared to defend that choice of destination.

For example, in Porto during our last summer’s vacation, it was not sufficient to simply suggest walking the Ponte de Dom Luis I without waxing eloquently about the fantastic views yet to be seen over the Rio Douro.

Speak not of the Porto stock exchange unless you mention the wonderfully ornate palace it once was.

Don’t suggest the Livraria Lello without mentioning J.K. Rowling’s frequency within it.

 

Much like the advice I have given my Cambridge Certificate test-takers in regards to the oral (speaking) component of the examinations….

It is not enough to voice an opinion.

You must give a reason for that opinion.

 

We found ourselves in another far-from-home point on the map, as couples often do, based on the opinions of her friends.

And, as all husbands learn through trial and error, time and experience, if the ideas of your wife are always right then the brainstorm of possibilities suggested by her gaggle of girlfriends that gather around her must certainly be right by sheer weight of numbers.

In this blog I wrote of flying to and arriving in Porto and of our visit to the Sé, the city’s largest cathedral.

(Please see Canada Slim and the War of the Oranges.)

 

What is important for you to know before you read further is that we arrived at our B & B by taking a taxi from the Airport.

Though this little detail may seem innocuous and innocent at first glance it is vitally important to the tale that follows….

 

Porto, Portugal, Tuesday 24 July 2018

The signs on the Avenida Dom Afonso Henriques did not speak to me.

They were of local matters and were written in Portuguese so despite the size of the massive billboards that hugged the incline leading to Sao Bento I found myself inclined to ignore them.

Did I imagine our attending a concert here in two months’ time?

We had a week to spend in Porto and the region so there was no profit in pausing our progress in trying to decipher their messages.

As usual, in my rucksack I lugged a library with me: the Pocket Rough Guide to Porto, The Rough Guide to Portugal, Lonely Planet Portugal, A.H. de Oliveira Marques’ A Very Short History of Portugal, Matthew Hancock’s Xenophobe’s Guide to the Portuguese and Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon.

I would later purchase and add to my burden Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem (Message) and Livro do desassossego por Bernardo Soares (The Book of Disquiet) and Luís de Camoes’ Sonetos Amorosos (Love Sonnets).

 

It is a rare moment that a train station concourse is a tourist attraction in its own right, but the one at Sao Bento is one of the most beautiful in the world.

But this was not always so.

 

Until the late 19th century there was the convent of the Benedictine nuns of Sao Bento de Ave Maria, built at the beginning of the 16th century, heavily destroyed in a fire in 1783 but fully restored by 1821.

In 1821 this convent was inhabited by 55 nuns, as well as by 105 members of staff (mostly personal maids).

The Catholic Church has long been the world’s largest Christian organization and has been Portugal’s largest religion since the Iberian Peninsula was ruled by the Roman Empire.

In 1834, Joaquim António de Aguiar (1792 – 1884) terminated the state sanction of religious orders and nationalized their lands and possessions.

Later referred to as Mata-Frades (Killer of Brothers), Aguiar’s government took control of the convents, churches, manor homes and holdings of various institutes that had been sustained by donations of the religious faithful and placed them for sale.

Although they hoped to place land and goods in the hands of the more disadvantaged, most of the poor did not have the capital to purchase them.

In fact, total sales were ten times less than expected and most holdings were purchased by speculators or existing landowners.

Aguiar’s famous decree of 30 May 1834 ordered the immediate extinction of all male religious orders (and the confiscation of their property), the prohibition of new nuns to profess their vows and the extinction of the convents after the death of the last nun who lived there.

 

Female religious orders struggled a lot during those days, encapsulated in a time that no longer had space for them.

The convent of the Benedictine nuns of Sao Bento de Ave Maria was no exception.

It had to sell most of their precious silver service in the public square to face financial struggles.

The convent slowly fell apart.

The nuns were dying, one by one.

The last nun died in May 1892, more than 58 years after the dissolution decree.

 

When the first steam locomotive reached Porto on 7 November 1896, goods still had to be transported by oxcart from the Campanha train station, 4 km away, over the hills to the city centre.

After 15 years of construction, by way of the demolition of the railway tunnel through the eastern hills and an elaborate interior design with 20,000 tiles, the station was finally inaugerated in 1916.

 

Today Sao Bento is the main terminus of Porto’s suburban railway lines and the western terminus for the scenic Douro line between Porto and Pocinho.

The Station also serves the Minho, Braga, Guimaraes, Caíde / Marco de Canaveses and Aveiro lines.

All trains leaving Sao Bento call at Campanha as their next station.

The Station is near the vintage tramline 22 and is connected to Sao Bento Metro Station on Metro line D.

 

Porto has some of Portugal’s best azulejos – decorative ceramic tiles – and you can see a variety of styles decorating houses, shops, monuments and churches all over the city.

The craft was brought over by the Moors in the 8th century.

Portuguese azulejos developed their own style around the mid-16th century when a new Italian technique enable images to be painted directly onto the clay, thanks to a tin oxide coating which prevented runnage.

Above: Adoration of the Magi, Museum of Azulejos, Lisbon

 

Wealthy Portuguese began to commission large azulejo panels displaying Vasco da Gama’s voyages to the East.

Above: Vasco da Gama (1460 – 1524)

 

The early 18th century saw highly trained artists producing elaborate multicoloured ceramic mosaics, often with Rococo or Baroque themes as in the interior of the Sé.

Above: Sé, Porto

 

After the Great Earthquake of 1 November 1755, more prosaic tiled facades, often with neoclassical designs, were considered good insulation devices, as well as protecting buildings from fire and rain.

After the mid-19th century, azulejos were being mass-produced to decorate shops and religious buildings, such as the fantastic interior of the Igreja de Carmo.

Above: Igreja de Carmo, Luanda, Angola

 

By the 1900s Portugal had become the world’s leading producer of azulejos, with Art Deco designs taking hold in the 1920s.

Witness the facade of the Pérola do Bolhao shop.

 

Sao Bento station’s entrance hall represents a coming together of all the best the azulejos have to offer.

The Station was decorated by painter Jorge Colaco.

The first tiles were placed on 13 August 1905.

His tiles show various scenes from Portuguese history.

The towering, ornate ceilings, arched windows and impressive clock all give the appearance of a palace ballroom rather than a ticket hall.

The upper parts of the frieze are decorated with polychromatic azulejos depicting a chronology of the forms of transport used by man in Portugal.

The lower and upper frame of the frieze consists of a line of tile in blue, brown and yellow in a stylized geometric pattern.

Under this, on the top of the north wall, is a large composition that covers the entire wall, depicting the Battle of Valdevez (1140), with two groups of antagonists and other knights in the background.

This monochromatic composition is executed in blue on white tiles, similar to all the other main azulejo “paintings“.

Below the battle is another composition that represents the meeting between the Knight Egas Moniz and Alfonso VII of León in Toledo (12th century), offering his life, his wife and his sons during the siege of Guimaraes.

 

In the south is a painting of the entrance to Porto of King John I and Philippa of Lancaster, on horseback, to celebrate their wedding (1387).

Below that is the Conquest of Ceuta (1415) with the principal figure of Infante Dom Henrique who subjugated the Moors.

The wall into the Station is divided into multiple compositions.

To the left, a vision of the procession of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios in Lamego, an exhaustive description and detail showing the multitudes within an urban setting.

Under this composition are two panels that represent her “promise” on her knees and, the other, her actions at the “miraculous” fountain.

In the same detail is the pilgrimage of Sao Trocato to Guimaraes.

The lower panels show a picture of a cattle fair and pilgrim camp.

The central panels of the wall represent four work scenes: the vineyards, the harvest, the wine shipment down the Rio Douro and work in the watermill.

On the pilasters separating the vains with access to the street, below the polychromatic frieze, is a series of smaller compositions.

Above these are medallions depicting romantic scenes and, below, allegories associated with the railway referencing time and signalling, in an expression of Art Deco.

 

As the wife and I take photograph after photograph after photograph of the Station, I find myself thinking many things.

 

Legend says that, in a stubborn but serene way, the ghost of the last nun of the former convent still walks the corridors of Sao Bento, and in the silence in the time between midnight and daybreak, one can hear her prayers.

But only the attuned and the attentive can hear the nun, just as only in the space between spaces, the silence between breaths, the magic of moments does Porto reveal herself to those who truly seek her.

 

I find myself feeling contradictory.

I do not believe in ghosts yet I believe in the spirit of a place.

I may not believe in God and yet I can sense when a place is sacred.

The Station is no longer a consecrated convent and yet it has never lost its divine power to move strangers within these walls.

 

I recall reading what Paul Theroux once said about a nation’s railways.

“Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country:

The seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains.

The proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is.

There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important then the wagons some Indians drive.

Dining cars, I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration).

The noodle stall in the Malaysian Train, the borscht and bad manners in the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman.”

 

The Comboios de Portugal (CP)(Portuguese National Railways) operates all Portuguese trains, yet despite this journey being our third time in this country, I have no memory of taking a train when we visited the Algarve on our first adventure or when we remained in Lisbon on our second.

For the most part the CP is an efficient network with modern rolling stock, but, as is often the case in Europe, rural train stations can sometimes be a long way away from the town or village they serve.

 

A casual Google search suggests that the Bard of Train Travel, Paul Theroux once stood in Sao Bento Station as we did.

But whether he took the famous Linha do Douro I do not know, but if his travel accounts are anything to go by Theroux would have been more interested in taking train journeys that crossed national borders and spanned continents rather than taking a Portuguese train of which most are designated Regionals (R) or Interregionals (I).

In its heyday the Linha crossed the border to Spain bound for Salamanca and Madrid and sprouted some stunning valley branch lines but this is no longer so.

 

(The determined train traveller can cross into Spain via Valenca do Minho to the north, Vilar Formoso, Marvao-Beira or Caia to the east, or Vila Real de Santo António to the south.

Theroux’s travelogue The Pillars of Hercules, which is an account of his travels around the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Morocco travelling clockwise along the coasts, may have been prefaced by his travelling by train along the Portuguese coast through Porto and Lisbon, Tunes and Vila Real de Santo António to Seville then Ronda and Algeciras, then by bus to La Línea de la Concepción followed by a five-minute walk to the border of the British colony.

But this is simply conjecture on my part.)

 

Trains depart daily from Sao Bento along the Linha do Douro, reputed to be one of the most beautiful rail routes in Europe as it follows the course of the Rio Douro into the heart of the port wine-growing estates.

(We would that week take the train and ride the rails of the Linha do Douro to Pocinho and return by boat back to Porto, but that is a tale best told at another time.)

 

But what Sao Bento represents is what impressed me most.

A centuries-old convent transformed into an azulejo-covered train station.

The mystery of faith transformed into the mystique of travel.

 

Locals were astonishingly easy to distinguish from tourists, for the local does not look at the azulejos with any admiration for they are as much a part of Porto as a red fire hydrant is a normal fixture of a Manhattan street.

Almost invisible, inconsequential, something to be walked past as one shakes one’s head at the weird ones so fascinated by the mere commonplace.

For them Sao Bento is simply a station, a pit stop, a necessary go-through or starting point.

 

But to me, surrounded by tiled masterpieces of living history, Sao Bento is forbidden seduction.

You desire her but she is untouchable.

You want to linger but you know you cannot.

 

Beyond the doors the traffic never-ceasing reminds you of life beyond these walls.

From these platforms an escape from one’s cloistered existence beckons.

 

Photographs never capture the essence of a place just as words never fully describe the magic of women.

 

We cannot stay, for there is much yet to be seen, much life left to be lived.

A last lingering look in the dim hope of branding these images into one’s memory.

We know that we ourselves will leave no trace that we were here, for we are mere members of a multitude passing through.

For some reason Leonard Cohen croons his “Sisters of Mercy” song from the jukebox of my mind.

Somehow this feels appropriate.

“Oh, the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
Oh, I hope you run into them, you who’ve been travelling so long.

Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well, I’ve been where you’re hanging. I think I can see how you’re pinned.
When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.

Well, they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon.
Don’t turn on the lights. You can read their address by the moon.
And you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night.
We weren’t lovers like that and besides, it would still be all right.
We weren’t lovers like that and besides, it would still be all right.”

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / Facebook / Pocket Rough Guide to Porto / Rough Guide Portugal / Lonely Planet Portugal / Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express / http://portoalities.com / http://www.visitportoandnorth.travel.com

 

 

Canada Slim and the Freudian Slippers

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 15 January 2018

I have spoken of Sigmund Freud before.

Above: Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

 

And I must confess to a reluctance to like the man and his theories, for the same reason I am reluctant to embrace Charles Darwin and his theories:

Above: Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)

 

Admitting there may be some validity to their theories is to admit to embarrassing revelations about myself.

 

Maybe we did evolve from single cell organisms and apes through a process of millions of millennia, so perhaps a belief in an invisible God that created the world in seven calendar days and could bring me eternal life after death is less plausible than the acceptance that I am just the tiniest particle in the vast expanse of time, space and reality.

 

And maybe, just maybe, there might be more to Freud and his theories than just the scandalous unproven idea that he liked to watch his mother pee, and that some of the ways we think about ourselves and how our unconscious, dreams and sexuality as suggested by Freud’s theories might be somewhat uncomfortably plausible.

 

My wife, the medical doctor in the house, has, of course, had exposure during her studies to the work and thought of Freud in regards to child development.

During her internship in a Vienna practice she visited the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna – there are three Freud Museums, the other two are in Pribor, Czech Republic, and in London – which she immensely enjoyed.

Above: Sigmund Freud Museum, Bergstrasse 19, Vienna

 

Knowing that she had some free time before her medical conference in London in October 2017, Ute was determined that she would visit the Freud Museum here as well.

Above: Freud Museum, London

 

I have already written extensively of some of the many sites we saw in London during our week there together and suffice to say that what I have said is a mere drop in the bucket of all that has been said or could be said by others.

(For more on London, please see:

• Canada Slim and the Body Snatchers /….and the Danger Zone / ….and the Paddington Arrival / ….and the Street Walked Too Often /….Underground / …. and the Outcast /…. and the Wonders on the Wall / …. and the Calculated Cathedral / …. and the Right Man / …. and the Queen’s Horsemen / …. and the Royal Peculiar / …. and the Uncertainty Principle / …. and the Museum of Many / …. and the Lamp Ladies / …. and the Breviary of Bartholomew of this blog. )

 

London, England, 25 October 2017

In North London, perched on a hill to the west of Hampstead Heath, Hampstead Village developed into a fashionable spa in the 18th century and was not much altered thereafter.

Being a sloping site deterred Victorian property speculators and put off the railway companies from destroying much of Hampstead.

Later it became one of the city’s most celebrated literary quartiers and even now retains a reputation as a bolt hole for high-profile intelligentsia and discerning pop stars.

The steeply inclined High Street, lined with posh shops and arty cafés, flaunts the area’s ever-increasing wealth, but far more appealing are the extensive, picturesque and precipitious maze of alleyways and steps radiating both east and west of Heath Street.

Proximity to Hampstead Heath is the true joy of the territory, for this mixture of woodland, smooth pasture and landscaped garden is simply the most exhilirating patch of greenery in London.

Over the years, countless writers, artists and politicos have been drawn to Hampstead, which has more blue plaques commemorating its residents than any London borough.

John Constable lived here in the 1820s, trying to make ends meet for his wife and seven children, painting cloud formations on the Heath.

Above: John Constable (1776 – 1837)

 

John Keats (1795 – 1821) moved into Well Walk in 1817 to nurse his dying brother then moved to a semi-detached villa, fell in love with the girl next door, bumped into Coleridge on the Heath and in 1821 went to Rome to die.

Above: Keats House, Spanish Steps, Rome

(I have visited Keats House in Rome and in London.)

Above: Keats House, Hampstead, North London

 

In 1856, Karl Marx finally achieved respectability when he moved into Grafton Terrace.

Above: Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

 

Robert Louis Stevenson stayed here when he was 23 suffering from tuberculosis and thought Hampstead was “the most delightful place for air and scenery“.

Above: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)

 

Author H.G. Wells (1866 – 1946) lived on Church Row for three years just before World War One, while photographer Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980) attended primary school and was bullied by author Evelyn Waugh (1903 – 1966) – the start of a lifelong feud.

 

The composer Edward Elgar became a special constable during the war, joining the Hampstead Volunteer Reserve.

Above: Edward Elgar (1857 – 1934)

 

Writer D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) and his German wife Frieda (1879 – 1956) watched the first Zeppelin raid on London from the Heath in 1915 and decided to leave.

Above: Memorial, Camberwell Old Cemetery, London, to 21 civilians killed by Zeppelin bombings in 1917

 

Following the war, Lawrence’s friend and fellow writer Katherine Mansfield, lived for a couple of years in a big grey house overlooking the Heath, which she nicknamed “the Elephant“.

Above: Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923)

 

Actor Dirk Bogarde was born in a taxi in Hampstead in 1921.

Above: Dirk Bogarde (1921 – 1999)

 

Poet Stephen Spender spent his childhood in “an ugly house” on Frognal and went to school locally.

Above: Stephen Spender (1909 – 1995)

 

Elizabeth Taylor was born in Hampstead in 1932 and came back to live here in the 1950s during her first marriage to Richard Burton.

Above: Elizabeth Taylor (1932- 2011)

 

In the 1930s, Hampstead’s modernist Isokon Building, a block of flats on Lawn Road, became something of an artistic hangout, particularly the drinking den, the Isobar.

Above: Isokon Flats, Hampstead, North London

 

Architect Walter Gropius (1883 – 1969) and artists Henry Moore (1898 – 1986), Barbara Hepworth (1903 – 1975) and her husband Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982) all lived here.

Another tenant, Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976), compared the exterior of Isokon to a giant ocean liner.

 

Architect Ernö Goldfinger (1902 – 1987) built his modernist family home at 2 Willow Road and local resident Ian Fleming named James Bond’s adversary after him.

Above: 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, North London

 

Mohammed Ali Jinnah abandoned India for Hampstead in 1932, living a quiet life with his daughter and his sister and working as a lawyer.

Above: Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876 – 1948)

 

George Orwell lived rent-free above Booklovers’ Corner, a bookshop on South End Road, in 1934, in return for services in the shop in the afternoon.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying has many echoes of Hampstead and its characters.

 

Artist Piet Mondrian escaped to Hampstead from Nazi-occupied Paris, only to be bombed out a year later, after which he fled to New York.

Above: Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944)

 

Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti (1905 – 1994) was another refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe as was painter/poet Oskar Kokoschka (1886 – 1980).

 

General Charles de Gaulle (1890 – 1970) got first-hand experience of Nazi air raids when he lived on Frognal with his wife and two daughters.

 

Ruth Ellis (1926 – 1955), the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955, shot her lover outside Magdala Tavern by Hampstead Heath Train Station.

 

Sid Vicious (1957 – 1979) and Johnny Rotten lived in a squat on Hampstead High Street in 1976.

 

John le Carré lived here in the 1970s and 1980s and set a murder in Smiley’s People on Hampstead Heath.

Above: John le Carré

 

Former Labour leader Michael Foot lived in a house he bought in 1945 with his redundancy cheque from The Evening Standard until the age of 96.

Above: Michael Foot (1913 – 2010)

 

Today comedian Ricky Gervais, director Ridley Scott, footballer Thierry Henry and pop stars Boy George and Harry Styles have homes here.

 

And it was here in Hampstead where the Austrian neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, having reluctantly left Vienna following the Nazi Anschluss (annexation).

In January 1933, the Nazi Party took control of Germany and Freud’s books were prominent among those they burned and destroyed.

Freud remarked to Ernest Jones:

“What progress we are making!

In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.

Now, they are content with burning my books.“

Freud was wrong.

The Nazis would have gassed and incinerated him too in one of their death camps – as happened to millions of other Jews.

Freud continued to underestimate the growing Nazi threat and remained determined to stay in Vienna, even following the Anschluss of 13 March 1938, in which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and the outbreaks of violent anti-Semitism that ensued.

 

Ernest Jones, the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), flew into Vienna from London via Prague on 15 March determined to get Freud to change his mind and seek exile in Britain.

Above: Ernest Jones (1879 – 1958)

 

That same month Nazi S.A. men invaded Freud’s home searching for valuables.

Freud’s “Old Testament” frown frightened them away, though daughter Anna was detained by the Gestapo a whole day.

This prospect and the shock of the arrest and interrogation of Anna Freud by the Gestapo finally convinced Freud it was time to leave Austria.

 

Jones left for London the following week with a list provided by Freud of the party of émigrés for whom immigration permits would be required.

Back in London, Jones used his personal acquaintance with the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, to expedite the granting of permits.

There were seventeen in all and work permits were provided where relevant.

Jones also used his influence in scientific circles, persuading the president of the Royal Society, Sir William Bragg, to write to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, requesting to good effect that diplomatic pressure be applied in Berlin and Vienna on Freud’s behalf.

 

Freud also had support from American diplomats, notably his ex-patient and American ambassador to France, William Bullitt.

Bullitt alerted US President Roosevelt to the increased dangers facing the Freuds, resulting in the American consul-general in Vienna, John Cooper Wiley, arranging regular monitoring of Berggasse 19.

He also intervened by phone call during the Gestapo interrogation of Anna Freud.

 

The departure from Vienna began in stages throughout April and May 1938.

Freud’s grandson Ernst Halberstadt and Freud’s son Martin’s wife and children left for Paris in April.

Freud’s sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, left for London on 5 May, Martin Freud the following week and Freud’s daughter Mathilde and her husband, Robert Hollitscher, on 24 May.

By the end of the month, arrangements for Freud’s own departure for London had become stalled, mired in a legally tortuous and financially extortionate process of negotiation with the Nazi authorities.

Under regulations imposed on its Jewish population by the new Nazi regime, a Kommissar was appointed to manage Freud’s assets and those of the IPA whose headquarters were nearby Freud’s home.

 

Freud was allocated to Dr. Anton Sauerwald, who had studied chemistry at Vienna University under Professor Josef Herzig, an old friend of Freud’s.

Sauerwald read Freud’s books to further learn about him and became sympathetic towards his situation.

Though required to disclose details of all Freud’s bank accounts to his superiors and to arrange the destruction of the historic library of books housed in the offices of the IPA, Sauerwald did neither.

Instead he removed evidence of Freud’s foreign bank accounts to his own safe-keeping and arranged the storage of the IPA library in the Austrian National Library where it remained until the end of the war.

Though Sauerwald’s intervention lessened the financial burden of the “flight” tax on Freud’s declared assets, other substantial charges were levied in relation to the debts of the IPA and the valuable collection of antiquities Freud possessed.

Unable to access his own accounts, Freud turned to Princess Marie Bonaparte, the most eminent and wealthy of his French followers, who had travelled to Vienna to offer her support and it was she who made the necessary funds available.

This allowed Sauerwald to sign the necessary exit visas for Freud, his wife Martha and daughter Anna.

Above: Anton Sauerwald

 

They left Vienna on the Orient Express on 4 June, accompanied by their housekeeper and a doctor, arriving in Paris the following day where they stayed as guests of Princess Bonaparte before travelling overnight to London arriving at Victoria Station on 6 June.

Freud was immediately Britain’s most famous Nazi exile.

Among those soon to call on Freud to pay their respects were Salvador Dalí, Stefan Zweig, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf and H. G. Wells.

 

 

Representatives of the Royal Society called with the Society’s Charter for Freud, who had been elected a Foreign Member in 1936, to sign himself into membership.

 

Princess Bonaparte arrived towards the end of June to discuss the fate of Freud’s four elderly sisters left behind in Vienna.

 

Above: Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882 – 1962)

 

Her subsequent attempts to get them exit visas failed and they would all die in Nazi concentration camps.

 

In early 1939 Sauerwald arrived in London in mysterious circumstances where he met Freud’s brother Alexander.

He was tried and imprisoned in 1945 by an Austrian court for his activities as a Nazi Party official.

Responding to a plea from his wife, Anna Freud wrote to confirm that Sauerwald “used his office as our appointed commissar in such a manner as to protect my father“.

Her intervention helped secure his release from jail in 1947.

 

In the Freuds’ new home, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, North London, Freud’s Vienna consulting room was recreated in faithful detail.

He continued to see patients there until the terminal stages of his illness.

He also worked on his last books, Moses and Monotheism, published in German in 1938 and in English the following year and the uncompleted An Outline of Psychoanalysis which was published posthumously.

 

The ground floor of the museum houses Freud’s study, library, hall and the dining room.

Freud’s study and library look exactly as they did when Freud lived here – they were modelled on his Berggasse 19 flat in Vienna:

The large collection of antiquities and the psychiatrist’s couch, sumptiously draped in an opulent Iranian rug, were all brought here from Vienna.

 

Upstairs on the first floor in the video room there is some old footage of the Freud family.

While another room is dedicated to Sigmund’s favourite daughter, Anna Freud, herself an influential child analyst.

 

There is a temporary exhibitions room which hosts alternate contemporary art and Freud-themed exhibitions.

Art installations often use several rooms within the museum, such as the 2001/02 exhibition “A Visit to Freud’s” by an Austrian female photographer Uli Aigner.

 

Many areas such as the kitchen and Anna Freud’s consulting room are out of public view and have been converted into offices.

 

The house had only finished being built in 1920 in the Queen Anne Style.

 

A small sun room (loggia) in a modern style was added at the rear by his architect son Ernst Ludwig Freud that same year so Sigmund could sit out and enjoy the garden.

It has since been enclosed and now serves as the museum shop, which flogs merchandise from silk scarves inspired by his patients’ artwork to novelty Freudian slippers, plus a good selection of books, including those used to research this post.

 

In February 1923, Freud detected a leukoplakia, a benign growth associated with heavy smoking, on his mouth.

Freud initially kept this secret, but in April 1923 he informed Ernest Jones, telling him that the growth had been removed.

Freud consulted the dermatologist Maximilian Steiner, who advised him to quit smoking but lied about the growth’s seriousness, minimizing its importance.

Freud later saw Felix Deutsch who saw that the growth was cancerous.

He identified it to Freud using the euphemism “a bad leukoplakia” instead of the technical diagnosis epithelioma.

Deutsch advised Freud to stop smoking and have the growth excised.

Freud was treated by Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist (nose surgeon) whose competence he had previously questioned.

Hajek performed an unnecessary cosmetic surgery in his clinic’s outpatient department.

Freud bled during and after the operation and may narrowly have escaped death.

Freud subsequently saw Deutsch again.

Deutsch saw that further surgery would be required, but did not tell Freud that he had cancer because he was worried that Freud might wish to commit suicide.

 

Freud had been given just five years to live.

He lasted sixteen, but he was a semi-invalid when he arrived in London and rarely left the house except to visit his pet dog Chun who was held in quarantine for nearly a year.

 

Freud was over eighty at this time.

 

By mid-September 1939, Freud’s cancer of the jaw was causing him increasingly severe pain and had been declared to be inoperable.

 

The last book he read, Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, prompted reflections on his own increasing frailty.

Above: Title page of Honoré Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (Skin of Sorrow)

 

A few days later he turned to his doctor, friend and fellow refugee, Max Schur, reminding him that they had previously discussed the terminal stages of his illness:

“Schur, you remember our ‘contract’ not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense.”

When Schur replied that he had not forgotten, Freud said, “I thank you.” and then “Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it’s right, then make an end of it.”

Anna Freud wanted to postpone her father’s death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive and on 21 and 22 September administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud’s death around 3 am on 23 September 1939, age 83.

However, discrepancies in the various accounts Schur gave of his role in Freud’s final hours, which have in turn led to inconsistencies between Freud’s main biographers, has led to further research and a revised account.

This proposes that Schur was absent from Freud’s deathbed when a third and final dose of morphine was administered by Dr Josephine Stross, a colleague of Anna Freud’s, leading to Freud’s death around midnight on 23 September 1939.

 

Above: Freud’s ashes, Golders Green Crematorium

 

The house remained in his family until his youngest daughter Anna Freud, who was a pioneer of child therapy, died in 1982.

 

The house has a well maintained garden which is still much as Freud would have known it.

 

The Freuds moved all their furniture and household effects to London.

There are Biedermeier chests, tables and cupboards and a collection of 18th century and 19th century Austrian painted country furniture.

The museum owns Freud’s collection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Oriental antiquities, and his personal library.

Although Freud was not a practising Jew, he was very conscious of his Jewishness, which is reflected in the artifacts he collected, including an etching hanging in his study by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669) of Menasseh ben Israel (1604 – 1657), who persuaded Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews back into England in 1656.

Above: Rembrandt’s Portrait of Menasseh ben Israel

 

Freud’s “old and grubby gods” as he described his collection in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1899 are still on view to visitors, just as he left them.

Freud was an avid and knowledgable collector and often sought expert advice before purchasing.

As his collection grew, his study became a treasure trove of thousands of antiquities from all over the world, ranging from Roman glass objects to wooden Buddha statuettes, terracotta representations of the Greek god Eros, Egyptian gods cast in bronze, Chinese works in jade and a 20th century metal porcupine given to him during a visit to the United States in 1909.

Freud confessed that his passion for collecting was second only to his addiction to cigars.

 

 

The star exhibit in the museum is Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, which had been given to him by one of his patients, Madame Benvenisti, in 1890.

This was restored at a cost of £5000 in 2013.

This couch was where patients revealed their wildest dreams, forgotten trauma and hidden phobias or free associated whatever sprung into their minds before Freud would interpret their unconscious meanings.

In 2013, the Freud Museum’s curators worried about the deteriorating condition of the 125-year-old couch, which had begun to sag badly in the middle and was splitting along its seams.

Thanks to generous private donations and painstaking work by specialists, the couch was restored to its original splendour.

Covered with Oriental rugs and cushions it looks remarkably comfortable to recline upon and recall deep-seated memories.

The couch has seen a lot of Freud’s patients both in Vienna and London.

Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories.

Some patients known by pseudonyms were:

• Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben)
• Dora (Ida Bauer, 1882–1945)
• Frau Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser)
• Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (Ilona Weiss)
• Fräulein Katharina (Aurelia Kronich)
• Fräulein Lucy R.
• Little Hans (Herbert Graf, 1903–1973)
• Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer, 1878–1914)
• Enos Fingy (Joshua Wild, 1878–1920)
• Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff, 1887–1979).

Other famous patients included:

• Prince Pedro Augusto of Brazil (1866–1934)
• H.D. (1886–1961)
• Emma Eckstein (1865–1924)
• Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), with whom Freud had only a single, extended consultation
• Princess Marie Bonaparte
• Edith Banfield Jackson (1895–1977)
• Albert Hirst (1887–1974).

The Wolf Man wrote of Freud’s home that….

“There was always a feeling of sacred peace and quiet here. 

The rooms themselves must have been a surprise to any patient, for they in no way reminded one of a doctor’s office but rather of an archaeologist’s study.”

 

Above: The Wolf Man

 

To the Wolf Man Freud said:

“The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patients’ psyche.”

 

In 2015 (the 50th anniversary of the Museum), the Museum, along with the artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, hired a police forensic team to scrutinize traces of DNA left on the couch.

The team found many examples, including strands of hair and a multitude of a multitude of dust particles, from Sigmund Freud, his patients and his family.

Freud did not sit on the couch himself when analyzing his patients, but sat out of sight next to it.

He once famously remarked to his friend, the psychoanalyist Hanns Sachs:

“I can’t let myself be stared at for eight hours daily.”

 

The study and library were preserved by Anna Freud after her father’s death.

The bookshelf behind Freud’s desk contains some of his favourite authors: not only Goethe and Shakespeare but also Heine, Multatuli and Anatole France.

Freud acknowledged that poets and philosophers had gained insights into the unconscious which psychoanalysis sought to explain systematically.

In addition to the books, the library contains various pictures hung as Freud arranged them; these include ‘Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx‘ and ‘The Lesson of Dr Charcot‘ plus photographs of Martha Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Yvette Guilbert, Marie Bonaparte and Ernst von Fleischl.

The collection includes a portrait of Freud by Salvador Dalí.

 

The museum organizes research and publication programmes and it has an education service which organises seminars, conferences and educational visits to the museum.

The museum is a member of the London Museums of Health & Medicine.

 

I quickly wandered through the Museum, upstairs and down, while Ute took the audio-guided tour.

I confess that I did not fully comprehend the importance of Sigmund Freud to the same extent as she did, for in our partnership she is both the brains and the beauty while I am simply loud and can lift heavy objects.

I still couldn’t explain the therapeutic techniques of free association and transference if my very life depended upon it.

And in this overly politically correct climate we now find ourselves living in these days I find myself quite discomfited by the notions of sexuality in infantile forms.

I have yet to be convinced of the soundness of his Oedipus complex theory that suggests that the ancient Greek legend of a king who kills his father and marries his mother is reflective of a child’s incest fantasy of falling in love with Mother and being jealous of Father.

Nor am I decided whether Freud’s idea that dreams are unconscious wish fulfillments as he suggests.

And I claim almost embarrassingly little understanding of that what he called the id, ego and superego, and very scant notions of what he terms the libido and the death drive.

But I will say that the Museum succeeded in capturing my curiosity about this man whose name, though a household one, remains almost as misunderstood as the unconscious mind.

 

Freud was born in Freiburg, Moravia (today’s Pribor, Czech Republic), the first of his mother’s eight children.

Above: Freud’s birthplace, Pribor, Czech Republic

 

His father, Jakob Freud (1815 – 1896) was a fairly successful wool merchant, who, at age 40, with two grown sons, Emanuel (1833 – 1914) and Philipp (1836 – 1911) and already a grandfather, married, for his second time, Sigmund’s mother Amalie Nathanson (1835 – 1930).

“Sigi” was the first – and favourite – of Amalie’s offspring, and Sigi knew it.

“A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success, that often induces real success.”

Above: Sigi (age 16) and his mother Amalia, 1872

 

In 1859, the Freud family left Freiburg.

Freud’s half brothers emigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the “inseparable” playmate of his early childhood, Emanuel’s son, John.

Jakob Freud took his wife and two children (Freud’s sister, Anna, was born in 1858; a brother, Julius born in 1857, had died in infancy) firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born: Rosa (b. 1860), Marie (b. 1861), Adolfine (b. 1862), Paula (b. 1864), Alexander (b. 1866).

Freud’s choice of boyhood heroes revealed a deep dislike of Imperial Austria: the anti-monarchist Oliver Cromwell and the Carthaginian general Hannibal.

Austria was Roman Catholic and anti-Semetic.

 

In 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school.

He proved to be an outstanding pupil and graduated in 1873 with honors.

He loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.

 

Freud entered the University of Vienna at age 17 in 1873.

He had planned to study law, but joined the medical faculty at the university, where his studies included philosophy, physiology and zoology.

Freud’s special interests were histology (the scientific study of organic tissues) and neurophysiology (the scientific study of the nervous system).

He wanted to be a scientist – not a medical practicioner.

In 1876, Freud spent four weeks at a zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an inconclusive search for their male reproductive organs.

 

In 1877 Freud moved to Ernst Brücke’s physiology laboratory where he spent six years comparing the brains of humans and other vertebrates with those of invertebrates such as frogs, crayfish and lampreys.

His research work on the biology of nervous tissue proved seminal for the subsequent discovery of the neuron in the 1890s.

Freud’s research work was interrupted in 1879 by the obligation to undertake a year’s compulsory military service.

The lengthy downtimes enabled him to complete a commission to translate four essays from John Stuart Mill’s collected works.

He graduated with an MD in March 1881.

 

Freud was happy doing scientific work but Brücke gave him some fatherly advice.

Academic posts were few and badly paid and Freud’s chances of advancement as a Jew were bad, so with Freud’s father unable to support him – what with the Crash of 1873 ruining him and with six other children to support – and marriage plans with Martha Bernays (1861 – 1951), Freud began his medical career at the Vienna General Hospital.

 

Freud had to face another long training period in clinical medicine before starting his own private practice.

First he served (1882 – 1885) as assistant to Hermann Nothnagel (1841 – 1905), Professor of Internal Medicine, and spent five months (1183) working in the Psychiatric Clinic under Theodor Meynart (1833 – 1892), the greatest brain anatomist and neuropathologist at that time.

Meynart influenced Freud to become a specialist in neuropathology (diseases of the nervous system).

 

Freud’s research work in cerebral anatomy led to his studying the effects of cocaine – starting on himself.

He even prescribed it to Martha!

He felt that cocaine was nothing more than an anti-depressant, a harmless anaesthetic.

Freud’s close friend, the gifted physiologist Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow (1846 – 1891), suffered from a painful tumour of the hand and thus became a morphine addict.

Freud suggested that Ernst switch to cocaine instead.

Freud’s colleague Carl Koller put in his claim as the discoverer of cocaine, nearly ruining his reputation, because by 1886 cases of cocaine addiction were reported everywhere and Ernst had become a despairing addict.

Freud’s research would lead to the publication of an influential paper on the pallative effects of cocaine in 1884, but Ernst’s addiction would always make Freud regret that he had failed to anticipate cocaine’s addictive effects.

Above: Ernst von Fleschl-Marxow

 

His work on aphasia (the inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions as a result of a stroke or a head trauma) would form the basis of his first book On the Aphasias: a Critical Study, published in 1891.

 

Over a three-year period, Freud worked in various departments of the hospital.

His time spent in Theodor Meynert’s psychiatric clinic and as a locum (temporary replacement physician) in a local asylum led to an increased interest in clinical work.

His substantial body of published research led to his appointment as a university lecturer in neuropathology in 1885, a non-salaried post but one which entitled him to give lectures at the University of Vienna.

In 1886, Freud resigned his hospital post and entered private practice specializing in “nervous disorders“.

 

The same year he married Martha Bernays, the granddaughter of Isaac Bernays, a chief rabbi in Hamburg.

They had six children: Mathilde (b. 1887), Jean-Martin (b. 1889), Oliver (b. 1891), Ernst (b. 1892), Sophie (b. 1893), and Anna (b. 1895).

From 1891 until they left Vienna in 1938, Freud and his family lived in an apartment at Berggasse 19, near Innere Stadt, a historical district of Vienna.

 

In 1896, Minna Bernays, Martha Freud’s sister, became a permanent member of the Freud household after the death of her fiancé.

The close relationship she formed with Freud led to rumours, started by Carl Jung, of an affair.

The discovery of a Swiss hotel log of 13 August 1898, signed by Freud whilst travelling with his sister-in-law, has been presented as evidence of the affair.

 

Freud began smoking tobacco at age 24.

Initially a cigarette smoker, he became a cigar smoker.

He believed that smoking enhanced his capacity to work and that he could exercise self-control in moderating it.

Despite health warnings from colleague Wilhelm Fliess, he remained a smoker, eventually suffering a buccal (of the mouth) cancer.

Freud suggested to Fliess in 1897 that addictions, including that to tobacco, were substitutes for masturbation, “the one great habit.”

 

Freud had greatly admired his philosophy tutor, Brentano, who was known for his theories of perception and introspection.

Brentano discussed the possible existence of the unconscious mind in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874).

Although Brentano denied its existence, his discussion of the unconscious probably helped introduce Freud to the concept.

 

Freud owned and made use of Charles Darwin’s major evolutionary writings, and was also influenced by Eduard von Hartmann’s The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869).

Other texts of importance to Freud were by Gustav Fechner and Johann Friedrich Herbart with the latter’s Psychology as Science arguably considered to be of underrated significance in this respect.

Freud also drew on the work of Theodor Lipps who was one of the main contemporary theorists of the concepts of the unconscious and empathy.

Though Freud was reluctant to associate his psychoanalytic insights with prior philosophical theories, attention has been drawn to analogies between his work and that of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both of whom he claimed not to have read until late in life.

One historian concluded, based on Freud’s correspondence with his adolescent friend Eduard Silberstein, that Freud read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and the first two of the Untimely Meditations when he was seventeen.

In 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death, Freud bought his collected works.

He told his friend, Fliess, that he hoped to find in Nietzsche’s works “the words for much that remains mute in me.”

Later, he said he had not yet opened them.

Freud came to treat Nietzsche’s writings “as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied.”

Above: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

 

His interest in philosophy declined after he had decided on a career in neurology.

Freud read William Shakespeare in English throughout his life and it has been suggested that his understanding of human psychology may have been partially derived from Shakespeare’s plays.

 

Freud’s Jewish origins and his allegiance to his secular Jewish identity were of significant influence in the formation of his intellectual and moral outlook, especially with respect to his intellectual non-conformism, as he was the first to point out in his Autobiographical Study.

They would also have a substantial effect on the content of psychoanalytic ideas, particularly in respect of their common concerns with depth interpretation and “the bounding of desire by law”.

 

In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who was conducting scientific research into hypnosis.

He was later to recall the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in neurology research.

Charcot specialized in the study of hysteria and susceptibility to hypnosis, which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience.

 

Once he had set up in private practice in 1886, Freud began using hypnosis in his clinical work.

He adopted the approach of his friend and collaborator, Josef Breuer, in a use of hypnosis which was different from the French methods he had studied in that it did not use suggestion.

The treatment of one particular patient of Breuer’s proved to be transformative for Freud’s clinical practice.

 

Described as Anna O., she was invited to talk about her symptoms while under hypnosis (she would coin the phrase “talking cure” for her treatment).

In the course of talking in this way these symptoms became reduced in severity as she retrieved memories of traumatic incidents associated with their onset.

Above: Bertha Pappenheim (aka Anna O.)(1859 – 1936)

 

The uneven results of Freud’s early clinical work eventually led him to abandon hypnosis, having reached the conclusion that more consistent and effective symptom relief could be achieved by encouraging patients to talk freely, without censorship or inhibition, about whatever ideas or memories occurred to them.

In conjunction with this procedure, which he called “free association“, Freud found that patients’ dreams could be fruitfully analyzed to reveal the complex structuring of unconscious material and to demonstrate the psychic action of repression which, he had concluded, underlay symptom formation.

 

By 1896 he was using the term “psychoanalysis” to refer to his new clinical method and the theories on which it was based.

 

Freud’s development of these new theories took place during a period in which he experienced heart irregularities, disturbing dreams and periods of depression, a “neurasthenia” which he linked to the death of his father in 1896 and which prompted a “self-analysis” of his own dreams and memories of childhood.

His explorations of his feelings of hostility to his father and rivalrous jealousy over his mother’s affections led him to fundamentally revise his theory of the origin of the neuroses.

On the basis of his early clinical work, Freud had postulated that unconscious memories of sexual molestation in early childhood were a necessary precondition for the psychoneuroses (hysteria and obsessional neurosis), a formulation now known as Freud’s seduction theory.

In the light of his self-analysis, Freud abandoned the theory that every neurosis can be traced back to the effects of infantile sexual abuse, now arguing that infantile sexual scenarios still had a causative function, but it did not matter whether they were real or imagined and that in either case they became pathogenic only when acting as repressed memories.

This transition from the theory of infantile sexual trauma as a general explanation of how all neuroses originate to one that presupposes an autonomous infantile sexuality provided the basis for Freud’s subsequent formulation of the theory of the Oedipus complex.

 

Freud described the evolution of his clinical method and set out his theory of the psychogenetic origins of hysteria, demonstrated in a number of case histories, in Studies on Hysteria published in 1895 (co-authored with Josef Breuer).

 

In 1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams in which, following a critical review of existing theory, Freud gives detailed interpretations of his own and his patients’ dreams in terms of wish-fulfillments made subject to the repression and censorship of the “dream work“.

He then sets out the theoretical model of mental structure (the unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious) on which this account is based.

An abridged version, On Dreams, was published in 1901.

 

In works which would win him a more general readership, Freud applied his theories outside the clinical setting in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

 

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905, Freud elaborates his theory of infantile sexuality, describing its “polymorphous perverse” forms and the functioning of the “drives“, to which it gives rise, in the formation of sexual identity.

The same year he published ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora)‘ which became one of his more famous and controversial case studies.

 

During this formative period of his work, Freud valued and came to rely on the intellectual and emotional support of his friend Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin based ear, nose and throat specialist whom he had first met 1887.

Above: Freud (left) and Wilhelm Fliess (1858 – 1928)(right)

 

Both men saw themselves as isolated from the prevailing clinical and theoretical mainstream because of their ambitions to develop radical new theories of sexuality.

Fliess developed highly eccentric theories of human biorhythms and a nasogenital connection which are today considered pseudo-scientific.

He shared Freud’s views on the importance of certain aspects of sexuality — masturbation, coitus interruptus, and the use of condoms — in the etiology of what were then called the “actual neuroses“, primarily neurasthenia and certain physically manifested anxiety symptoms.

They maintained an extensive correspondence from which Freud drew on Fliess’s speculations on infantile sexuality and bisexuality to elaborate and revise his own ideas.

His first attempt at a systematic theory of the mind, his Project for a Scientific Psychology was developed as a metapsychology with Fliess as interlocutor.

However, Freud’s efforts to build a bridge between neurology and psychology were eventually abandoned after they had reached an impasse, as his letters to Fliess reveal, though the soundest ideas of the Project were to be taken up again in the concluding chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams.

 

Freud had Fliess repeatedly operate on his nose and sinuses to treat “nasal reflex neurosis” and subsequently referred his patient Emma Eckstein to him.

According to Freud her history of symptoms included severe leg pains with consequent restricted mobility, and stomach and menstrual pains.

These pains were, according to Fliess’s theories, caused by habitual masturbation which, as the tissue of the nose and genitalia were linked, was curable by removal of part of the middle turbinate.

Fliess’s surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding – he had left a half-metre of gauze in Eckstein’s nasal cavity the subsequent removal of which left her permanently disfigured.

At first, though aware of Fliess’s culpability – Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror – he could only bring himself to delicately intimate in his correspondence to Fliess the nature of his disastrous role and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein’s hysteria.

Freud ultimately, in light of Eckstein’s history of adolescent self-cutting and irregular nasal and menstrual bleeding, concluded that Fliess was “completely without blame“, as Eckstein’s post-operative hemorrhages were hysterical “wish-bleedings” linked to “an old wish to be loved in her illness” and triggered as a means of “rearousing [Freud’s] affection“.

Eckstein nonetheless continued her analysis with Freud.

She was restored to full mobility and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself.

Above: Emma Eckstein (1865 – 1924)

 

Freud, who had called Fliess “the Kepler of biology“, later concluded that a combination of a homoerotic attachment and the residue of his “specifically Jewish mysticism” lay behind his loyalty to his Jewish friend and his consequent over-estimation of both his theoretical and clinical work.

 

Their friendship came to an acrimonious end with Fliess angry at Freud’s unwillingness to endorse his general theory of sexual periodicity and accusing him of collusion in the plagiarism of his work.

After Fliess failed to respond to Freud’s offer of collaboration over publication of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1906, their relationship came to an end.

In 1902, Freud at last realised his long-standing ambition to be made a university professor.

The title “professor extraordinarius“was important to Freud for the recognition and prestige it conferred, there being no salary or teaching duties attached to the post (he would be granted the enhanced status of “professor ordinarius” in 1920).

Despite support from the university, his appointment had been blocked in successive years by the political authorities and it was secured only with the intervention of one of his more influential ex-patients, a Baroness Marie Ferstel, who had to bribe the minister of education with a painting.

With his prestige thus enhanced, Freud continued with the regular series of lectures on his work which, since the mid-1880s as a lecturer of Vienna University, he had been delivering to small audiences every Saturday evening at the lecture hall of the university’s psychiatric clinic.

 

From the autumn of 1902, a number of Viennese physicians who had expressed interest in Freud’s work were invited to meet at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon to discuss issues relating to psychology and neuropathology.

This group was called the Wednesday Psychological Society (Psychologische Mittwochs-Gesellschaft) and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement.

 

Freud founded this discussion group at the suggestion of the physician Wilhelm Stekel.

Stekel had studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

His conversion to psychoanalysis is variously attributed to his successful treatment by Freud for a sexual problem or as a result of his reading The Interpretation of Dreams, to which he subsequently gave a positive review in the Viennese daily newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt.

Above: Wilhelm Steckel (1868 – 1940)

 

The other three original members whom Freud invited to attend, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane and Rudolf Reitler, were also physicians and all five were Jewish by birth.

Both Kahane and Reitler were childhood friends of Freud.

 

Kahane (1866 – 1923) had attended the same secondary school and both he and Reitler went to university with Freud.

They had kept abreast of Freud’s developing ideas through their attendance at his Saturday evening lectures.

In 1901, Kahane, who first introduced Stekel to Freud’s work, had opened an out-patient psychotherapy institute of which he was the director in Bauernmarkt, in Vienna.

In the same year, his medical textbook, Outline of Internal Medicine for Students and Practicing Physicians, was published.

In it, he provided an outline of Freud’s psychoanalytic method.

Kahane broke with Freud and left the Wednesday Psychological Society in 1907 for unknown reasons and in 1923 committed suicide.

 

Reitler (1865 – 1917) was the director of an establishment providing thermal cures in Dorotheergasse which had been founded in 1901.

He died prematurely in 1917.

 

Adler, regarded as the most formidable intellect among the early Freud circle, was a socialist who in 1898 had written a health manual for the tailoring trade.

He was particularly interested in the potential social impact of psychiatry.

Above: Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937)

 

Max Graf, a Viennese musicologist and father of “Little Hans” (Herbert Graf, 1903 – 1973), who had first encountered Freud in 1900 and joined the Wednesday group soon after its initial inception, described the ritual and atmosphere of the early meetings of the society:

The gatherings followed a definite ritual.

First one of the members would present a paper.

Then, black coffee and cakes were served; cigar and cigarettes were on the table and were consumed in great quantities.

After a social quarter of an hour, the discussion would begin.

The last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself.

There was the atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room.

Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial.

 

Above: Max Graf (1873 – 1958)

 

By 1906, the group had grown to sixteen members, including Otto Rank, who was employed as the group’s paid secretary.

 

In the same year, Freud began a correspondence with Carl Gustav Jung who was by then already an academically acclaimed researcher into word-association and the Galvanic Skin Response, and a lecturer at Zurich University, although still only an assistant to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich.

Above: Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961)

 

In March 1907, Jung and Ludwig Binswanger, also a Swiss psychiatrist, travelled to Vienna to visit Freud and attend the discussion group.

Thereafter, they established a small psychoanalytic group in Zürich.

 

In 1908, reflecting its growing institutional status, the Wednesday group was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

 

After the founding of the IPA in 1910, an international network of psychoanalytical societies, training institutes and clinics became well established and a regular schedule of biannual Congresses commenced after the end of World War I to coordinate their activities.

 

In 1911, the first women members were admitted to the Society.

Tatiana Rosenthal (1885 – 1921) and Sabina Spielrein were both Russian psychiatrists and graduates of the Zürich University medical school.

Prior to the completion of her studies, Spielrein had been a patient of Jung at the Burghölzli and the clinical and personal details of their relationship became the subject of an extensive correspondence between Freud and Jung.

Both women would go on to make important contributions to the work of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society founded in 1910.

Above: Sabina Spielrain (1885- 1942)

 

Freud’s early followers met together formally for the first time at the Hotel Bristol, Salzburg on 27 April 1908.

This meeting, which was retrospectively deemed to be the first International Psychoanalytic Congress, was convened at the suggestion of Ernest Jones, then a London-based neurologist who had discovered Freud’s writings and begun applying psychoanalytic methods in his clinical work.

Jones had met Jung at a conference the previous year and they met up again in Zürich to organize the Congress.

There were, as Jones records, “forty-two present, half of whom were or became practicing analysts.”

In addition to Jones and the Viennese and Zürich contingents accompanying Freud and Jung, also present and notable for their subsequent importance in the psychoanalytic movement were Karl Abraham and Max Eitingon from Berlin, Sándor Ferenczi from Budapest and the New York-based Abraham Brill.

Important decisions were taken at the Congress with a view to advancing the impact of Freud’s work.

A journal, the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologishe Forschungen, was launched in 1909 under the editorship of Jung.

This was followed in 1910 by the Monthly Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse edited by Adler and Stekel, in 1911 by Imago, a journal devoted to the application of psychoanalysis to the field of cultural and literary studies edited by Rank and in 1913 by the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, also edited by Rank.

 

Plans for an international association of psychoanalysts were put in place and these were implemented at the Nuremberg Congress of 1910 where Jung was elected, with Freud’s support, as its first president.

 

Freud turned to Brill and Jones to further his ambition to spread the psychoanalytic cause in the English-speaking world.

Both were invited to Vienna following the Salzburg Congress and a division of labour was agreed with Brill given the translation rights for Freud’s works, and Jones, who was to take up a post at the University of Toronto later in the year, tasked with establishing a platform for Freudian ideas in North American academic and medical life.

Jones’s advocacy prepared the way for Freud’s visit to the United States, accompanied by Jung and Ferenczi, in September 1909 at the invitation of Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, where he gave five lectures on psychoanalysis.

The event, at which Freud was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, marked the first public recognition of Freud’s work and attracted widespread media interest.

 

Freud’s audience included the distinguished neurologist and psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam, Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System at Harvard, who invited Freud to his country retreat where they held extensive discussions over a period of four days.

Putnam’s subsequent public endorsement of Freud’s work represented a significant breakthrough for the psychoanalytic cause in the United States.

When Putnam and Jones organised the founding of the American Psychoanalytic Association in May 1911 they were elected president and secretary respectively.

Brill founded the New York Psychoanalytic Society the same year.

His English translations of Freud’s work began to appear from 1909.

 

Some of Freud’s followers subsequently withdrew from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and founded their own schools.

From 1909, Adler’s views on topics such as neurosis began to differ markedly from those held by Freud.

As Adler’s position appeared increasingly incompatible with Freudianism, a series of confrontations between their respective viewpoints took place at the meetings of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society in January and February 1911.

In February 1911, Adler, then the president of the society, resigned his position.

At this time, Stekel also resigned his position as vice president of the society.

Adler finally left the Freudian group altogether in June 1911 to found his own organization with nine other members who had also resigned from the group.

This new formation was initially called the Society for Free Psychoanalysis but it was soon renamed the Society for Individual Psychology.

In the period after World War I, Adler became increasingly associated with a psychological position he devised called individual psychology.

 

In 1912, Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (published in English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious) making it clear that his views were taking a direction quite different from those of Freud.

To distinguish his system from psychoanalysis, Jung called it analytical psychology.

Anticipating the final breakdown of the relationship between Freud and Jung, Ernest Jones initiated the formation of a secret committee of loyalists charged with safeguarding the theoretical coherence and institutional legacy of the psychoanalytic movement.

Formed in the autumn of 1912, the Committee comprised Freud, Jones, Abraham, Ferenczi, Rank, and Hanns Sachs.

Max Eitingon joined the Committee in 1919.

Each member pledged himself not to make any public departure from the fundamental tenets of psychoanalytic theory before he had discussed his views with the others.

Above: The Committee (from left to right): Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones and Hanns Sachs

 

After this development, Jung recognised that his position was untenable and resigned as editor of the Jarhbuch and then as president of the IPA in April 1914.

The Zürich Society withdrew from the IPA the following July.

 

Later the same year, Freud published a paper entitled “The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement“, the German original being first published in the Jahrbuch, giving his view on the birth and evolution of the psychoanalytic movement and the withdrawal of Adler and Jung from it.

 

The final defection from Freud’s inner circle occurred following the publication in 1924 of Rank’s The Trauma of Birth which other members of the committee read as, in effect, abandoning the Oedipus Complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytic theory.

Abraham and Jones became increasingly forceful critics of Rank and though he and Freud were reluctant to end their close and long-standing relationship the break finally came in 1926 when Rank resigned from his official posts in the IPA and left Vienna for Paris.

His place on the committee was taken by Anna Freud.

Rank eventually settled in the United States where his revisions of Freudian theory were to influence a new generation of therapists uncomfortable with the orthodoxies of the IPA.

 

Psychoanalytic societies and institutes were established in Switzerland (1919), France (1926), Italy (1932), the Netherlands (1933), Norway (1933) and in Palestine (Jerusalem, 1933) by Eitingon, who had fled Berlin after Adolf Hitler came to power.

The New York Psychoanalytic Institute was founded in 1931.

The 1922 Berlin Congress was the last Freud attended.

By this time his speech had become seriously impaired by the prosthetic device he needed as a result of a series of operations on his cancerous jaw.

He kept abreast of developments through a regular correspondence with his principal followers and via the circular letters and meetings of the secret Committee which he continued to attend.

The Committee continued to function until 1927 by which time institutional developments within the IPA, such as the establishment of the International Training Commission, had addressed concerns about the transmission of psychoanalytic theory and practice.

There remained, however, significant differences over the issue of lay analysis – i.e. the acceptance of non-medically qualified candidates for psychoanalytic training.

Freud set out his case in favour in 1926 in his The Question of Lay Analysis.

He was resolutely opposed by the American societies who expressed concerns over professional standards and the risk of litigation (though child analysts were made exempt).

These concerns were also shared by some of his European colleagues.

Eventually an agreement was reached allowing societies autonomy in setting criteria for candidature.

In 1930 Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize in recognition of his contributions to psychology and to German literary culture.

 

Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and across the humanities.

It thus continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate with regard to its therapeutic efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or is detrimental to the feminist cause.

Nonetheless, Freud’s work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture.

 

In the words of W.H. Auden’s 1940 poetic tribute, by the time of Freud’s death, he had become “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.”

 

Somehow I got the feeling that the Freud Museum, try as it may, fails to truly capture the essence of what Sigi was trying to do.

Because the man was just too big.

At least in terms of the average tourist-layman, the simple man I am.

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / The Rough Guide to London / Richard Appignanesi & Oscar Zarate, Introducing Freud / Joel Whitebook, Freud: An Intellectual Biography / Rebecca Wallersteiner, “If you’re sitting comfortably….a trip to the Sigmund Freud Museum!“, Spotlight, 23 October 2015 / Sophie Leighton, “Freud’s Collections“, Freud Museum London Friends News