He led his guests to the corner where a strange platform was mounted on rubber padding. When he flipped a switch, it began to vibrate rapidly and silently.
Twain stepped forward, eager. “Let me try it, Tesla. Please.”
“No, no. It needs work.”
“Please.”
Tesla chuckled. “All right, Mark, but don’t stay on too long. Come off when I give you the word.” He called to an attendant to throw the switch.
Twain, in his usual white suit and black string tie, found himself humming and vibrating on the platform like a gigantic bumblebee. He was delighted. He whooped and waved his arms. The others watched in amusement.
After a time the inventor said, “All right, Mark. You’ve had enough. Come down now.”
“Not by a jugful,” said the humorist. “I am enjoying this.”
“But seriously, you had better come down,” insisted Tesla. “Believe me, it is best that you do so.”
Twain only laughed. “You couldn’t get me off this with a derrick.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when his expression froze. He lurched stiffly toward the edge of the platform, frantically waving at Tesla to stop it.
“Quick, Tesla. Where is it?”
The inventor helped him down with a smile and propelled him in the direction of the rest room. The laxative effect of the vibrator was well known to him and his assistants.4
None of his guests had volunteered to undergo the experiment in which Tesla stood on the high-voltage platform; they never did. But now they clamored for an explanation of why he had not been electrocuted.
As long as the frequencies were high, he said, alternating currents of great voltages flowed largely on the outer surface of the skin without injury. But it was no stunt for amateurs, he warned. Milliamperes penetrating nerve tissue could be fatal, while amperes distributed over the skin could be tolerated for short periods. Very low currents flowing beneath the skin, whether alternating current or direct current, could kill.
It was dawn when Tesla finally said good-night to his guests. But the lights burned on in his laboratory for another hour before he locked the doors and walked to his hotel for a brief period of rest.
2. A GAMBLING MAN
Nikola Tesla was born at precisely midnight between July 9 and 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan, province of Lika, Croatia, between Yugoslavia’s Velebit Mountains and the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea. The tiny house in which he was born stood next to the Serbian Orthodox Church presided over by his father, the Reverend Milutin Tesla, who sometimes wrote articles under the nom-de-plume “Man of Justice.”
No country in Eastern Europe had greater ethnic and religious diversity than Yugoslavia. Within Croatia the Serbian Teslas were part of a racial and religious minority. The province then belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs to whose heavy-handed rule the people adapted as best they could.
Ethnic traditions are often most tenaciously observed by transplanted minorities and the Teslas were no exception. They placed great store on Serbian martial songs, poetry, dancing, and storytelling, as well as on weaving and the celebration of saints’ days.
Although illiteracy was more common than not in that time and place, it was of a rare mind-expanding kind, for the people both admired and cultivated prodigious feats of memory.
In the Croatia of Tesla’s childhood, choices of career were more or less limited to farming, the Army, or the Church. The families of Milutin Tesla and his wife D-uka Mandić, who came originally from western Serbia, had for generations sent their sons to serve Church or Army and their daughters to marry ministers or officers.
Milutin had originally been sent to Army officers’ school, but he had rebelled and left to join the ministry. This he saw as the only career for his sons, Dane (or Daniel) and Nikola. As for their sisters, Milka, Angelina, and Marica, the Reverend Tesla hoped that God in His wisdom and mercy would provide them with clerical husbands like himself.
The life of a Yugoslav woman was grueling, for she was expected not only to do the heavy work of the farm but also to raise the children and care for the home and family. Tesla always said that he inherited his photographic memory and his inventive genius from his mother, and deplored that she had not lived in a country and at a time when women’s abilities were fairly rewarded. She had been the eldest daughter in a family of seven children, forced to take over when her mother became blind. Hence she herself got no schooling. But either in spite or because of that, she had developed an amazing memory, being able to recite verbatim whole volumes of native and classic European poetry.
After her marriage, her own five children arrived quickly. The eldest was Daniel. Nikola was the fourth.
Since the Rev. Milutin Tesla wrote poetry in his spare time, the boy grew up in a household where cadence always permeated ordinary speech and where the quoting of passages from the Bible or poetry was as natural as roasting corn over charcoal in summer.
In his youth Nikola also wrote poetry and would later take some to America with him. He would never permit his poems to be published, however, considering them too personal. When he grew older, it would delight him to astonish new friends by reciting their native poetry (in English, French, German, or Italian) at impromptu meetings. He continued to write an occasional poem throughout his life.
The child began when only a few years of age to make original inventions. When he was five, he built a small waterwheel quite unlike those he had seen in the countryside. It was smooth, without paddles, yet it spun evenly in the current. Years later he was to recall this fact when designing his unique bladeless turbine.
But some of his other experiments were less successful. Once he perched on the roof of the barn, clutching the family umbrella and hyperventilating on the fresh mountain breeze until his body felt light and the dizziness in his head convinced him he could fly. Plunging to earth, he lay unconscious and was carried off to bed by his mother.
His sixteen-bug-power motor was, likewise, not an unqualified success. This was a light contrivance made of splinters forming a windmill, with a spindle and pulley attached to live June bugs. When the glued insects beat their wings, as they did desperately, the bug-power engine prepared to take off. This line of research was forever abandoned however when a young friend dropped by who fancied the taste of June bugs. Noticing a jarful standing near, he began cramming them into his mouth. The youthful inventor threw up.
He next endeavored to take apart and reassemble the clocks of his grandfather. This too, he recalled, came to an end: “In the former operation I was always successful but often failed in the latter.” Thirty years passed before he would tackle clockwork again.
Not all his youthful chagrins were scientific in nature. “There was a wealthy lady in town,” he later recalled in a brief autobiography, “a good but pompous woman, 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. It tore off with a ripping noise which sounded like a salvo of musketry fired by raw recruits.”1
His father, although livid with rage, gave him only a gentle slap on the cheek—“the only corporal punishment he ever administered to me but I almost feel it now.” Tesla said his embarrassment and confusion were indescribable, and he was practically ostracized.
However, good fortune threw him a rope, and he was redeemed in the eyes of the village. A new fire engine had been purchased, along with uniforms for a fire department, and this called for a celebration. The community turned out for a parade, there were speeches, and then the command was given to pump water with the new equipment. Not a drop came from the nozzle. While the village fathers stood in puzzled dismay, the bright lad flung himself into the river and found, as he had suspected, that the hose had collapsed. He corrected the problem, instantly drenching the delighted village fathers. Long after, Tesla wou
ld recall that “Archimedes running naked thru the streets of Syracuse did not make a greater impression than myself. I was carried on the shoulders and was the hero of the day.”2
In bucolic Smiljan where his first few years were spent, the intense child with the pale wedge-shaped face and shock of black hair seemed to live a charmed life. Just as in later years he would work with high voltages of electricity without serious harm, he then skated through extraordinary dangers.
With telescopic memory and perhaps some exaggeration, he later wrote that he was given up by doctors as a hopeless physical wreck three times, that he was almost drowned on numerous occasions, was nearly boiled alive in a vat of hot milk, just missed being cremated, and was once entombed (overnight in an old shrine). Hair-raising flights from mad dogs, enraged flocks of crows, and sharp-tusked hogs spiced this catalogue of near-catastrophes.3
Yet outwardly his parents’ home provided an idyllic pastoral scene. Sheep grazed in the pasture, pigeons cooed in a cote, and there were chickens for a small boy to tend. Each morning he delighted in watching the flock of geese that rose magnificently to the clouds; they returned 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.”
For all of this outward beauty, however, there were ogres in the boy’s mind, the lasting trauma of a family tragedy. As far back as he could remember, his life had been profoundly influenced by his older brother, who was seven at the time of Nikola’s birth. Daniel, brilliant and the idol of his parents, was killed at the age of twelve in a mysterious accident.
The immediate cause of the tragedy may have been a magnificent Arabian horse which had been given to the family by a dear friend. It was petted by them and attributed with almost human intelligence. In fact this beautiful creature had once saved the father’s life in the wolf-infested mountains. But according to Tesla’s autobiography, Daniel died of injuries caused by the horse. Of the incident itself, however, no details remain.4
Anything Nikola did thereafter, he claimed, seemed dull by comparison to the promise of the dead brother. His own achievements “merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself. But I was far from being considered a stupid boy….”
A second more psychologically intricate version exists as to how Tesla’s older brother died. According to the second version, Daniel died from a fall down the cellar stairs. Some believe that the boy lost consciousness and in his delirium accused Nikola of pushing him. He died later from the head injury, probably a hematoma, so this account goes. Unfortunately at this date both versions are impossible to confirm.
Much later in his life, Tesla still suffered from nightmares and hallucinations related to the death of his brother. The details of the experience are never clarified, but the episode recurs and is recounted throughout his life as if from various time frames. One can theorize that a five-year-old child, unable to tolerate such a burden of assumed guilt, might have rewritten the facts in his mind.
We can only speculate about the degree to which Daniel’s death may have been responsible for the fantastic array of phobias and obsessions that Nikola subsequently developed. All we can say for certain is that some manifestations of his extreme eccentricity seem to have appeared at an early age.
For example, he had a violent aversion to earrings on women, especially pearls, although jewelry with the glitter of crystals or sharp-planed facets intrigued him. The smell of a piece of camphor anywhere in the house caused him acute discomfort. In research, if he dropped little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, it caused a peculiar and awful taste in his mouth. He counted steps when walking, calculated the cubic contents of soup plates, coffee cups, and pieces of food. If he failed to do so his meal was unenjoyable—hence his preference for dining alone. And perhaps most serious insofar as physical relationships were to be concerned, he claimed that he could not touch the hair of other people, “except perhaps at the point of a revolver.”5 But we cannot precisely date the onset of these or his many other phobias.
According to Tesla, hoping to console his parents for the loss of Daniel, he subjected himself at a very early age to iron discipline in order to excel. He would be more spartan, more studious than other boys, more generous, and in every way superior. And it was while denying himself and repressing natural impulses, he later believed, that he began to develop his strange compulsions.
If Tesla’s character did begin to change, the symptoms were not entirely apparent until some time after Daniel’s death. “Up until the age of eight years,” he wrote, “my character was weak and vacillating.” He dreamed of ghosts and ogres, feared life, death, and God. But then there did come a kind of change, as the result of his favorite pastime—which was reading in his father’s well-stocked library. The Rev. Milutin Tesla at one point forbade Nikola to have candles, fearing that he would ruin his eyes by reading all night. The boy got some materials and made his own, stuffed rags in the keyhole and door cracks, and then read all night. He did not stop reading until he heard his mother beginning her arduous rounds at dawn.
The book that changed his vacillating nature was Abafi or The Son of Aba, by a leading Hungarian novelist—a work that “somehow awakened my dormant powers of will and I began to practice self-control.” To the rigorous discipline then developed, he attributed his later success as an inventor.6
From birth he was intended for the clergy. Although he longed to become an engineer, his father was inflexible. To prepare him, the Reverend Tesla initiated a daily routine: “It comprised all sorts of exercises—as guessing one another’s thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences or performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and reason and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.”7
Of his mother he wrote that she 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 multifold 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 fibers herself. She worked indefatigably, from break of day till late at night, and most of the wearing apparel and furnishings of the home was the product of her hands.”8
The brilliant Daniel, before his untimely death, had been subject to strong flashes of light that interfered with his normal vision during moments of excitement. A similar phenomenon plagued Tesla during most of his life, beginning in childhood.
He described it years later as “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. None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomena….”9
He theorized that the images resulted from a reflex action from the brain upon the retina under great excitation. They were not hallucinations. In the stillness of night, the vivid picture of a funeral he had seen or some other disturbing scene would thrust itself before his eyes, so that even if he jabbed his hand through it, it would remain fixed in space.
“If my explanation is correct,” he wrote, “it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come; I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.”10
Since Tesla’s time para
psychologists have studied subjects who purportedly can project their mental images onto rolls of unexposed photographic film. The direct transmission of thought onto electronic printers also is the subject of recent research.
To free himself of the tormenting images and to obtain temporary relief, the young Tesla began to conjure up imaginary worlds. Every night he would start on make-believe journeys—see new places, cities, and countries, live there, meet people and make friends, 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.”11
This he did constantly until the age of seventeen, when his thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then, to his delight, he found that he could visualize with such facility that he needed no models, drawings, or experiments, but could picture them all as real in his mind.
He recommended this method as far more expeditious and efficient than the purely experimental. Anyone who carries out a construct, Tesla held, runs the risk of becoming bogged down in the details and defects of the apparatus and, as the designer goes on improving, tends to lose sight of the underlying principle of the design.
“My method is different,” he wrote. “I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in my thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance.”12
Thus, he claimed he was able to perfect a conception without touching anything. Only when all the faults had been corrected in his brain did he put the device into concrete form.
“Invariably,” he wrote, “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? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be mathematically treated and the effects calculated or the results determined beforehand from the available theoretical and practical data….”13
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 3