Tesla: Man Out of Time
Despite such claims, Tesla did in fact often make small sketches of inventions in whole or in part. Later in life his methods of research came to resemble more closely the empirical approach of Edison.
Tesla’s childhood development is confusing because he enhanced his native talent with such rigorous mental discipline that it is impossible to separate the innate gifts from the acquired. Some people, for example, prefer to think of Tesla’s prodigious memory as being in no way abnormal but merely the result of making the most of what God gave him. Yet the ability to memorize a page of type or the precise relationships and sizes of myriad patterns on a page in the wink of an eye—call it photographic, eidetic, or whatever—does seem to belong to the specially gifted. Such memory usually begins to wane in adolescence, indicating that it is affected by bodily chemical changes.
In Tesla’s case, perhaps because of his special training in early childhood and his subsequent self-discipline, his phenomenal memory was retained throughout much of his life. The fact that he began to make trial-and-error adjustments of his research equipment in Colorado when he was middle-aged hints at a waning power.
He claimed that his method of visual invention had one defect that kept him poor in a monetary sense, though rich in the raptures of the mind: Potentially valuable inventions were often put aside without the final time-consuming perfection required for commercial success. Edison would never have allowed this to happen and hired many assistants to make sure it did not. In fact Edison was said to have a knack for picking up other inventors’ ideas and rushing them to the Patent Office. With Tesla it was to be just the opposite. Ideas chased each other through his mind faster than he could nail them down. Once he understood exactly how an invention worked (in his mind), he tended to lose interest, for there were always exciting new challenges just over the horizon.
His photographic memory explained in part the lifelong difficulty he would experience in working with other engineers. While they demanded blueprints, he worked in his mind. In grade school he was almost kept back, despite brilliance in mathematics, because he so loathed the required drawing classes.
He was twelve years old before he succeeded in banishing disturbing images from his mind by deliberate effort; but he was never able to control the inexplicable flashes of light that usually occurred when he was in a dangerous or distressing situation, or when he was greatly elated. Sometimes he saw all the air around him filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with years and reached a peak when he was about twenty-five.
At sixty he reported, “These luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me, but they are no longer exciting, being of relatively small intensity. When I close my eyes, I invariably observe first, a background of very dark and uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night. In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears, to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines, at right angles to one another, in all sorts of colors with yellow-green and gold predominating. Immediately thereafter the lines grow brighter and the whole is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes to the left, leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert grey which quickly gives way to a billowy sea of clouds, seemingly trying to mould themselves in living shapes. It is curious that I cannot project a form into this grey until the second phase is reached. Every time, before falling asleep, images of persons or objects flit before my view. When I see them I know that I am about to lose consciousness. If they are absent and refuse to come it means a sleepless night.”14
In school he excelled at languages, learning English, French, German, and Italian as well as the Slavic dialects, but it was math at which he starred. He was that unnerving sort of student who lurks behind the instructor while problems are being written on the board, and quietly chalks down answers the moment the teacher has finished. At first they suspected him of cheating. But soon it was realized that this was just another aspect of his abnormal ability to visualize and retain images. The optic screen in his mind stored entire logarithmic tables to be called on as needed. After he became an inventor, however, he would sometimes have to struggle for long periods to solve a single scientific problem.
He reported another curious phenomenon that is familiar to many creative people, i.e., that there always came a moment when he was not concentrating but when he knew he had the answer, even though it had not yet materialized. “And the wonderful thing is,” he said, “that if I do feel this way, then I know I have really solved the problem and shall get what I am after.”
Practical results generally confirmed this intuition. It is a fact that in later life the machines that Tesla built nearly always worked. He might err in his understanding of the scientific principle, or he might even mistake the quality of materials used in construction, but somehow the machines, as they evolved in his mind and were later translated into metal, usually did just what he intended.
Had there been school psychologists in his childhood, the bedeviling images that warred with his sense of reality might easily have earned him a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and therapy or drugs might have been prescribed—perhaps to “cure” the very fountain of his creativity.
When he first discovered that the pictures in his mind could always be traced to actual scenes which he had previously observed, he believed he had hit upon a truth of great importance. He made a point of always trying to trace the external source. In short, before Freud’s methods were well known, he was practicing a kind of autoanalysis, and after a while this effort grew to be almost reflexive.
“I gained great facility in connecting cause and effect,” he reported. “Soon I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression.”15
The conclusion he drew from this exercise was not altogether heartening. Everything he did that he had thought to be the result of free will he now decided was actually caused by real circumstances and events. And if this were true it followed that he himself must be merely a kind of automaton. Conversely, anything a human being could do, a machine could be made to do, including acting with judgment based upon experience.
From these meditations the young Tesla developed two concepts that—in rather different ways—were to be important to him in later life. The first was that human beings could be adequately understood as “meat machines.” The second was that machines could, for all practical purposes, be made human. The first idea may have done nothing to improve his sociability, but the second was to lead him deep into the strange world of what he called “teleautomatics” or robotry.
The Teslas had moved to the nearby city of Gospić when Nikola was six. There he entered school and had seen his first mechanical models, including water turbines. He built many of them and found great pleasure in operating them. He also became fascinated by a description he had read of Niagara Falls. In his imagination a big wheel appeared, run by the cascading waters. He told his uncle that one day he would go to America and carry out this vision. Thirty years later, seeing his idea materialize, Tesla would marvel “at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.”
At ten he entered the gymnasium, which was new and had a fairly well-equipped department of physics. The demonstrations performed by his instructors fascinated him. Here his brilliance in mathematics shone, but his father “had considerable trouble in railroading me from one class to another” because he could not endure the required course in freehand drawing.
In the second year he became obsessed with the idea of producing continuous motion through steady air pressure, and with the possibilities of a vacuum. He grew frantic with his desire to harness these forces but for a long time groped in the dark. Finally, he recalled, “my endea
vors crystallized in an invention which was to enable me to achieve what no other mortal ever attempted.” It was all part of his consuming dream of being able to fly.
“Every day I used to transport myself through the air to distant regions but could not understand just how I managed to do it,” he recalled. “Now I had something concrete—a flying machine with nothing more than a rotating shaft, flapping wings, and … a vacuum of unlimited power!”16
What he built was a cylinder freely rotatable on two bearings and partly surrounded by a rectangular trough which fit it perfectly. The open side of the trough was closed by a partition and the cylindrical segment divided into two compartments entirely separated from each other by airtight sliding joints. One of these compartments being sealed and exhausted of air, the other remaining open, perpetual rotation of the cylinder would result—or so the inventor thought. And indeed, when he had finished, the shaft rotated slightly.
“From that time on I made my daily aerial excursions in a vehicle of comfort and luxury as might have befitted King Solomon,” he recalled. “It took years before I understood that the atmospheric pressure acted at right angles to the surface of the cylinder and that the slight rotary effort I observed was due to a leak. Though this knowledge came gradually it gave me a painful shock.”17
While at this school—for which he was probably too advanced— he was prostrated “with a dangerous illness, or rather a score of them, and my condition became so desperate that I was given up by physicians.” To aid his recovery after there had been a change for the better, he was allowed to read. Finally he was asked to catalog the books at the local library, a task which, he later recalled, introduced him to the earliest works of Mark Twain. To his delight in finding them he attributed a miraculous recovery. Unfortunately, the anecdote has the ring of apocrypha, for Twain at that time had written almost nothing that might have found its way across the ocean and into a Croatian library. Whatever the truth of the story, Tesla liked it and stuck by it. Twenty-five years later he met the great humorist in New York City, told him of the experience, and was amazed, he said, to see Twain burst into tears.
The boy continued his studies at a higher school in Karlstadt (Karlovac), Croatia, where the land was low and marshy and where, in consequence, he suffered repeated bouts with malaria. Yet his illnesses did not prevent him from conceiving an intense interest in electricity under the stimulating influence of his physics professor. Every experiment he saw produced “a thousand echoes” in his mind, and he longed for experimentation and investigation as a career.
When next he returned home, a cholera epidemic was raging, and he immediately contracted the disease. He was in bed for nine months, scarcely able to move, and for the second time it was thought he was dying. He remembered that his father sat by his bed, trying to cheer him, and that he rallied sufficiently to suggest, “Perhaps I may get well if you will let me study engineering.” The Reverend Tesla, who had never once relented in his determination that Nikola should enter the clergy, was now trapped by his own compassion and yielded.
What happened next is a little unclear. Apparently Tesla was summoned to serve for three years in the army, a prospect even more repugnant to him than the clergy. But in later life he did not refer to this, saying only that his father insisted he spend a year camping and hiking in the mountains to regain his health. In the event, he did spend a year in the latter fashion and did not serve in the army. His father’s family included high-ranking officers, and in all likelihood their influence was employed to formalize his release from conscription for medical reasons.18
His rugged year in the mountains did nothing to subdue his fertile imagination. One plan he conceived was to build a tube under the Atlantic Ocean through which to shoot mail between the continents. He worked out mathematical details of a pumping plant to force water through the tube, which would push the spherical containers of mail. But he failed to gauge accurately the frictional resistance of the pipe to the flow of water. It appeared to be so great that he was forced to abandon the plan. Even so, he gained knowledge from this that would be applied in a later invention.
Never one to waste time on trifling schemes, he then conceived of building a gargantuan elevated ring around the equator. At first it would have scaffolding. Once this was knocked away the ring would rotate freely at the same speed as the Earth. In this respect it would have had its analogs in the synchronized satellites not invented until the late twentieth century. Tesla’s goal, however, was even more ambitious. He proposed next to employ some reactionary force that would make the ring hold still with relationship to the Earth. Thus travelers could climb aboard it and be sped around Earth at a dizzying speed of 1,000 miles per hour—or rather, Earth would race beneath them, enabling them to circle the globe in a day while sitting still.
At the end of this magnificent, if impractical, year of wandering and dreaming, he was enrolled in 1875 at the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz. During his first year he had a fellowship from the Military Frontier Authority and hence had no financial worries. Nevertheless, he crammed from three in the morning until eleven at night, determined to complete two years’ work in one. Physics, mathematics, and mechanics were his main studies.
He records that the compulsion to finish everything, once started, almost killed him when he began reading the works of Voltaire. To his dismay he learned that there were close to one hundred volumes in small print “which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem.” But there could be no peace for Tesla until he had read them all.
At the end of the year he sailed through nine exams with ease. But when he returned the following year his comfortable financial situation had evaporated. The Military Frontier was being abolished, there would be no fellowship, and the salary of a clergyman would be unable to cover the high tuition costs. Tesla would thus be obliged to drop out before the school year ended. He made the most of the little time he had, however, and it was in this second year that he first began to toy with the idea of an alternative to direct-current electrical machines.
The man responsible for introducing Tesla to the fascinations of electrical machinery was a German, one Professor Poeschl, who taught theoretical and experimental physics. Although he had “enormous feet and hands like the paws of a bear,” Tesla found his experiments inspiring. When one day there arrived from Paris a direct-current apparatus called a Gramme Machine that could be used both as a motor and a dynamo, Tesla examined the machine intently, feeling a strange excitement. It had a wire-wound armature with a commutator. While operating, it sparked badly, and Tesla brashly suggested to Professor Poeschl that the design might be improved by dispensing with the commutator and by switching to alternating current.
“Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things,” the German scholar retorted heavily, “but he will never do this. It would be equivalent to converting a steadily pulling force, like that of gravity, into a rotary effort. It is a perpetual motion machine, an impossible idea.”19
The young Serb had no idea how it might be done, but instinct told him that the answer already lay somewhere in his mind. He knew that he would be unable to rest until he had found the solution.
But now Tesla’s money had run out. He tried in vain to borrow, and when this failed, he began to gamble. Although he was not a very good card player, he became almost professionally skillful at billiards.
Unfortunately, his newfound skills did not save him. Tesla’s nephew, Nikola Trbojevich, says he was told by other family members that Tesla was “fired” from the college and from the city by the police as well “because of playing cards and leading an irregular life.” The nephew adds: “His mother got the money together for him to go to Prague, as his father would not speak to him. In Prague, where he spent two years, he might have gone to the university unofficially, but the search made by the Czechoslovak Government shows that he was not enrolled in any one of the four universities in Czechoslovakia….[I]t appears that Tesla was subst
antially a self-taught man, which by no means detracts from his stature. Faraday also was a self-taught man.”20
In 1879 Tesla had tried to find a job in Maribor but was unsuccessful. He was finally forced to return home. His father died that same year, and shortly thereafter he returned to Prague in the hope of being able to continue his studies. It is believed that until the age of twenty-four he remained there, auditing courses and studying in the library and so keeping abreast of progress in electrical engineering and physics.
Probably he continued gambling in an effort to keep in funds, but by this time he was well free of any danger of becoming an addict. Tesla himself has described how he became a gambler and then managed to reform. “To sit down to a game of cards,” he recalled, “was for me the quintessence of pleasure. My father led an exemplary life and could not excuse the senseless waste of time and money in which I indulged…. I would say to him, ‘I can stop whenever I please but is it worthwhile to give up that which I would purchase with the joys of Paradise?’ On frequent occasions he gave vent to his anger and contempt, but my mother was different. She understood the character of men and knew that one’s salvation could only be brought about through his own efforts. One afternoon, I remember, when I had lost all my money and was craving for a game, she came to me 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.’ She was right. I conquered my passion then and there…. I not only vanquished but tore it from my heart so as not to leave even a trace of desire….”21
Later in life he began to smoke excessively, and also found that the consumption of coffee was affecting his heart. Willpower triumphed again, and he banished both vices. He even stopped drinking tea. Obviously Tesla distinguished between the exercise of free will (which human “meat machines” lacked), and of willpower or the exercise of determination.