Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (2 page)

Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

If you mean the man who really invented, in other words, originated and discovered – not merely improved what had already been invented by others, then without a shade of doubt, Nikola Tesla is the world’s greatest inventor, not only at present, but in all history.

Hugo Gernsback, Father of Modern Science Fiction, 1919

 

Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943) is the towering genius who made the modern world. All the electrical devices around us owe something to him. Not only did he invent many of the gadgets we depend on today, he had a vision of the future, much of which has become reality long after his death. As long ago as 1900, Tesla wrote of a world system of wireless transmission:

The World-System has resulted from a combination of several original discoveries made by the inventor in the course of long continued research and experimentation. It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter-connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the globe.

This is surely the mobile phone network we have over a century later. And in his autobiography,
My Inventions
, published in 1919, he envisaged that in nine months, without undue expense, he could deliver:

• The interconnection of existing telegraph exchanges or offices all over the world;

• The establishment of a secret and non-interferable government telegraph service;

• The interconnection of all present telephone exchanges or offices around the globe;

• The universal distribution of general news by telegraph or telephone, in conjunction with the press;

• The establishment of such a ‘World System’ of intelligence transmission for exclusive private use;

• The interconnection and operation of all stock tickers of the world;

• The establishment of a world system of musical distribution, etc.;

• The universal registration of time by cheap clocks indicating the hour with astronomical precision and requiring no attention whatever;

• The world transmission of typed or handwritten characters, letters, checks, etc.;

• The establishment of a universal marine service enabling the navigators of all ships to steer perfectly without compass, to determine the exact location, hour and speed; to prevent collisions and disasters, etc.;

• The inauguration of a system of world printing on land and sea;

• The world reproduction of photographic pictures and all kinds of drawings or records …

Here we have the internet, GPS and Satnav. But Tesla was not just a visionary who delivered theory. He was a practical man who pioneered alternating current that made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, allowing electrical appliances to be powered by remote power stations, rather than have a power station on every street corner as the earlier direct current system envisaged.

He is now acknowledged to have beaten Guglielmo Marconi to the invention of the radio. Indeed, he spoke of his world system of wireless transmission the year before Marconi transmitted the first radio signal across the Atlantic. His Tesla Coil, invented in 1891, is widely used in radio and television sets, and other electronic equipment. He developed electric motors, generators, X-rays, fluorescent tubes, remote control and radar. However, many of his inventions are unacknowledged because he was so busy developing new ideas to bother patenting them.

Although he was never awarded a Nobel Prize, three Nobel laureates lauded him as ‘one of the outstanding intellects of the world who paved the way for many of the technological developments of modern times’. He appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine and the unit of magnetic induction, a minor planet, a crater on the moon, an award and an airport are named after him. He was also played by David Bowie in the 2006 movie
The Prestige
.

Otherwise, with his talk of death rays and communication from other planets, his image endures as that of the mad scientist. But he was far from mad. He was one of the outstanding figures of the 20th century, arguably more influential than Einstein, Stravinsky or Picasso, and 70 years after his death, he deserves to be better known.

 

PART ONE: STRANGER FROM A STRANGE LAND

Chapter 1 – Birth of a Visionary

 

In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those I imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety…

Nikola Tesla

 

Legend has it that Nikola Tesla – the pioneer who brought electric light to nearly every home on the planet – was born in a dazzling electrical storm. Sadly, the meteorological records of the Balkans in the 19th century are not readily to hand. But it would have been a fitting debut for the man who made his own artificial lightning with sparks up to 1000 ft (300 m) long and thunder that could be heard 15 miles (24 km) away. In 1894, before a large gathering of people in Philadelphia, Tesla ran 250,000 volts through his body to demonstrate the safety of alternating current. An eyewitness to his experiments said that there was ‘light flaming at every pore of his skin, from the tips of his fingers and from the end of every hair on his head'.

On the night of his birth, hearing the thunder, according to family lore, the fearful midwife said: ‘He'll be a child of the storm.' His mother responded: ‘No, of light.'

Born in the dark of the small Croatian village of Smiljan at midnight on 10 July 1856, Tesla was ethnically a Serb. His family had left Serbia, then under the Ottoman empire, for Catholic Croatia when it became part of the burgeoning Austrian Empire in the 1700s. Both his grandfathers had fought in Napoleon's Illyrian Army that aimed to kick out the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, and unite the Balkans.

Tesla's father, Milutin, was an Orthodox priest and wanted Nikola to follow in his footsteps. Milutin was a poet and political activist who wrote of a united Yugoslavia, which did not come about until 1929. His mother Djouka never learned to read, but could memorize epic Serbian poems and long passages of the Bible. Tesla attributed his phenomenal memory to her.

 

Electric Pet Theory

It was the Tesla family's cat, Macak, that introduced the 3-year-old Tesla to electricity. ‘As I stroked Macak's back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement,' he recalled. ‘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.' The young Tesla asked his father what had caused the sparks. Milutin replied: ‘Electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.' It led Nikola to think that nature was a cat and God was stroking it.

That night, as it grew dark, Nikola noticed that the cat was surrounded by a halo from the static electricity in its fur. In 1939, looking back on the experience, Tesla said: ‘I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvellous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself “what is electricity?” and have found no answer. 80 years have gone by since that time and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.'

 

Mother of Invention

Tesla inherited his flair for inventing from his mother who, he said, ‘descended from one of the oldest families in the country and a line of inventors. Both her father and grandfather originated numerous implements for household, agricultural and other uses.' But she stood out even among this remarkable family. He said:

My mother was an inventor of the first order and would, I believe, have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multi-fold opportunities. She invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibres herself.

He also inherited his immense appetite for work from her. ‘She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night,' he said, ‘and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home was the product of her hands. When she was past sixty, her fingers were still nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash.' While famous for her embroidery, she also devised a mechanical eggbeater.

 

Infamous Frog Catcher

In his autobiography
My Inventions
, Tesla recalled his first invention. One of his playmates had a fishing rod and set out with friends to catch frogs. But Tesla was left out because he had had a quarrel with the boy. So he got hold of a piece of soft iron wire, hammered the end into a point between two stones, bent it into shape and attached it to a strong string. Then he cut a branch to make a rod and, armed with some bait, went to the brook.

However, he found that, while the frogs would not take his bait, they would bite on the bare hook. He kept this secret from the other boys who caught nothing, only telling the secret at Christmas, in the generous spirit of the season.

Next, he made an early attempt ‘to harness the energies of nature to the service of man,' he said. He attached a rotor to a spindle with a disc on the other end in an attempt to make a primitive helicopter. To power the device, he attached four June bugs.

‘These creatures were remarkably efficient,' he said, ‘for once they were started, they had no sense to stop and continued whirling for hours and hours, and the hotter it was, the harder they worked.' But then another boy came along and ate the June bugs alive. After that, Tesla was never able to touch another insect.

He took clocks to pieces and discovered how difficult it was to put them back together again. He also made himself a wooden sword and, imagining himself a great Serbian warrior, he slashed at cornstalks, ruining the crop and earning himself a spanking from his mother.

 

Tragic Death of Dane

Tesla possessed a powerful imagination, at that time, filled with superstition and religious images. They were almost tangible and often accompanied by flashes of light that obscured the real world. He did not think this peculiar as his elder brother Dane saw the same things.

The young Nikola was overshadowed by Dane who, he said, was ‘gifted to an extraordinary degree'. But, when Nikola was 5, Dane was thrown by the family's Arabian horse and died of his injuries.

‘I witnessed the tragic scene and, although so many years have elapsed since,' he wrote in 1919, ‘my visual impression of it has lost none of its force.'

However, there was another version of this story. In it Dane was said to have died after falling down the cellar stairs. He suffered a head injury and in his delirium accused Nikola of pushing him. Nearly 70 years later he still recalled the night of Dane's death:

It was a dismal night with rain falling in torrents. My brother, … an intellectual giant, had died. My mother came to my room, took me in her arms and whispered almost inaudibly: ‘Come and kiss Daniel.' I pressed my mouth against the ice-cold lips of my brother knowing only that something dreadful had happened. My mother put me again to bed and lingering a little said with tears streaming: ‘God gave me one at midnight and at midnight he took away the other one.'

Following Dane's death, his parents recalled his achievements, making Nikola's seem dull by comparison. This undermined his confidence and he ran away, seeking refuge in an inaccessible mountain chapel that was only visited once a year, remaining there ‘entombed for a night'.

The tragedy of Dane's death never left him. For the rest of his life he would have nightmares about it. And after Dane's death, Tesla's waking fantasies became more real and he began to have out-of-body experiences.

 

Childhood Traumas

There were other traumatic events in Tesla's childhood. After having a bath on a summer's day, his mother put him outside naked to dry in the sun where he was attacked by a goose that seized him by the navel with its beak and almost pulled it inside out. He once fell headlong into a huge vat of boiling milk, risked drowning swimming under a raft and found himself almost swept over a waterfall created by a nearby dam. As well as being lost, frozen and entombed, he claimed to have had ‘hairbreadth escapes from mad dogs, hogs, and other wild animals'.

Even ordinary things held hidden terrors. He developed a strange aversion to women's earrings. The sight of a pearl would almost give him a fit, though he was fascinated by crystals. He would not touch other people's hair ‘except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver'. He would get a fever from looking at a peach and hated having camphor anywhere in the house. Dropping little squares of paper into a dish filled with liquid produced an awful taste in his mouth.

Some of these strange quirks helped prepare him for the world of science. He would count his steps as he walked and calculate the volume of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food. Otherwise he did not enjoy his meals. Every repeated act had to be done a number of times that was divisible by three. If not, he would start over.

 

Unsettling Town Life

Soon after Dane's death, Tesla's father was promoted and moved to an onion-domed church in the town of Gospic. There Nikola started school. His father had a well stocked library, but flew into a rage when he discovered Nikola reading at night. Fearing the boy's eyesight would be strained, he hid the candles. Undeterred the enterprising Nikola cast his own and sealed up any cracks in his room so the light could not be seen from the outside. Then he read until dawn.

Nikola missed the countryside and found himself ill-equipped for life in the town.

‘In our new house I was but a prisoner,' he wrote, ‘watching the strange people I saw through my window blinds. My bashfulness was such that I would rather have faced a roaring lion than one of the city dudes who strolled about.'

Then this shy boy met with an incident ‘the mere thought of which made my blood curdle like sour milk for years afterwards'. Coming down from the church belfry one Sunday after ringing the bell, he stepped on the train of one of the town's grand dames which ‘tore off with a ripping noise which sounded like a salvo of musketry fired by raw recruits'. His father was livid and slapped him on the cheek. This was the only corporal punishment he ever administered.

 

Developing Mind over Matter

Until the age of 8, Tesla admitted that his character was ‘weak and vacillating'. Then he came upon an historical novel called
Abafi
– which means ‘Son of Aba' – by Hungarian writer Miklós Jósika. In it, the young roué Olivér Abadir gradually mends his ways and becomes a national hero in Transylvania's fight against the onslaught of the Hungarians, Turks and Austrians. Following his example, Tesla set about developing willpower. ‘In a little while I conquered my weakness and felt a pleasure I never knew before – that of doing as I willed,' he said.

Following the incident of the torn train, Tesla had been ostracized in Gospic. Now he managed to redeem himself. The town had recently organized a fire department and was showing off its new fire engine. The entire populace turned out for the ceremony and speeches. With the hose at the ready, the order was given to start pumping, but not a drop of water came out. While the bigwigs tried in vain to locate the trouble, Tesla felt instinctively for the suction hose that ran down into the river. He found it collapsed. Plainly there was a blockage, so he waded into the river and unblocked it. Suddenly he was the hero of the day and found himself carried shoulder high.

 

Calculus, Coils and Turbines

At 10 years old, Tesla entered the local Real Gymnasium – the equivalent of a British prep school or an American junior high school. It had a well-equipped physics department.

‘
I was interested in electricity
almost from the beginning of my educational career,' he said. ‘I read all that I could find on the subject … [and] experimented with batteries and induction coils.'

He was also keen on waterwheels and turbines, and experimented designing a flying machine which, he realized later, could not work because it depended on perpetual motion. Then, after seeing a picture of Niagara Falls, he told his Uncle Josif that one day he would go to America and put a big wheel under the falls to harness its power.

Finishing at the Real Gymnasium at the age of 14, Tesla fell ill. During his youth he claimed that three times he was in such a bad way that he was ‘given up by physicians'. While he was recuperating, the local library sent all the books it had not catalogued for Nikola to read and classify. It was then, for the first time, he came across the works of Mark Twain, whom he would later befriend.

When he recovered, his father sent him to Karlovac – also known as Karlstadt – to the Higher Real Gymnasium to prepare him for the seminary. Nikola's father was still determined that his son should follow him into the priesthood, a prospect which filled Tesla with dread. At the Higher Real Gymnasium, he showed early signs of genius, performing integral calculus in his head, leading his teachers to think he was cheating.

Again the Gymnasium at Karlovac had a good physics department. Tesla became fascinated by the Crookes radiometer they had there. Invented by British scientist William Crookes, it consisted of four metal vanes, polished on one side, blackened on the other, mounted on a vertical pivot in a glass bulb. The mechanism spun when bright light fell on it. It was also in Karlovac, in 1870, he saw, for the first time, a steam train.

 

Contracting Cholera and Recuperating

When he had completed his studies at Karlovac, Tesla got a message from his father telling him to go into the mountains with a hunting party. This puzzled him as his father did not approve of hunting, so he ignored the message and returned to Gospic to find it in the grip of a cholera epidemic. That was why his father wanted him to stay away. Nikola soon came down with the disease and was confined to bed for nine months. When he was at death's door, his father tried to encourage him in the hope he would rally. Nikola seized the opportunity and said to his father: ‘Perhaps I may get well if you will let me study engineering.' His father replied: ‘You will go to the best technical institution in the world.' After that he pulled through.