by Marc Seifer
In 1956 there was a celebration of the centenary of Tesla’s birth. To highlight the event, with Nobel laureate Niels Bohr as a speaker, a centennial congress was held in Tesla’s honor. Simultaneously, the Yugoslav Postal Service issued a commemorative Tesla stamp, and the Yugoslav government placed Tesla on the 100 dinar note (equivalent to a U.S. dollar). Statues of the inventor were placed at museums in Zagreb and Vienna, a school was named after him in Illinois, a Tesla day was proclaimed in Chicago, and in Munich the Institute Electrotechnical Committee agreed to adopt the name “tesla” as the unit of magnetic flux density. Now Tesla could take his rightful place beside such other luminaries as Ampère, Faraday, Volta, and Watt.
Twenty years later, as a gift from the Yugoslavian people, in 1976 a statue of Tesla by sculptor Franco Krsinic, was placed at Niagara Falls and an identical companion statue erected on the village square in Gospić, Croatia, where Tesla was raised as a boy. (Unfortunately, this Gospić statue was purposely blown apart during the war in 1993.) President Tito gave a speech in Tesla’s honor in Smiljan before thousands of Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians (who were separated by armed guards and demarcation fences), and the celebration also continued in America. Plaques were posted at the site of his residence at the Hotel Gerlach in New York City and at the Wardenclyffe laboratory, which still stands at Shoreham, Long Island.
In 1983 the U.S. Post Office honored Tesla, along with Charles Steinmetz, Philo Farnsworth, and, alas, Edwin Armstrong, in a block-offour commemorative stamp. In Boston a giant Tesla coil can be found at the Museum of Science, and Tesla’s picture can be found hanging in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. There are also two major organizations in his honor, the Tesla Memorial Society, in Lackawanna, New York, and the International Tesla Society, which has held conferences every two years since 1984 at the society’s headquarters in Colorado Springs.
William Whyte wrote in The Organization Man that as beneficial as the large corporations can be, they are also static, delusory, and self-destructive. During the inevitable conflict between the individual and society, the organization man is caught in a bind because the company provides a livelihood, but at the expense of the worker’s individuality. This is what Whyte calls a “mutual deception”: “It is obvious to fight tyranny; it is not easy to fight benevolence, and few things are more calculated to rob the individual of his defenses than the idea that his interests and those of society can be wholly compatible…One who lets the Organization be the judge ultimately sacrifices himself.”3
The corporate view becomes the very embodiment of rationality itself, structuring, restructuring, and thereby controlling consciousness.4 As was the case with the Tesla situation, the more the corporate world rejected the Wardenclyffe idea, the more unworkable it appeared to the engineers working in the industry, because they, as products and extensions of the corporations, had their consciousness shaped by its policies. Ultimately, Tesla’s worldview became a threat, and it was easier to dismiss him as an eccentric than consider that his plans may have been viable.
A modern example of a famous innovator who became somewhat of a nonperson is Steven Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computer. Realizing, in the mid-1980s, that the Motorola microprocessor was superior for graphics capabilities to the one in the Apple II computer and the one being used by Bill Gates/Microsoft for IBM, Jobs produced the Macintosh. First-generation Macintoshes, which were admittedly unattractive for business use and constructed so that they were not expandable, were not immediate successes in the marketplace. The inferior IBM disk operating system (DOS) was, of course, the standard. Undeterred, Jobs wanted to scrap the obsolete but highly profitable Apple II to go solely into production of Macs. Even though he was the wunderkind cocreator of the billion-dollar enterprise, Jobs became a threat to its financial stability. In a stunning move, Jobs was not only deposed; he was literally barred from working at Apple, even though he was still the largest shareholder! A decade later, the Bill Gates/IBM-compatible (Intel/Pentium) chip, although endowed with graphics (Windows) capabilities, is still based on an inferior design as compared to the Power-Mac. Nevertheless, the Gates/Intel chip is by far the leading system in the country, even though the Power-Mac by necessity is the standard in such fields as graphic design. Coyly, Gates said it this way: “People were coming out with completely new operating systems, but we had already captured the volume, so we could price it low and keep selling…[And] believe me, it would have been a lot easier to write Windows so it didn’t run DOS applications. But we knew we couldn’t make the transition without that compatibility.”5
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Being aware of the criticisms of the Freudian paradigm and the problem of oversimplification, I argued in my doctoral dissertation that in order to explain Tesla’s unusual personality, self-proclaimed celibacy, and alleged homosexuality, it is possible that he may have suffered repressed guilt feelings associated with the untimely death of his older brother Dane when Tesla was five years old. In the throes of the Oedipal complex and admittedly overattached to his mother, young Niko experienced great trauma not only because Dane was Djouka’s favorite son but also because Niko was at that age of gaining his sexual identity and learning to transfer love bestowed upon himself to others. Possibly the mother rejected Tesla after Dane’s death, and thus Tesla bestowed the love back upon himself and became narcissistic. Wishing to gain back the perceived loss of love from his mother and lost brother, later in life Tesla would unconsciously seek out figures that would combine the dynamics of “older brother/mother surrogates,” for example, strong, nurturing authority figures, such as Westinghouse and Pierpont Morgan. This combination of brother and mother might also explain the confusion associated with Tesla’s sexual identity.
To recapture their lost love and, in the symbolic sense, to bring the brother back from the dead (for that would be the only way to repair the damage), Tesla would have to form a sacrifice as penance. In Westinghouse’s case, he ripped up the royalty clause, and it cost him millions of dollars (he could have set up a deferred payment schedule);6 and in Morgan’s case, the inventor insisted that the financier take the larger share of the partnership, that is, 51 percent, even when Morgan suggested fifty-fifty.
Due, however, to a multitude of personality factors, including egomania, overambition, and his impatient wish to crush the competition, Tesla breached his contract with Morgan by deciding to build a larger tower than was agreed upon. This was a self-destructive move (although it might have succeeded and was also, on another level, simply a calculated risk). From the psychoanalytic standpoint, unconsciously he was hoping that the financier would forgive his sins (show his surrogate son that he still loved him) by providing him with the additional funds to complete the tower. When Morgan said no, the unconscious could not face such a harsh rejection, so Tesla tried obdurately to turn the man around; and even when it was clear that Morgan would never come through, the self-perceived surrogate son continued to try.
Turning to Tesla’s persistent wish to contact extraterrestrials, from a psychoanalytic perspective these outer space entities may have symbolized beings existing in the afterworld. Certainly the need to believe in extraterrestrials is a powerful and popular one. It explains why so many people accepted Percival Lowell’s “Canals of Mars” hypothesis and, in today’s world, the extreme popularity of such movies as Star Wars, Star Trek, and ET. In Tesla’s case the extraterrestrials may have prelogically stood for his dead brother and mother. The insistence that he had probably been contacted by Martians became an unconscious safety valve which allowed him to hypercathect (release) much of the anxiety associated with the death of his older brother, as the brother would still be, in a sense, alive. Thus, if Dane still existed, the trauma of his death would be diminished, and Niko’s mother would love him again.
This form of regressive behavior could also explain Tesla’s obsession with caring for pigeons. After Dane died, the family was wrested from their idyllic farm in Smiljan to the bustling city of Gosp
ić. The pigeons were not only substitute mistresses for Tesla; they also symbolized a return to the utopia of his early and untroubled childhood in Smiljan.
As a counterhypothesis to the psychoanalytic paradigm (and as no solid evidence of homosexuality has been discovered by this researcher), one must place Tesla within his time period. Like William James and other intellects of that day, the idea of dedicating oneself to science at the expense of marriage was not a unique occurrence. Tesla was keenly aware that the responsibilities of marriage would have interfered too greatly with his inventive élan. Purposely, and admittedly through self-denial, he transformed his instincts in the alchemical sense to raise them to a higher level. This view, however, does not completely explain the natural proclivity to partake of the passions, especially when one considers that at his height, in the Gay Nineties, the rising star could probably have had his pick of any number of willing females, for example, Marguerite Merrington. Nor does it explain his overattachment to the city pigeons.
Nevertheless, the Freudian paradigm falls short in its attempts to explain the nature of Tesla’s wizardry in that it tends to see this ability as a sublimation rather than an end in itself. Tesla’s emphasis on ritual and such obsessions as cleanliness and self-denial were just as much linked to his childhood bouts with cholera, caused by impure drinking water, as to his wish to change his state of consciousness through a set routine so that he could prepare his mind to do its work. Unlike most inventors, Tesla’s creativity did not just lie in one plane. He adapted his mental faculties to a number of separate fields, designing fundamental inventions in lighting, electrical power distribution, mechanical contrivances, particle-beam weaponry, aerodynamics, and artificial intelligence. This great versatility of achievement places the inventor in a category all his own. Ultimately, Tesla was a journeyman searching for the Holy Grail. His goal was nothing short of altering the very direction of the human species through extensions of his effort.
CULT FIGURE
It was the coil that I noticed first—because I had seen drawings like it years ago…“Hank, do you understand? Those men, long ago tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along. They couldn’t do it. They gave it up.” She pointed at the broken shape. “But there is it.”
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand7
At 8:00 P.M. on June 20, 1957, in the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in New York City, the Interplanetary Sessions Newsletter announced a meeting to coordinate an expected visit by the “Space People” to the planet Earth. The event was planned by three individuals: George Van Tassel, author of I Rode a Flying Saucer; George King, purported telepathic contactee with extraterrestrials, and Margaret Storm, author of the occult Tesla biography Return of the Dove, a book whose “transcripts were received on the Tesla set, a radio-type machine invented by Tesla in 1938 for interplanetary communication.” By July 1 it was assured that the “Martians” would have “full scale operations” in Washington, D.C., New York, and “general North American areas.” It was also revealed that “Tesla was a Venusian, brought to this planet as a baby in 1856, and left in a remote mountain province in what is now Yogoslavia [sic].”
In attendance at this meeting was a man who preferred to remain unnoticed. He was an FBI agent assigned to continue the expanding file on the enigmatic Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. It is quite likely that a copy of this newsletter, which is in the FBI file, was also read by J. Edgar Hoover, a man concerned about the growing interest in the flying-saucer phenomena and the secrecy surrounding various adherents.
Margaret Storm’s supposition that Tesla was born on another planet to give us our entire electric power and mass communications systems stemmed from a colorful history of the inventor’s ties to the group-fantasy belief that life on Mars was a virtual certainty. Fueled by McCarthyism and the fear of Communist (alien) infiltration and also theosophical literature, Storm proclaimed that Tesla had descended from the sixth-root race, a new species of human that was evolving on the planet. To complicate matters, she was also friends with Arthur Matthews, author of Wall of Light: Nikola Tesla and the Venusian Spaceship. A bizarre electrician who had once written to Tesla in the 1930s, Matthews contended that he and his supposed employer, Tesla, had traveled many times to nearby planets aboard Venusian spacecraft and that Tesla, as late as 1970, was still alive, living as an extraterrestrial.8
Relegated to occult status for many decades, Tesla has also been fictionalized as one of any number of mad scientists in science-fiction literature, as part of the composite New Age hero John Galt in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, as a source for future technology in James Redfield’s 1996 bestseller The Tenth Insight, and as the extraterrestrial (played by rock star David Bowie) in the Nicholas Roeg movie The Man Who Fell to Earth. As a cult figure in the United States, Tesla has also seen a panegyric resurgence with the younger generation because of a rock band which goes by the same name.
In Japan, however, Tesla’s cult status is much more complicated. On the one hand, Dr. Yoshiro NakaMats, the world’s leading inventor, whose creations include the floppy disk, is a great proponent of Tesla and has created a celebration in Tesla’s honor. On the other hand, Tesla’s secret weaponry work has also attracted the attention of one of the most dangerous cults of modern times.
Just one month after the January 1995 earthquake in Kobe destroyed the city and killed 5,000 people, followers of the “charismatic psychopath” Shoko Ashara, the man responsible for poisoning the subways with Sarin gas in Tokyo, flew into Belgrade to infiltrate the Tesla Museum with hopes of obtaining the inventor’s schematics for his supposed telegeodynamic earthquake machine. Ashara’s cult, known as Aum Supreme Truth, had an Internet of supposedly tens of thousands of members in a half dozen countries with access to state-of-the-art high-tech devices, a large data base of military secrets, firearms, and laser apparatus, and other more esoteric New Age weaponry systems. Seeking world domination, their plans were interrupted by the earthquake. Rather than seeing the event as a natural occurrence, Ashara suggested that the Kobe disaster was caused by electromagnetic experiments conducted by one of the Japanese megacorporations or by American or possibly Russian military tests of a top-secret Tesla telegeodynamic instrument.
Raised in a country that had seen its cities destroyed by the atom bomb, Ashara had been influenced by apocalyptic science fiction stories, by the book Tesla Superman written by Japanese author Masaki Shindo, and by such Teslaphiles as Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, whose model for the Tesla magnifying transmitter hypothesized that it could be used as an intercontinental “electrostatic scalar-wave” delivery system. Realizing that Armageddon was at hand, the Kobe earthquake being proof of the prophecy, Ashara now planned to seize the high ground by constructing his own “Tesla howitzer” while at the same time perfecting the death ray.9
Christopher Evans, in his text Cults of Unreason, suggests that cults appear as “stop-gaps” for people in society—ways for them to deal with life’s mysteries and also for the unsettling feeling associated with the rapid pace of our times.10 According to Evans, cults exist in order to discover the “Holy Grail,” the supposed secret behind the universe. Tesla himself called his magnifying transmitter the “philosopher’s stone.” To him, it was the mechanism by which to transform society and interlink the entire globe. Following a Goethean path, Tesla’s weltanschauung suggested a hierarchy of intelligence to the universe. Not only were his creations derived from natural law, through them, humans could attain godlike status and communicate with other interstellar neighbors.
“According to the idea of esotericism, as applied to history,” says Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, “no civilization ever begins of itself.”11 Esoteric schools involve other (higher) dimensions, says astrologer Dane Rudyar. Certain individuals, often referred to as avatars, Rudyar suggests, are actually “seed men” who one way or another have within their being knowledge that can lead a culture into transcenden
ce.
Tesla had possession of certain knowledge which for various reasons was rejected by mainstream science and society or suppressed by powers that perceived his contributions as threatening. Yet the essence of Tesla’s work is available for the seeker. Described by popular New Age writer Robert Anton Wilson as an “illuminati,” Tesla remains a cult hero because of his esoteric status, because his life’s work has served as a template for numerous science-fiction characters and cinematic themes, and because he provides answers for those who study his work for its inner meaning.12
Unlike so many other esoteric figures, however, Tesla is in a unique position because so many of his inventions were incorporated into our modern high-tech world. Had his ultimate world broadcasting plan actually coalesced during his heyday, there is no telling how history might have proceeded and how the quality of our lives might have changed.
The Tesla particle beam weapon. (© Lynn Sevigny 1995)
APPENDIX A
THE MAGNIFYING
