Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

  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.

  During his recuperation, he would take long walks in the forest. Along the way he conceived a way to send letters and parcels between continents via tubes under the oceans. Mail would be packed in balls that would be forced along the pipes by water at high pressure. However, he did not take into account the resistance to the flow of water and the system would not have worked.

  He also thought up a scheme to speed up worldwide travel. A stationary ring would be erected high above the equator, with the world turning underneath it. People would travel up onto the ring, then wait for their destination to appear below. He conceded that it would be impossible to build such a ring, but these thought experiments prepared his mind for later work. He said:

  I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient.

  As good as his word, Tesla’s father secured a scholarship for him from the Grenzlandsverwaltungsbehoerde – the Military Frontier Administration Authority – paying 420 gulden a year for him to attend the Joanneum Polytechnic in Graz, Austria. When he has finished, he would then have to serve 8 years in the Military Authority. Tesla left for college with a bag covered with the embroidered designs his mother was famous for. He treasured that bag for the rest of his life.

  Chapter 2 – Electric Brainwaves

  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 …

  Nikola Tesla

  Arriving at the Polytechnic in 1875, Tesla did not study engineering initially. Perhaps in deference to his father, he studied physics and mathematics with the aim of becoming a professor like his Uncle Josif. The Polytechnic had recently bought a Gramme dynamo which physics professor Jacob Pöschl used to teach his students about electric currents. During his lectures, he connected the dynamo to a battery, so it would work
as a motor.

  While Professor Pöschl was making demonstrations, running the machine as a motor, the brushes gave trouble, sparking badly, and I observed that it might be possible to operate a motor without these appliances. But he declared that it could not be done and did me the honour of delivering a lecture on the subject, at the conclusion he remarked, ‘Mr Tesla may accomplish great things, but he certainly 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 scheme, an impossible idea.’ But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibres that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other wilful effort of the brain, is futile.

  Tesla would go on to make a motor that did without troublesome brushes. It was his first great invention.

  Experimenting with Thought

  While somewhat intimidated by his professor’s authority, Tesla was determined to prove that he was right and ‘undertook the task with all the fire and boundless confidence of youth’. To take up the challenge of building a spark-free motor, Tesla switched to the engineering course. However, electrical engineering was in its infancy and the course in Graz concentrated on civil engineering. Consequently, Tesla returned to his thought experiments:

  I started by first picturing in my mind a direct-current machine, running it and following the changing flow of the currents in the armature. Then I would imagine an alternator and investigate the progresses taking place in a similar manner. Next I would visualize systems comprising motors and generators and operate them in various ways. The images I saw were to me perfectly real and tangible.

  Tesla was a diligent student – for the first year. He worked from 3 am until 11 pm, 7 days a week, taking no holidays. He passed his exams way ahead of his fellow students. But when he went home with his exemplary exam certificates his father was furious. ‘That almost killed my ambition,’ he wrote.

  It was only later, after his father had died, that he discovered letters from his professors telling him to take his son away from the polytechnic, otherwise he would kill himself with overwork.

  Carousing and Gambling

  In his second year at college Tesla gave himself over to carousing and, in his third year, he gave up going to lectures altogether. This led to his scholarship being cancelled. He tried to get another scholarship from the publishers of the pro-Serbian newspaper, Queen Bee, calling himself a ‘technician’ and saying he could speak Italian, French and English, as well as Serbian, Croatian and German. It was refused and he was thrown out of school for gambling and, it was said, ‘womanizing’. He disappeared from Graz without a word and friends feared that he had drowned in the river.

  In 1878, he re-appeared in Maribor, which was then in the Austrian province of Styria, now in Slovenia. He found work there as a draftsman in a tool and die shop, though he seems to have spent much of his time playing cards for money. His father, who did not approve of gambling, found out where he was and came to beg him to return to school, this time in Prague.

  A few weeks after his father’s visit, Tesla was arrested as a vagrant and deported back to Gospic. At his father’s church, he met and fell in love with a girl called Anna. Strolling by the river or on long walks back to his hometown of Smiljan, they discussed the future. She wanted a family; he wanted to be an electrical engineer. Then his father fell seriously ill. He died soon after, aged 60, and was given a funeral fitting for a saint.

  Tesla continued gambling. One day his mother came to him and gave him a roll of notes, saying: ‘The sooner you lose all we possess the better it will be. I know that you will get over it.’

  He said: ‘I conquered my passion then and there and only regretted that it had not been a hundred times as strong. I not only vanquished but tore it from my heart so as not to leave even a trace of desire. Ever since that time I have been as indifferent to any form of gambling as to picking teeth.’ He reported giving up excessive smoking and coffee drinking with similar ease. And he seems to have given up his passion for Anna too.

  The Coming of the Telephone

  Tesla then honoured his dead father’s wishes. Supported by two maternal uncles, he went to Prague University and signed up for courses in mathematics, experimental physics and philosophy. This introduced him to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711 – 76) and the idea that human beings were born a blank slate that was shaped through life by sensory perceptions – ideas that would come into play when he later worked on robotics.

  The intellectual ferment of Prague stimulated Tesla and, again, he put his mind to building a new type of electric motor, removing the commutator to eliminate the sparking. Eventually, the money from his uncles dried up. Tesla needed a job and he saw in the newspapers that one of Thomas Edison’s agents, Tivadar Puskás, was setting up a telephone exchange in Budapest, having already built one in Paris. Puskás’ idea was to build telephone exchanges in major European cities. Until then Alexander Graham Bell had only thought of installing his invention on private lines linking two locations.

  However, in Budapest, no work was forthcoming, so Tesla took a government job as a draftsman in the Central Telegraph Office. This bored him and he quit to devote himself full time to inventing. Coming up with no practical idea, he had a nervous breakdown.

  A Flash of Inspiration

  Tesla was only rescued from a deep depression by his new friend Anthony Szigeti. One afternoon they were walking in the City Park reciting poetry. ‘At that age,’ he said, ‘I knew books by heart, word for word.’ As the sun was setting, he began a passage in German from Goethe’s Faust. The quote concludes:

  Alas the wings that lift the mind no aid

  Of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.

  Tesla said:

  As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, ‘See my motor here; watch me reverse it.’ I cannot begin to describe my emotions.

  The idea Tesla had come up with was using a rotating electric field within the motor.

  Although Tesla described his ‘Eureka!’ moment in his autobiography, he did not patent the alternating current (AC) motor until 1903. He did further experiments on it in 1883 and 1887, and the idea was still not fully worked out when he addressed the AIEE in 1888.

  However, Tesla had solved the problem that Professor Pöschl had said was impossible. He was now convinced he was an inventor, and he had made the intellectual breakthrough that would make him rich and famous.

  Tesla may have also found inspiration at the works of Ganz and Company in Budapest where AC electrical distribution was being developed. Electricity can be transmitted down wires with less loss at higher voltages. With AC electricity you can step up the voltage – and step it down again – using a transformer. In the Ganz works, engineers found that a metal ball placed on top of a transformer would revolve. Later, Tesla would use this in his Egg of Columbus demonstrations.

  Passport to Paris

  Eventually, Tesla was taken on by Tivadar Puskás’ brother Ferenc to work on the new telephone exchange. Tivadar was then in Paris, helping introduce Edison’s incandescent lighting system. When the telephone exchange in Budapest was finished, Ferenc sold it to a local businessman and Tivadar offered Tesla and Szigeti jobs in the Edison organization in Paris. Tesla was immediately struck by the ‘City of Light’.

  I never can forget the deep impression that magic city produced on my mind. For several days after my arrival I roamed through the streets in utter bewilderment at the new spectacle. The attractions were many and irresistible, but, alas, the income was spent as soon as received. When Mr Puskás asked me how I was getting along …
I [replied] ‘the last 29 days of the month are the toughest’

  Employed at the Edison works in the suburb of Ivry, Tesla learned a great deal about the practical business of building generators and motors. At the time, little of the basic science had been done and progress was made by trial and error. However, Tesla had the advantage that, unlike the other engineers, he had studied physics and mathematics, and could make calculations.

  His schedule, as usual, was unrelenting. He would get up in the morning at 5 am and swim 27 laps of a bathhouse on the Seine. In the evenings he would play billiards with his colleagues. Even then, he would explain his idea for an AC motor, again in the dirt with a stick.

  In his spare time, he worked on alternative designs for his flying machine and outlined the specifications for his AC motor in a notebook. It would need three different alternating currents delivered to the motor down six wires at 120° out of phase. This would produce a rotating magnetic field. But he could not get any of Edison’s men interested. The business making money at the time was delivering electric light rather than powering motors. The other problem was that, using six wires, rather than the three used in Edison’s system, would use much more copper which was a major factor in the cost of new equipment at the time.

  Only one Edison man, David Cunningham, saw the potential in Tesla’s motor and suggested that they set up a stock company. But Tesla was unfamiliar with the American way of doing business and nothing came of it.

  He was still suffering from seeing flashing lights. One night in Paris, he said: ‘I felt the positive sensation that my brain had caught fire. I was alight, as though a small sun was located in it and I passed the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head.’