Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (4 page)

In 1863 disaster struck the Tesla household.
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Dane, who “was gifted to an extraordinary degree,” was out riding the family horse, which was “of Arabian breed, possest [
sic
] of almost human intelligence.” The horse may have been the type easily spooked. The previous winter, it had thrown Milutin in the middle of the forest after an encounter with wolves and had run home, leaving him unconscious. The horse, however, was smart enough to bring the search party back to the scene of the accident, and thus the father was saved. This animal, which “was cared for and petted by the whole family,” threw the brother as well, but Dane died of the injuries. The family never really recovered. “[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. So I grew up with little confidence in myself.”
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Upset by his brother’s death and the rejection by his parents, particularly his mother, the seven-year-old ran away from home and hid in an “inaccessible” mountain chapel which “was visited only once a year.” By the time he had reached the place, it was nightfall. There was little the boy could do but force his way in and spend the night “entombed…It was an awful experience.”
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Shortly after this tragedy, Milutin was promoted and given the parish at the ornate “onion bulb church” in the town of Gospić.
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The family moved the few miles to Gospić, where father Tesla also took a post teaching
religion at the local gymnasium (high school).
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Niko was of school age, so he began his formal education at this time. However, he had great difficulty adjusting to city life, for he missed the farm and the idyllic existence he had once enjoyed. “This change of residence was like a calamity to me. It almost broke my heart to part from our pigeons, chickens and sheep, and our magnificent flock of geese which used to rise to the clouds in the morning and return from the feeding grounds at sundown in battle formation, so perfect that it would have put a squadron of the best aviators of the present day to shame.”
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The boy would wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares of Dane’s death, which he claimed to have witnessed, and of the funeral, which probably involved an open 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…[by] continuously [conjuring up] new images…I was opprest [
sic
] by thoughts of pain in life and death and religious fear…swayed by superstitious beliefs and lived in constant dread of the spirit of evil, of ghosts and ogres and other unholy monsters of the dark.”
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It was at this time that Tesla began to have what today are known as out-of-body experiences, although he never ascribed anything mystical or paranormal to them. “Blurred [at first]…I would [see]…on my journeys…new places, cities and countries—live there, meet people and make friendships…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.”
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Tesla stated he had such great powers of eidetic imagery that he sometimes needed one of his sisters to help him tell which was hallucination and which was not. Like Dane, his thoughts were often interrupted with annoying flashes of light. These psychoneurological disturbances continued throughout his life. On the positive side, the problem was also attributed to his inventive bent. He could use his powers of visualization to mold his various creations, and even run and modify them in his mind, before committing them to paper and the material world.

While still in grade school, Niko had obtained a post at the local library in Gospić classifying the various books. But he was forbidden to read at night for fear that his eyes would be strained in dim light, and Milutin “would fly into a rage” to stop him.
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Undeterred, Niko would swipe some household candles, seal up the cracks in his room, and continue reading through the night. The book that Tesla claimed changed his life was
Abafi,
a story, translated into Serbian, about the son of Aba, by the Hungarian author Josika. “Up to the age of eight, my character was weak and vacillating…This work somehow awakened my dormant powers of
will and I began to practice self-control. At first my resolutions faded like snow in April, but in a little while I conquered my weakness and felt a pleasure I never knew before—that of doing as I willed.”
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Thus, by the age of twelve he was successfully experimenting with acts of self-denial and self-mastery, a paradoxical pattern which played itself out repeatedly throughout his life. Simultaneously, Tesla began to develop peculiarities, probably stemming from the stress associated with his brother’s death, strained relationship with his parents, and denial of his sexual desires.
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At this time he became ill and claimed that a heavy dose of Mark Twain’s writings turned his spirit and cured him. “Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship…I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that a great man of laughter burst into tears.
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During this period I contracted many strange…habits…I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women but other ornaments, as bracelets, pleased me…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 not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach…Even now [at age sixty-one] I am not insensible [
sic
] to some of these upsetting impulses.”
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The youngster, however, also undertook normal boyhood adventures, including a few near-death experiences: on one occasion “by falling headlong into a huge kettle of boiling milk, just drawn from the paternal herds”;
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on another occasion nearly drowning after swimming under a raft; and on a third occasion by nearly being swept over a waterfall at one of the nearby dams. These were rather unpleasant experiences, but not as bad, according to the inventor, as the following: “There was a wealthy lady in town who used to come to the church gorgeously painted up and attired with an enormous train and attendants. One Sunday I had just finished ringing the bell in the belfry and rushed downstairs when this grand dame was sweeping out and I jumped on her train [and] tore it. Livid, my father gave me a gentle slap on the cheek, the only corporal punishment he ever administered to me but I almost feel it now.”
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Niko became ostracized and avoided social interaction. Fortunately, he was able to redeem himself through his inventive mind. One day, the local firemen brought out their new engine and started a fire to demonstrate it. To the embarrassment of the officials, the hose, which drew its water from the local river, would not work. Intuitively, Tesla realized that there was a kink in the rigging. Tearing off his Sunday best, he dived into the water, unscrambled the line, and became the hero of the day. This event became a strong inducement for the boy to continue his interest in invention. Simultaneously, this act symbolized a new way to obtain love and admiration not only from his parents but also from society.

Between the ages ten and fourteen, Niko attended the Real Gymnasium,
equivalent to junior high school. (It appears that both his father and uncle taught there.) It was a fairly new institution, with a wellequipped physics department. “I was interested in electricity almost from the beginning of my educational career,” he wrote. “I read all that I could find on the subject…[and] experimented with batteries and induction coils.”
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Tesla also began experimenting with water turbines and motors that utilized power derived from differentials in air pressure. His goal, though unattainable due to a flaw in his logic, was a perpetual-motion machine that would work by maintaining a steady-state vacuum and harnessing, like a windmill, the rush of incoming air. This movement, he hoped, would turn a generator endlessly.

After seeing a drawing or photograph of Niagara Falls, Tesla announced to his Uncle Josip that one day he would place a gigantic wheel under the falls and thereby harness it. Most likely, he also visited the magnificent network of waterfalls at Plitvice Lakes for additional inspiration, as they were only a day’s journey away.

In 1870, at the age of fourteen, Niko moved from Gospić to Karlovac (Carlstadt), where he saw a locomotive for the first time, to attend the Higher Real Gymnasium, located by a swamp on a tributary of the Sava River near Zagreb. The youth lived with his aunt Stanka, his father’s sister, and her husband, Colonel Brankovic, “an old war-horse.”
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During his stay “at Karlovac, he frequently visited his cousin, Milica Zoric, at the family estate in Tomingaj…[Niko] who would often go there for vacations…[found it to be] a sort of sanctuary…”
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At Karlovac he was trained in languages and mathematics. His most influential professor was Martin Sekulic, a physics teacher, who “demonstrated the principles by apparatus of his own invention. [It was]…a freely rotatable bulb, with tinfoil coatings, which was made to spin rapidly when connected to a static machine. It is impossible for me to convey an adequate idea of the intensity of feeling I experienced in witnessing his exhibitions of these mysterious phenomena. Every impression produced a thousand echoes in my mind.”
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Through hard work, Tesla condensed the four years of schooling into three and began to plan a way to approach his father with his controversial decision not to enter the ministry but to study engineering instead. “It is not humans that I love, but humanity” he tried to tell his father.

During his last year at Karlovac, after a day of exploration by a nearby marsh, he caught a fever which he said was malaria. The seriousness of his condition may have been exacerbated by an inadequate diet. “I was fed [by my aunt] like a canary bird…When the Colonel would put something substantial on my plate she would snatch it away and say excitedly to him: ‘Be careful, Niko is very delicate.’ I had a voracious appetite and suffered
like Tantalus. But I lived in an atmosphere of refinement and artistic taste quite unusual for those times and conditions.”
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Upon graduation, Tesla received notice from his father that he should go on a hunting expedition, as there was an epidemic in town. The youth returned to Gospić, anyway. The streets were stacked with corpses, the atmosphere thick with smoke, for the people mistakenly thought that cholera was being transmitted through the air rather than by drinking water. Partly due to his weakened condition from his earlier illness, Tesla quickly became a victim. Bedridden for nine months, he nearly died. “In one of the sinking spells which was thought to be the last, my father rushed into the room…‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘I may get well if you will let me study engineering.’ ‘You will go to the best technical institution in the world,’ he solemnly replied, and I knew that he meant it.”
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The Teslas settled on the Polytechnic School at Graz, Austria, located 175 miles to the north. First, however, the boy would have to serve three years in the army. With a major war breaking out against the Turks, Milutin directed his son to pack his gear and go into the hills to avoid the draft. There the youth could maintain a low profile and at the same time recover his health. “For most of this term I roamed in the mountains, loaded with a hunter’s outfit and a bundle of books, and this contact with nature made me stronger in body as well as in mind…but [my] knowledge of principles was very limited.”
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Misguided inventions of this period included a “submarine tube…[able] to convey letters and packages across the seas…[and] a ring around the equator” for transporting people from one end of the globe to the other.”
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One day, while playing with snowballs on the side of a mountain, however, Tesla discovered the concept of hidden trigger mechanisms able to unleash great reservoirs of energy: “One…found just the right conditions; it rolled until it was a large ball and then spread out rolling up the snow at the sides as if it were a giant carpet, and then suddenly it turned into an avalanche…stripping the mountainside clear of snow, trees, soil and everything else it could carry with it.”
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But contact with war was unavoidable, and on occasion the youth chanced upon its ravages. Twenty-five years later, he would recall, “I have seen men hung, beaten to death, shot, quartered, stuck on a pointed stick, heads chopped off and children on a bayonette like quails ‘en broche’ at Delmonico’s.”
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Fortunately, Tesla avoided capture, and in 1875 he returned to Gospić. With a new fellowship from the Military Frontier Authority, he began school in Austria the following semester.

It has cost me years of thought to arrive at certain results, by many believed to be unattainable, for which there are now numerous claimants, and the number of these is rapidly increasing, like that of the colonels in the South after the war.

N
IKOLA
T
ESLA
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E
ighty miles south of Vienna, in the capital of the province of Styria, was the Polytechnic School in Graz. Milutin had chosen the school because it was one of the most advanced of the region. The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach had taught there a few years earlier, as had the psychophysiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner. Planning on becoming a professor, Tesla undertook courses in arithmetic and geometry from Professor Rogner, a lecturer known for his histrionics; theoretical and experimental physics with the punctilious German professor Poeschl; and integral calculus with Professor Allé. Allé “was the most brilliant lecturer to whom I ever listened. He took a special interest in my progress and would frequently remain for an hour or two in the lecture room, giving me problems to solve, in which I delighted.”
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Other courses taken included analytical chemistry, mineralogy, machinery construction, botany, wave theory, optics, French, and English.
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To save money, he roomed with Kosta Kulishich, whom he had met at the Student Society of Serbia. Kulishich later became a professor of philosophy in Belgrade.
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Tesla plunged into his work with great intensity. Studying upward of twenty hours a day, he changed his major to engineering and extended his curriculum to study other languages—he could speak about nine of them—and the works of such writers as Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, and Shakespeare, many of which he knew entirely by heart. “I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began,” he recalled, reflecting on his next self-appointed assignment. The collected works of Voltaire comprised “one
hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem.”
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This task cured him of the compulsion but did not serve to quell the pattern of relentless self-denial and self-determination. Because he was praised by his teachers, the other students became jealous, but at first Tesla remained unperturbed.

Returning home the following summer, having passed his freshman year with all A + ’s,
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the young scholar expected to be praised by his parents. Instead, his father tried to persuade his son to stay in Gospić. Unbeknown to Tesla, his teachers had written Milutin warning that the boy was at risk of injuring his health by obsessively long and intense hours of study. A rift was created between father and son, perhaps in part because the Military Frontier Authority had been abolished and the scholarship was no longer available.

Reacting to the ridicule from other students, who resented Tesla for his monastic study habits and close association with the faculty, Tesla took up gambling. “He began to stay late at the Botanical Garden, the students’ favorite coffee house, playing cards, billiards and chess, attracting a large crowd to watch his skillful performances.”
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Tesla’s father “led an exemplary life and could not excuse the senseless waste of time and money…” “I can stop whenever I please,” he told his father, “but is it worth while to give up that which I would purchase with the joys of Paradise?”
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During his sophomore year, a direct-current Gramme dynamo was delivered from Paris to Professor Poeschl’s physics class. It was equipped with the customary commutator, a device that transferred the current from the generator to the motor.
Electricity in its natural state is alternating.
This means that its direction of flow changes rapidly.
An analogous situation would be a river that flowed downstream, then upstream, then downstream, and so on many times per second.
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One can see the difficulty in harnessing such a river with, for instance, a waterwheel, for the wheel would constantly change its direction as well. The commutator is comprised of a series of wire brushes that serve to transfer the electricity into only one direction of flow, that is, a direct current (DC). It is a cumbersome device and sparks considerably.

When Professor Poeschl displayed this up-to-date equipment, Tesla
intuitively deduced that the commutator was unnecessary
and that alternating current (AC) could be harnessed unencumbered. He voiced this opinion, which appeared utterly fantastic at the time. Poeschl devoted the rest of the lecture to a detailed explanation of how this goal was impossible. Driving the point home, Poeschl embarrassed his student by disconnecting the “superfluous” commutator and noting with feigned surprise that the generator no longer worked.
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“Mr. Tesla may do many things, but this he can not accomplish. His plan is simply a perpetual motion scheme.”
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Tesla would spend the next four years obsessed with proving the professor wrong.

Another invention Tesla worked on at the same time, but under the tutelage of Professor Allé, was that of a mechanical flying machine. As a child, Tesla had heard stories from his grandfather about Napoleon’s employment of hot-air balloons, which were used to observe enemy troop movements and for dropping bombs. No doubt he had also studied the principles involved in school and quite possibly saw such futuristic creations floating in the Austrian skies when he went off to college.

By his third year Tesla was running into difficulties at school. Having surpassed his classmates in his studies, he became bored and frustrated by his inability to find a solution to his AC problem. He began to gamble more heavily, sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch. Although Tesla tended to return his winnings to heavy losers, reciprocation did not occur, and one semester he lost his entire allowance, including the money for tuition. His father was fuming, but his mother came to him with “a roll of bills” and said, “Go and enjoy yourself. The sooner you lose all we possess the better it will be. I know that you will get over it.”
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The audacious youth won back his initial losses and returned the balance to his family. “I conquered my passion then and there,” he wrote, and “tore it from my heart so as not to leave a trace of desire. Ever since that time I have been as indifferent to any form of gambling as to picking teeth.”
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This statement appears to be an exaggeration, as Tesla gambled quite freely with his future and was known to play billiards when he came to the United States. An Edison employee recalled: “He played a beautiful game. [Tesla] was not a high scorer, but his cushion shots displayed skill equal to that of a professional exponent of this art.”
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It has also been suggested that years later, in the early 1890s, Tesla bilked some of the wealthy socialites in New York by feigning minimal ability in the sport.
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Exam time came, and Tesla was unprepared. He asked for an extension to study but was denied. He never graduated from the Austrian Polytechnic School and did not receive any grades for his last semester there. Most likely, he was discharged, in part for gambling and, supposedly, “womanizing.”
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According to his roommate, Tesla’s “cousins, who had been sending him money, therefore withdrew their aid.” Fearing that his parents would find out, Tesla disappeared without word. “Friends searched everywhere for him and decided that he had drowned in the river.”

Clandestinely packing his gear, Tesla traveled south, over the border into Slovenia, where he arrived in Maribor in late spring of 1878 to look for work. He played cards with the local man on the streets, as is still the custom today, and soon gained employment with an engineer “earning 60 florins a month,”
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but the job was short-lived. Tesla continued traveling, making his way through Zagreb, to the small coastal village of Min-Gag. He would not return home, for he did not want to confront his parents. At
the same time, however, Tesla also continued his quest for a solution to the problem of removing the commutator from the DC generator.

His cousin, Dr. Nikola Pribic, recalled a story he had heard as a boy growing up in Yugoslavia in the 1920s: “My mother told us…he would always like to be alone [when Tesla visited us]. In the morning he would go off into the woods and meditate. He would measure one tree to another making notes, experimenting [stringing wires between them and transmitting current]. Peasants passing by would be astonished at such an erratic person…They would approach and say, ‘We’re sorry; your [cousin] seems to be crazy.’”
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Having finally located his son, after word from Kulishich, who had seen Tesla in Maribor, Milutin traveled north to discuss his academic problems. Tesla refused to return to Graz, so Milutin offered a solution: His son would make a fresh start at another university. They returned to Gospić.

Reaccepted into the family, Tesla began once again to attend church to hear his father’s sermons. There he met Anna. She was “tall and beautiful [with] extraordinary understandable eyes.” For the first and only time in his life, Tesla would say, “I fell in love.” Delighting in her company, Nikola would take Anna for strolls by the river or back to Smiljan, where they would talk about the future. He wanted to become an electrical engineer; she wanted to raise a family.
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The following year, Milutin passed away, and a few months later, in 1880, Tesla left for Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic) to “carry…out my father’s wish and continue my education.” He promised to write to Anna, but their romance was doomed, and she would marry shortly thereafter.

Tesla enrolled in the Charles-Ferdinand branch of the University of Prague, one of the foremost institutions in Europe, for the summer term.

According to Ernst Mach, who, a decade earlier, had transferred from Graz to be appointed Rector Magnificus, Prague was a city “rich in talented people,” with street signs often appearing in a half-dozen languages. Although the city was filled with majestic buildings, sanitary conditions were severely lacking. To avoid typhoid fever one had to boil water or obtain mineral water from springs to the north.
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Just two years after Tesla’s stay, Harvard psychologist William James would come to visit, to meet with Mach and Mach’s archrival, Carl Stumpf, “Ordinary Professor of Philosophy.” Stumpf was a student of the controversial ex-priest Franz Brentano (who also influenced another pupil, Sigmund Freud) and was also Tesla’s philosophy teacher. Other courses Tesla undertook included analytical geometry with Heinreich Durege, experimental physics with Karel Domalip, both “Ordinary Professors,” and higher mathematics with Anton Puchta, who was an “Extraordinary
Professor” from the German Technical University also in Prague.
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With Stumpf, Tesla studied Scottish philosopher David Hume. Raised as a child prodigy of music, the acerbic and “sharp-nosed” Stumpf
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opposed a number of key psychophysicists, including the famed Wilhelm Wundt as well as Mach, but at the same time he also helped shape the thinking of a number of key students, such as phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler.
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A persuasive advocate of Hume’s “radical skepticism,” Stumpf argued for the concept of the “tabula rasa.” Basing his thinking on Aristotle and John Locke, both of whom repudiated the concept of innate ideas, Stumpf stated that the human mind was born a blank slate, a “tabula rasa”; impinging on it, after birth, were all of the “primary quality of things,” that is, true knowledge about the world. Through the sense organs, Tesla learned, the brain mechanically recorded incoming data. The mind, according to Hume, was nothing more than a simple compilation of cause-and-effect sensations. What we call ideas were secondary impressions derived from these primary sensations. The will and “even the soul w[ere] reduced by Hume to impressions and associations of impressions.”
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At this time, Tesla also studied the theories of Descartes, who envisioned animals, including man, as simply “automata incapable of actions other than those characteristic of a machine.”
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This line of thinking would dominate Tesla’s worldview and would ironically serve as the template for a mechanistic paradigm that would lead the inventor to discover his most original creations, even though the whole idea of original discovery appears to be antithetical to this extrinsically motivated Aristotelian premise. According to Tesla and to this view, all of his discoveries were derived from the outside world.

Although Tesla does not overtly refer to Stumpf’s perceived adversary, in retrospect, it appears obvious that Stumpf’s opposition did not stop Tesla from studying Mach’s experiments in wave mechanics. Born in Moravia (now the Czech Republic) in 1838, Mach graduated from the University of Vienna in 1860. By 1864 he was a full professor at Graz, and by 1867 he was head of the department of experimental physics at Prague, with four books and sixty-two articles to his credit. Influenced by the research in psychophysics of Fechner in Graz and Ludwig von Helmholtz in Berlin, Mach studied the workings of the human eye, along with his Prague colleague “famed physiologist and philosopher” Jan Purkyne. Both the eye and ear collected information from the outside world, analyzed it, and transferred it, via electrical impulses in the nerves, to the respective processing centers in the brain. This traditional line of research had been taken by many other well-known scientists, including Isaac Newton, Johann von Goethe, and Herbert Spencer, all favorites of Tesla’s.

In his laboratory, Mach had constructed a “famous instrument known
as a wave machine. This device could make progressive [and standing] longitudinal [and] transverse waves…” Mach could display a number of mechanical effects with these acoustic waves and “demonstrate the analogy between acoustic and electromagnetic events.” By this means, the “mechanical theory of the ether” could also be demonstrated.
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