Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Ten Fascinating Locations in Old New York, Part Four.

In this series of posts, I have been presenting the real life locations where I set my novel, A Predator's Game. The action took place in 1896. My characters, Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle, battle with the multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes.

Part One. The American Tract Society Building, The Suicide Curves of the Ninth Avenue El, and The American Museum of Natural History.
Part Two. Bellevue Morgue, Hart Island, and The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.
Part Three. Tesla's Laboratory on East Houston, and the Eden Musée.

This post: Niagara Falls. The Adams Powerhouse. Goat Island and Terrapin Point.

The novel ends at Niagara Falls. This was inevitable. The conceit of my novel is that Nikola Tesla, tall, cerebral, other-worldly, acts in the role of Sherlock Holmes. The visiting author, Arthur Conan Doyle serves in the role of Dr. Watson. The multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes (the evil Holmes) functions as Moriarty.

In late 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. During his real-life tour of America in the 1890s, he visited Niagara Falls and declared it should have been where Sherlock Holmes had died.

At the same time, in the mid-1890s, Niagara Falls was the site of Nikola Tesla's supreme triumph. The massive hydroelectric plant assembled there foretold the future. Electricity would define the progress of the coming century.

Two anecdotes.

In his youth, Nikola Tesla constructed paddle-wheels out of twigs and leaves and sent them spinning in a local creek. When he saw a postcard of Niagara Falls, he wondered how large a paddle-wheel would be necessary to harness its power.

A second relevant story is about Tesla and his cat, Macak, goes back to when the inventor was three.

". . .as I stroked Macak's back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak's back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.

My father was a very learned man; he had an answer for every question. But this phenomenon was new even to him. "Well," he finally remarked, "this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm."

Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded." From: A Story of Youth Told by Age, Nikola Tesla.
 And so it was foreordained that Tesla would go on to discover the method of generating large amounts of electricity and would achieve this feat at Niagara Falls. In 1896, the electricity generated by the Niagara Falls complex doubled the electrical output for the entire United States. Some were skeptical that so much electricity would be used. They were wrong. Having electricity available created new industries. As an example, before having the electricity necessary for its refinement, aluminum was a precious and rarely used metal; an aluminum cap was placed atop the Washington Monument as a crown. The generators at Niagara helped create Alcoa as a major business and aluminum as a commonplace material.

The Adams Powerhouse at Niagara Falls (right)

The Adams Powerhouse was designed with cathedral-like grandeur by Tesla's friend, Stanford White and funded in part by Jacob Astor. In one of the tragedies that followed Tesla at the margins of his life, White would be murdered in one of the most spectacular and sordid crimes of the early 20th century (deemed "The Crime of the Century" by the press). Jacob Astor would die aboard the Titanic.
 
Armature being prepared for the Adams Powerhouse

Adams Powerhouse, 1902 (extended to add more generators)

Goat Island and Terrapin Point.

Niagara Falls is not the most ostentatious waterfall in the world, but among great waterfalls, it is the most accessible. At the time of the 1890s, the Victoria Falls and Iguazu Falls were known to the world at large, but few could venture to see them.

Goat Island divides Niagara Falls into two, into what are commonly called the American Falls and the Canadian Falls (also called the Horseshoe Falls). Goat Island is a primary tourist location with excellent views of both falls. In the 1890s, the more daring tourists had further options.

The Biddle Staircase and later the Biddle Elevator descended from the cliffside of Goat Island and allowed tourists to see the falls from below. That area below was a hostile landscape of boulders and scrub trees, but the views were spectacular.

The Biddle Stairs, in operation from 1829 to 1927. (minus the spectacular view)

The rickety bridge to Terrapin Rock at the time of the tower.

Just off of Goat Island, on the Canadian side and at the brink of the falls, was Terrapin Point. A dodgy bridge brought the braver tourists here, essentially just a rock at the brink of the cliff. From the 1820s until 1889, a tower was set at this site. It was blown up, with the promise of a new one soon being built to replace it. This new tower was never built.

Another view.
The bridge and Terrapin Point after the tower was blown up.


-----

Nikola Tesla, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Henry H. Holmes are all characters in my thriller, A Predator's Game.

A Predator's Game is available in soft-cover and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers.




A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

Martin Hill Ortiz, also writing under the name, Martin Hill, is the author of A Predatory Mind. Its sequel, set in 1890s Manhattan and titled A Predator's Game, features Nikola Tesla as detective.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Ten Fascinating Locations in Old New York, Part Three.

Tesla in his East Houston Laboratory
In this series of posts, I have been presenting the real life locations where I set my novel, A Predator's Game. The action took place in 1896. My characters, Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle, battle with the multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes.

In my first post, I presented The American Tract Society Building, The Suicide Curves of the Ninth Avenue El, and The American Museum of Natural History. In the second post, I looked at how old New York handled its dead and undesirables, looking at the Bellevue Morgue, Hart Island, and The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane. In this post I will look at Tesla's laboratory on the north side of Houston and at the king of the dime store museums, The Eden Musée.

Location #4. Tesla's Laboratory on East Houston.
Location #3. The Eden Musée.



To be continued with:
Location #2. The Adams Power Station.
Location #1. Goat Island and Terrapin Point, Niagara Falls.

Tesla's Laboratory on East Houston.

I've undertaken some novel research regarding Tesla's laboratories, including uncovering photographs of the building on East Houston. Although Tesla created some of his most seminal inventions at previous laboratories, the East Houston address housed his work for the longest period.

Tesla situated his laboratory on the fifth and sixth floors of 46 to 48 East Houston in Manhattan. The building was torn down in 1929. In a 1901 article, the first floor entrance was described as "barn-like" and a freight elevator took the visitors to the upper floors. (Tesla--the original hipster?)

From my novel:

  Long, sturdy tables ran aside the walls of the laboratory, topped by a variety of instruments: turbines and rotors, along with the tools to make machines, to score, slice, and twist metal. A forest of devices crowded the center of the floor: squat spools, towering columns and a six-foot disk inlaid with a hypnotic spiral of copper.
  Holmes imagined some as giant chess pieces. A Tesla coil rising from the floor had elegant, sensuous lines and was topped with a sphere. It was the bishop. Another, taller coil wore a jagged copper crown: the queen. The waist-high spools of wire were the rooks.


From The Omaha Illustrated Bee, December 18, 1904, p. 5



As I point out at length in a previous post, the photo presented below was mislabeled and this was Tesla's laboratory at 46 to 48 East Houston shortly before it was torn down to make room for the expansion of East Houston.

Tesla's E. Houston laboratory (correctly 46 to 48 E. Houston), shortly before demolition.


The Eden Musée.

Dime museums sprung up in the late 1800s, as a quieter and more permanent alternative for audiences to view the curiosities one might otherwise find at freak shows or circuses. They often mixed morals and the morbid. A waxwork display might depict the perils of alcohol alongside the murders of Jack the Ripper. They might include jars with medical specimens or special musical events.

The Eden Musée which opened on 23rd Street near 6th Avenue in 1884, was the high-brow establishment among these museums. It included such features as the Leaders of the World in wax, where curious visitors could walk up to figurines of royalties. It included the amazing automaton, Ajeeb, an expert at chess (inside the robot was an actual chess champion). And it included a Chamber of Horrors with wax figurines of murderers and victims as entertainment.

From my book:

  Built with continental pretensions, the three-story dime museum presented a French Gothic façade with statues of plump ladies serving as columns. A decorative arch displayed a carving of sea nymphs. Its steep roof sloped over its third floor, plunging down to meet an ornamental railing. Garish streamers were slung from window to window. A banner screamed in three-foot-tall letters: Open To All! Come Visit Our Chamber of Horrors!


Eden Musee, 1899. Not as decorated as on other occasions.

Roman Diorama with Wax Figures for highbrow edification.
An Invitation to Come See the Famous Chess-Playing Automaton and Seances

Closed in 1915, the museum has had an enduring legacy. An exhibit in Coney Island purchased some of the material at a bankruptcy sale to outfit a new Eden Musée dedicated to the waxworks. This was destroyed by fire in 1928 only to be rebuilt with new figurines. The name was franchised to Boston for a short-lived museum whose waxworks were then sent to Cedar Point, Ohio where it operated until 1966. More recently, the name has been revived at Cedar Point for a haunted house exhibit. In 2010, a television series titled Musée Eden was set in Montreal. It was a thriller/period piece centering around a wax museum.

Continued in Part Four.

-----

Nikola Tesla, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Henry H. Holmes are all characters in my thriller, A Predator's Game.

A Predator's Game is available in soft-cover and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers.



A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

Martin Hill Ortiz, also writing under the name, Martin Hill, is the author of A Predatory Mind. Its sequel, set in 1890s Manhattan and titled A Predator's Game, features Nikola Tesla as detective.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Ten Fascinating Locations in Old New York, Part Two

In my novel, A Predator's Game, set in 1896, my characters, Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle, visit several noteworthy sites in New York and the surrounding areas. These locations range from the exotic to the macabre. In my previous post, I presented The American Tract Society Building, The Suicide Curves of the Ninth Avenue El, and The American Museum of Natural History. Today, I will deal with the fringes of Old New York and how the city handled its dead and mentally ill.


The Locations.

In today's post.
Location #7. The Bellevue Morgue.
Location #6. Hart Island.
Location #5. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.


In a future post:
Location #4. Tesla's Laboratory on East Houston.
Location #3. The Eden Musée.
Location #2. The Adams Power Station.
Location #1. Goat Island and Terrapin Point, Niagara Falls.

7. The Bellevue Morgue.

The Bellevue Hospital complex resided along the border of the East River. This included the hospital and psychiatric institution to the north and the city morgue on the southern end. Here is its description from the book:

The Bellevue morgue served the entire city of Manhattan, handling eight thousand corpses a year. Situated by the East River, it lay south of its namesake hospital and mental ward, and was housed in an imposing building. Long, broad, and a single story, it stood as a virtual bunker.

Here are the totals of the traffic of bodies as detailed in the 1896 Annual Report.

From the State Charities Aid Association's Report on the Department of Public Charities of New York City, 1896
For the bodies that landed in the morgue, 48 hours were given for relatives to claim them or else they were shipped out to be buried in mass graves on Hart Island. With no system for notification, less than half of the bodies were claimed. Conveniently, the ferry to Hart Island docked just outside the back door.

Selling the dead to medical schools was a profitable venture and the high demand ensured that most corpses were obtained illegally. From time to time, the morgue had scandals regarding trafficking cadavers and skeletons. In 1896, scandals at Bellevue Hospital and the morgue came to a head, resulting in the dismissal of the long time keeper of the morgue, Captain Albert N. White.

Identifying bodies in the Bellevue Morgue

6. Hart Island

Hart Island is one of the most fascinating and troubling pieces of New York history. It is a small, flat island set at the northeastern extreme of what, in 1898, became the city. It became the repository for every aspect for which the city wanted to turn a blind eye. Over the years portions have been used as an internment camp for war prisoners, a boy's reformatory, a woman's workhouse, a sanatorium, a penitentiary, and a silo for nuclear missiles.

In its ongoing function from the 1860s through today, it has served as New York City's pauper's graveyard. Over one million individuals have been buried on its land, their coffins deposited like refuse in long ditches. For one hundred fifty years, prisoners have been used as the burial detail. I suppose I have strong feelings about this as voiced in my novel by Captain McEvoy of the Fidelity.

We launch out on two trips a day. In the afternoon we gather up the bodies from all the islands and their institutions, everyone who was terminally reformed. We haul 'em off to the Bellevue morgue. Those corpses stay two days to fester them up a bit and in hopes someone will claim them. Only as part of a sick joke, no one gets told they are there. So each morning we cart away the ripened from a previous harvest. Packed in the cheapest of coffins, we haul them off to the cemetery at Hart's Island. Only it's not a cemetery, it's a wasteyard, where the coffins get piled one on top of the other in vast pits. Not even St. Peter with his Book of Life could sort out their bones.

People ask me if ferrying bodies don’t give me the chills. The rot of dead flesh don’t do nothing to affright me. It's better than the rot of the living—the cheap bastards who tally up the cost of every grain of rice and strip the names from the dead to save a squeezed penny. I fear those dead souls in Tammany who’s got the power to transform humans into rubbish.


Prisoners on the grave detail, Hart Island. April 1, 1900, New York Tribune.
The coffins placed in ditches. April 1, 1900, New York Tribune

Captain McEvoy aboard the good ship Fidelity docked at Hart Island. April 1, 1900, New York Tribune.


The Hart Island Project is dedicated to making the public aware of the ongoing burials on Hart Island and to provide a memorial for the more recently buried.

Location #5. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.

To investigate the conditions at the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum, the intrepid reporter Nellie Bly had herself locked up as a patient. The scandalous conditions and the resulting sensational stories prompted the shutting down of the facility and in early 1896 the State Lunacy Commission opened the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane on Wards Island. With 4,400 patients it became the most-populated psychiatric hospital in the world. Among its famous occupants, Scott Joplin would die there in 1917.

Ward's Island. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane is on the right.

1897 Photo of the East Building

Continued in Part Three.

-----

Nikola Tesla, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Henry H. Holmes are all characters in my thriller, A Predator's Game.

A Predator's Game is available in soft-cover and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers.


A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

Martin Hill Ortiz, also writing under the name, Martin Hill, is the author of A Predatory Mind. Its sequel, set in 1890s Manhattan and titled A Predator's Game, features Nikola Tesla as detective.

Friday, May 6, 2016

Ten Fascinating Locations in Old New York, Part One.

One of the joys of writing my novel, A Predator's Game, involved immersing myself in the Manhattan of 1896. With so many exotic locations, I was able to pick the best to set the scenes of my story.

Background.

In 1896, Manhattan and New York City were one and the same. The consolidation that would include the five boroughs took place in 1898. This was also several years before construction of the subway system had begun. Although no underground trains existed, there was an extensive system of overhead trains. Most trolleys were pulled by horses, with a single cable car traveling up and down Broadway and one on the Brooklyn Bridge. The latter converted to electric-power that year.

With the invention of the elevator and improvements in construction techniques, a new sort of building, the skyscraper, started going up all over the place and the tallest building one month would soon be overtaken the next.

The Ten Locations.

Location #10: The American Tract Society Building.
Location #9:  The Suicide Curves of the Ninth Avenue El.
Location #8: The American Museum of Natural History.
(to be continued with:)
Location #7. The Bellevue Morgue.
Location #6. Hart Island.
Location #5. The Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.
Location #4. Tesla's Laboratory on East Houston.
Location #3. The Eden Musée.
Location #2. The Adams Power Station.
Location #1. Goat Island and Terrapin Point, Niagara Falls.

Location #10. The American Tract Society Building.

A background theme of my story is the perils of technology. The appearance of tall buildings were a source of wonderment in the 1890s: evidence of unrelenting progress while at the same time changing the public's concept of the city, suddenly there was such a thing as a vertical landscape. I searched for a building that would describe both the awe and the shock of the new, firmly planted in the 19th century but calling out to the future.

From the book:

  As inventors of the religious pamphlet, the American Tract Society delivered the Good News to the masses. . . . The Society decided to construct their own Tower of Babel nearby City Hall and Newspaper Row and not far from the launching point of the Brooklyn Bridge, perfectly positioned as a prestigious address and guaranteeing them a regular income as landlords. ...

  When completed in August of 1895, the American Tract Society building stood twenty-three floors, its roof higher than any building in the city save those with steeples. Its elevators gave a jolt when they shot the passengers up to the heavens at an alarming speed and made a terrifying drop when they returned them to earth. Or else they simply crashed.


Deaths in elevators and deaths in falling from man-made heights were new and exotic fears and the Tract Society received bad publicity from both with articles published in the local papers, The Engineering News and The Scientific American. The builders had installed the wrong type of elevator hydraulics for so tall a building. Thus the owners had trouble renting the upper floors and eventually had to sell the building at foreclosure. It still stands today, albeit with better elevator brakes.


The American Tract Building (in back), 1890s.



Location #9. Suicide Curve.

Nothing better defined the progress of the 1890s with its wonder, its convenience, and its hell, than the elevated trains. Not needing to stop for pedestrian nor horse, these trains invented commuting and expanded  the city, so that houses and buildings crowded out the cornfields and open lands of northern Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. They also blotted out the sky for those who worked and lived below. Their coal engines belched sulfurous clouds as they passed.

One of the Spidery Monsters that Made Up the Elevated Train System.


Along the Ninth Avenue El, at 110th Street, the train tracks rose to perilous heights and took a pair of sharp turns. These were called the Suicide Curves. In my novel, a runaway train approaches the turn.

  Tesla stared up the line. “Changing direction while maintaining velocity is a form of acceleration with the additional force directed outwards from the curve.”

  “What does the hell does that mean?” Conan Doyle asked.


  “When we hit the curve that velocity will be directed toward tossing the train from its tracks and over the edge of the railway. To execute the turn with a margin of safety, we need to cut our speed in half.”


  The track sloped upward atop spindly metal legs, ascending to over one hundred feet above the streets below, seemingly suspended in midair, higher than the roofs of the nearby tenements.


Suicide Curve on the 9th Avenue El at 110th
A Satirical View of the Oppressive, Belching Elevated Trains

#8. The American Museum of Natural History.

Having opened in 1877, the American Museum of Natural History underwent a period of rapid expansion in the mid-1890s. From the novel:

  The American Museum of Natural History filled the five floors of a long main building and an eastern wing. Scaffolding surrounded the stub of a west wing. A pair of rounded towers bracketed the main entrance, where a stairhead platform spread out in front of a series of six tall arches. From here, a cement staircase divided in two and toppled down to the street level.

American Museum of Natural History, an 1898 drawing showing its West Wing complete.

  Immediately upon entering the museum, they were greeted by a monstrous elephant, its head bowed for the charge, its glass eyes gleaming. Its tusks twisted inwards and nearly touched, like a pair of filaments with a narrow spark gap.

Tip, the Killer Elephant at the Public Entrance to the Museum. After having gored and killed seven people at the zoo, Tip was given a trial and then executed and stuffed.

Continued.

-----

Nikola Tesla, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Henry H. Holmes are all characters in my thriller, A Predator's Game.

A Predator's Game is available in soft-cover and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers.


A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

Martin Hill Ortiz, also writing under the name, Martin Hill, is the author of A Predatory Mind. Its sequel, set in 1890s Manhattan and titled A Predator's Game, features Nikola Tesla as detective.


Thursday, May 5, 2016

Tesla Versus The Nobel Prize


The article as it ran in the November 6, 1915 Boston Journal.

On November 5th, 1915, the London Daily Telegraph made the announcement:

  The Swedish government has decided to distribute the Nobel prizes next week as follows:

  "Physics, Thomas A. Edison and Nikola Tesla; literature, Romain Rolland (French), Hendrik Pontoppidan (Swede); chemistry, Prof. Theodor Sveberg."

 

With Tesla and Edison being U.S. citizens, this announcement was picked up by newspapers all over America.

The story proved to be false. The British father and son team of William and William Lawrence Bragg won the prize for their work on X-ray crystallography. Tesla had not been nominated that year and would never win a Nobel Prize.

Although I had heard of this historical error, I did not realize how extensive and persistent it was. Even after the correct winners were announced, even after the Nobel Prize ceremony, Tesla continued to be named as the winner and named with a greater frequency than the Braggs.

Using an aggregator of American newspaper stories, over the months beginning with November 1915, 94 articles appeared in various newspapers  regarding Tesla and the Nobel Prize. (An additional 7 mentioned Edison as a winner without Tesla being named.)

Of these articles.
  • 51 came with the initial announcement. Clustering around November 5th/6th some of these articles presented Edison and Tesla as "possible" winners, while others were certain.
  • 10 belonged to a set beginning within a week. These were composed as a follow-up, talking with Tesla about his plans for and his visions of the future which included wireless telephone, lighting at sea, and wars without bombs.
  • A mere 7 articles mentioned Tesla did not win the prize. These began on November 13th and in each case mentioned the correct winners.
  • 19 cited Tesla as the winner of the Nobel prize while describing his patents for an electrical device to destroy bombs at a distance. These began December 8th, two days before the Nobel Prize ceremonies.Typical of these was a Boston Herald article dated, December 8th which began, "Nikola Tesla, the inventor, winner of the 1915 Nobel physics prize, has filed patent applications on the essential parts of a machine, the possibilities of which test a layman's imagination and promise a parallel of Thor's shooting. thunderbolts from the sky to punish those who angered the gods."
  • 3 cited Tesla as the winner of the Nobel prize while discussing Tesla's views on the elimination of war. These began January 30th, 1916.
  • 4 were miscellaneous, e.g., Nobel Prize given out tomorrow: Edison and Tesla are winners.

In contrast, the actual winners, William Bragg and his son, merited 22 articles.


Another way to look at this is:

  • 56 articles reported Tesla as receiving the Nobel Prize from the time of the announcement until the correction.
  • 7 articles correcting the error. (Additional articles reported the Braggs winning without correcting the previous error).
  • 13 articles reported Tesla as receiving the Nobel Prize from the time of correction up through the day of the ceremony.
  • 18 articles reported Tesla as receiving the Nobel Prize after the ceremony had taken place.

In contrast:
  • 14 articles reported the Braggs as receiving the Nobel Prize up to the time of the ceremony.
  • 8 articles reported the Braggs receiving the Nobel Prize after the ceremony. 


Thomas Edison was no rookie when it came to reports that he had won the Nobel Prize. On October 19, 1911, the Boston Herald ran a report with the headline: Edison Wins Nobel Prize for Physics. Similar articles ran in newspapers across the country. After the correction was made, Edison stated he would decline the award, anyhow: it was best given to an inventor early in his career who needed the money.

Some have suggested that Tesla and Edison were the original winners of the prize but that the recipients were changed due to Edison and Tesla's rivalry (or for other reasons). This did not happen. The nominations for the prize from 1915 have become available and Tesla's name was not among them. Furthermore, the initial report included several other recipients, all of whom failed to receive the award that year.

From an article in the Olympia Daily Recorder published 3 weeks after the Nobel Prize ceremony.
-----

Nikola Tesla, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Henry H. Holmes are all characters in my thriller, A Predator's Game.

A Predator's Game is available in soft-cover and ebook through Amazon and other online retailers


A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

Martin Hill Ortiz, also writing under the name, Martin Hill, is the author of A Predatory Mind. Its sequel, set in 1890s Manhattan and titled A Predator's Game, features Nikola Tesla as detective.