Tesla was an astonishingly brilliant and unusual man who, in his life, would invent AC electricity, many systems of fluorescent lighting, the first remote-control devices, wireless communication, and much more. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable because he primarily worked alone, often with little money or other support. He was passionate and driven by ideals, and many other more strategic and materialistic people would try to lay claim to his discoveries and exploit his trusting nature. His name was literally erased from textbooks so that others could take credit for his work.
Tesla was born during a lightning storm on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, a tiny village of just over a thousand people in the mountains of Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary). About half of the population of Smiljan were Serbian Orthodox families that had settled there during the Great Turkish War of the seventeenth century. Tesla’s father, Milutin, was a Serbian Orthodox minister who was sent to Smiljan to serve as a pastor. Milutin spoke many languages, was a talented mathematician, and was an avid reader with a large library. Tesla described him as “a very erudite man, a veritable natural philosopher, poet and writer.… He has a prodigious memory and frequently recited at length from works in several languages. He often remarked playfully that if some of the classics were lost he could restore them.”1 Both Tesla’s mother, Djouka, and brother, Dane, were also endowed with extraordinary memories. According to Tesla, because his mother had never learned to read, she memorized the great epic Serbian poems and long passages from the Bible.2 She also had exceptional mechanical talents and devised many kinds of household tools such as churns and looms. According to Tesla, his mother was “descended from a long line of inventors.” She also had untiring work habits that would be shared by her son, rising before dawn each day and working until eleven o’clock at night.3
Smiljan was a farming community, and Nikola spent his childhood days frolicking in nature, playing with the barnyard animals and his beloved cat, and creating early boyish inventions such as a cornstalk popgun, a hook for catching frogs, and a propeller powered by May bugs glued onto tiny wooden blades. Exhibiting his tinkering nature from a very early age, he would disassemble and then reassemble his grandfather’s clocks. He also played with his brother, who he described as being “gifted to an extraordinary degree; one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain.”4
Tragedy struck in 1863. Dane was thrown from the family horse and died of his injuries. The family was devastated, and, as later noted by Nikola, Dane’s “premature death left my parents disconsolate.… The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison. Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly.”5 Feeling rejected by his parents and traumatized by the death of his brother, Nikola began to have nightmares and “lived in constant dread of the spirit of evil, of ghosts and ogres and other unholy monsters of the dark.”6
Tesla was aware from an early age that he was uniquely intelligent. In his autobiography he recounts a story of a day when he was playing in the street with other boys and a wealthy alderman passed by. The alderman paused to give a silver piece to each of the boys, but when he reached Tesla, he suddenly stopped and commanded, “Look in my eyes.” Tesla met his gaze, his hand outstretched to receive the valuable coin, when to his dismay, the alderman said, “No, not much; you can get nothing from me. You are too smart.”7 When he was ten years old, he solved math problems so quickly that his teachers contacted his parents, suspecting him of cheating. They asked him to repeat the feat in front of both his teachers and parents, which he did, convincing all who observed that they were in the presence of a child prodigy.
However, Tesla was also aware that his mind had some peculiar traits that were more discomfiting. He would frequently experience the appearance of images, accompanied by strong flashes of light, which interfered with his thoughts and actions. They were pictures of things or scenes that he had once seen, not just imagined. A word could invoke the image of an object in front of him, and he was incapable of distinguishing it from reality. In fact, he would sometimes need one of his sisters to tell him whether the vision was a hallucination or not.8 The fact that the images were always something that Tesla had once seen suggests they were likely eidetic images—extremely clear mental images of an object that is no longer present—rather than hallucinations. Numerous studies of eidetic imagery suggest that it is an ability possessed by 2 percent to 10 percent of children and is almost nonexistent among adults. Not knowing or understanding the concept of an eidetic memory, however, Tesla and his family found the experiences worrying. Dane had experienced them too, provoking Tesla to speculate he was biologically predisposed to them.
Shortly after Dane’s death, the family moved to the nearby city of Gospić, where Nikola’s father served as the minister and also taught religion at the local gymnasium. Nikola missed his rural life and his animal playmates. He also began to have nightmares about Dane’s death and to experience images of Dane’s body in a casket:
A vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all efforts to banish it.… To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to get it I had to conjure continuously new images.… The remedy gradually lost all its force. Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes.… I began to travel; of course, in my mind.… Every night, (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys—see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.9
By the age of twelve, he had begun exhibiting other peculiarities, perhaps stemming from the stress of his brother’s death and his strained relationship with his parents.10 He would practice acts of self-denial and self-mastery (for example, patterns of restricted eating would persist throughout his life). He acquired a strong aversion to many round things, noting “The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of… objects with sharp edges.… I would get a fever by looking at a peach.” He also developed a germ phobia that caused him to feel repulsion at the idea of touching another person’s hair and that would later lead him to worry considerably about the impurity of water and to frequently wear gloves. He counted the steps in his walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups, and pieces of food—otherwise, he could not enjoy his meal. All repeated acts had to be divisible by three, or he would feel compelled to do them over again, even if it took hours. Many of these habits suggest an obsessive-compulsive disorder, a point that I will return to later.
From ages ten to fourteen, Nikola attended the Real Gymnasium (equivalent to junior high school), which had a well-equipped physics department, and his interest in electricity began to quickly emerge: “I was interested in electricity almost from the beginning of my educational career.… I read all that I could find on the subject… [and] experimented with batteries and induction coils.”11 He also began experimenting with water turbines and motors, and began to develop the goal of creating a perpetual-motion machine. At fourteen, he proclaimed his intention to build a gigantic waterwheel under Niagara Falls (which he had seen in a drawing or photograph) and harness its energy—a remarkably accurate forecast of his future.
Although Tesla dreamed of studying engineering, his father intended him to enter the ministry. Then, in a twist of fate, shortly after graduating from the Higher Real Gymnasium (equivalent to high school), Tesla contracted cholera. He was bedridden for nine months, and his family feared that he would die. While his father sat at his bedside, Nikola told him, “Perhaps I may get well if you will let me study engineering.” His father sol
emnly replied, “You will go to the best technical institution in the world.”12 Nikola recovered, and his father set about making good on his promise.
Tesla was known for being able to perform advanced calculus and physics equations in his head. At the age of seventeen, he began to turn his intelligence and capacity for imagery to invention:
I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind.… It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise?13
While the reader may find this difficult to believe, there are numerous documented instances of Tesla’s designs so constructed working perfectly upon execution. The process Tesla describes is closely analogous to what engineers now do with computer-aided design programs—but Tesla of course achieved it without the aid of a computer!
After spending a couple of years roaming in the mountains with “a hunter’s outfit and a bundle of books” to recover his health and avoid being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, he began his studies in 1875 at the Polytechnic School in Graz, the most advanced school of the region. Tesla threw himself into his studies with near-frenzied intensity, studying upward of twenty hours per day.14 As he noted, “I had made up my mind to give my parents a surprise, and during the whole first year I regularly started work at three o’clock in the morning and continued until eleven at night, no Sundays or holidays excepted. As most of my fellow-students took things easily, naturally I eclipsed all records.”15 Tesla studied so hard that his teachers worried that he might die from overwork. They wrote to his father suggesting that he persuade his son to leave school. His father tried to persuade Nikola to come back home to Gospić, but he was determined to continue his studies. He created his own extended curriculum that included not only those courses required for his major in engineering but also courses in languages (he could speak about nine) and self-directed study of the works of Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, and Shakespeare, many of which he committed to memory.16 As he noted in his autobiography, “I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire, when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close to one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside that last book I was very glad and said, ‘Never more!’”17 Tesla’s use of the word mania is probably more prescient than he intended. As we shall see later, Tesla exhibited many of the diagnostic criteria for mania, such as oversensitivity to stimuli, periods of extremely intense goal-directed activity, and a sharply reduced need for sleep.
It was during his sophomore year at the Polytechnic that Tesla first saw a direct-current dynamo that was outfitted, as was customary, with a commutator that transferred the electric current (which is alternating in its natural state) to the motor. Tesla immediately intuited that the commutator was unnecessary: he knew there must be a way to harness alternating current unencumbered by the awkward commutator. When Tesla voiced this opinion spontaneously in class, his outraged professor spent the rest of the class detailing why this was impossible and remarked critically, “Mr. Tesla will accomplish great things, but he certainly will never do this. It would be equivalent to converting a steady pulling force like gravity into rotary effort. It is a perpetual motion scheme, an impossible idea.”18 Tesla would eventually prove the professor—and many other people—wrong.19
Unfortunately, during this time Tesla acquired a gambling addiction, and he sometimes wagered for twenty-four hours at a stretch. He failed his exams and was thrown out of school. Initially, he fled to Slovenia to look for work, afraid to tell his parents of his misfortune. However, his father eventually found him and convinced him to finish his studies at the University of Prague, where he made great progress on his alternating-current theories.
After his father’s death in 1879, Tesla moved to Budapest to work for the American telephone exchange, where he began to study Thomas Edison’s inventions. He would take the machines apart and improve them, although he never bothered to obtain patents on any of his inventions. He also pursued the alternating-current problem with such intensity, denying himself any rest or leisure, that he suffered a nervous collapse. He experienced severe oversensitivity to sound and light, claiming that the sound of a fly landing on a table would cause a thud in his ear and that the sun’s rays would stun him. His condition must have been quite serious because his doctor warned that he might not recover. Relief came in a surprising way. Anthony Szigeti, Tesla’s former classmate and closest friend, managed to convince him to join him in outdoor exercise, and it was while walking in the park with Szigeti and reciting a passage from Goethe’s Faust that the solution to the alternating-current problem suddenly crystallized: “As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightening and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand, the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.… Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally I would have given for that one which I had wrestled from her against all odds and at peril of my existence.”20 Put simply, Tesla conceived of using two circuits that generated dual currents ninety degrees out of phase with each other. A receiving magnet, by means of induction, would rotate in space and continually attract a steady stream of electrons, whether the charge was positive or negative.
This revelation seemed to free Tesla. As he later wrote, “It was a mental state of happiness as complete as I have ever known in life. Ideas came in an uninterrupted stream and the only difficulty I had was to hold them fast.… In less than two months, I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system now identified with my name.”21 He designed dynamos, motors, transformers, and other devices needed for complete alternating-current systems. His ability to visualize equipment perfectly enabled him to create and test everything in his mind and then implement it in the machine shop, without ever having drawn up blueprints. When he was actually able to test his devices and see if his theory and mental images had been correct, they worked perfectly. This gave Tesla a tremendous sense of confidence, highlighting the role of “early wins” in creating self-efficacy, as discussed in the previous chapter. As biographer John O’Neill describes, “From these results he drew an unbounded sense of self-confidence; he could think and work his way to any goal he set. There was good reason for Tesla’s self-assurance. He had just passed his twenty-seventh birthday. It seemed to him only yesterday that Professor Poeschl had seemingly so completely vanquished him for saying that he could operate a motor by alternating current. Now he had demonstrably accomplished what the learned professor said could never be done.”22 Tesla’s alternating-current system would go on to revolutionize the use of electric power. As Marc Seifer notes in his biography of Tesla, “Before his invention, electricity could be pumped approximately one mile, and then only for illuminating dwellings. After Tesla, electrical power could be transmitted hundreds of miles, and then not only for lighting but for running household appliances and industrial machines in factories. Tesla’s creation was a leap ahead in a rapidly advancing technological revolution.”23
While working on several power plant projects in Paris and Germany (for which he was never f
airly paid), he met Charles Batchelor, who was the former assistant to Thomas Edison. Batchelor encouraged Tesla to go the United States to work with Edison. Tesla decided to follow his advice, and in 1884 he sold most of his belongings and moved to America. He brought with him a letter to Edison from Batchelor that read, “I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.”24 With this glowing recommendation, he was readily received by Edison. Tesla was thrilled to meet Edison, who was hailed as the “Napoleon of invention.” He was in awe that Edison had been able to accomplish so much with so little education, and it made him wonder if perhaps he had wasted his time pursuing education rather than more practical pursuits: “I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries… and felt that most of my life had been squandered.”25 Eventually, however, Tesla realized that Edison was at a great disadvantage by not having mathematical and engineering training: “If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.… I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor.… Trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense… the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.”26
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