His ideas were ahead of their time, and some believe the man himself to have been some kind of superhero. Jacek Świdziński presents an electrifying profile of one of the greatest inventors of all time.
It was a dark, stormy night. Just after the stroke of midnight on 10th July 1856, a child was born.
“A child of darkness,” said the midwife, holding up the baby boy illuminated by flashes of lightning.
“No, a child of light,” replied his mother.
Just a few years later, using a wire, two stones and a stick, the boy made his first fishing rod for catching frogs. By the age of six, he had constructed a motor driven by four beetles glued to a wooden cross, and a starting pistol made from a hollowed-out stalk, a piston and a hemp plug. The boy’s name was Nikola Tesla.
Most stories about Tesla’s life are a mix of the same old motifs drawn from popular culture. Here, I have reconstructed the history of the great inventor from his autobiography, biographies and online sources.
Tesla: Beginnings
The famous Serbian scientist was born in the Austrian Empire in the village of Smiljan (in present-day Croatia). His father was an Orthodox priest and expected his son to follow the same path. But young Tesla had other plans, and when he fell ill with cholera at the age of 17, he told his father that he would try to survive as long as he was allowed to study engineering. His father agreed in desperation and Tesla made a miraculous recovery nine months later. Before realizing his ambitions, he spent over a year in the Dinaric Mountains, where he regained his strength and avoided military service. While walking in the mountains, the teenager devised a design for a ring constructed above the equator that would hang in the sky once the scaffolding was removed. The plan relied on the discovery of a force that would hold the colossal satellite motionless relative to the spinning planet. When a passenger entered the ring, the Earth would move beneath them at a speed of over 1600 km/h.
In 1875, Tesla began studying at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Graz University of Technology. In his first year he took to his studies with a level of commitment that alarmed the lecturers. One of them wrote a letter to his father to alert him to the fact that Tesla was spending all his time in the laboratory and had practically stopped eating and sleeping (many years later, the inventor claimed that he regularly slept just two hours a day). In his autobiography, Tesla mentions the impulses and habits he had struggled with since childhood. Earrings, pearls, other people’s hair, camphor and the sight of peaches revolted him. He would compulsively count steps and everything else around him. He got pleasure from food by calculating the volume of meals, soup bowls and coffee cups. The sum of the repetitions of each activity he performed had to be divisible by three. He would keep going until he got the right result, even if it lasted for hours. He was probably struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder his whole life.
When his money ran out in the middle of his studies, Tesla began to experiment with gambling. He played cards and roulette, but as an engineer gifted with extraordinary spatial visualization, he liked billiards the best. In his second year at university, he spent most of his time in clubs, taking bets and beating the local champions. He was able to bolster his finances, but his reputation as a gambler led to his expulsion from the university. His tertiary education came to an end before he’d finished his third year.
Tesla in the Wild West
Over the next six years, the Serbian inventor worked in various European countries until the head of the Paris branch of Edison’s Continental convinced him to emigrate to the US. Apparently, most of Tesla’s luggage and money was stolen as he made his way to the port. He only made it on board thanks to his incredible memory and ability to repeat his exact ticket number. When mutiny broke out on the ship, he was almost thrown overboard. After a voyage of several weeks, he reached New York on 6th June 1884, at the age of 28. He reportedly had with him just four cents, a few clothes, samples of his poetry, a plan for a flying vehicle, and a letter from his supervisor in Paris recommending him to Thomas Edison.
He was employed as an engineer at Edison Machine Works and his talents were soon recognized. At that time, the lightbulb tycoon was leading the accelerated commercial electrification of the country, which was claiming an increasingly large number of victims of electric shocks and fires. Generators were exploding, people were scared to use the trolleybuses, ships were losing power and were forced to remain docked in the ports for extended periods. Tesla told Edison that he could improve his DC dynamo to make it safer, more efficient and more economical. Edison replied that if he succeeded, the $50,000 he’d make from it would belong to the Serb. The engineer set to work in his usual way, barely leaving the workshop, sleeping or eating. It took him more than six months to improve the primitive generators; when he finally met with Edison to present the results of his work, he asked when he could expect the money he’d been promised. Edison burst out laughing, claiming Tesla had misunderstood the American sense of humour. Instead, he could offer him a raise of $10. That same day, the young visionary left the corporation and decided to find the funds to finance his work on alternating current by himself.
And Tesla saw that it was good
Edison was advocating powering homes and industry with direct current, which caused very high loss of energy in the wires, drops in voltage, and overheating of the thick, uneconomical cables. To ensure a universal DC supply, generators had to be set up every three kilometres. The use of alternating current would enable a significant increase in voltage in thinner wires, and it could travel hundreds of kilometres with minimal loss of power. While working for Edison, Tesla had tried to convince him to develop pioneering AC technology, but Edison didn’t even want to hear about it. Edison was running his business based on quick profit and was probably scared to invest in the remodelling of the DC infrastructure.
Since his studies in Graz, Tesla’s main goal had been to build the perfect AC motor. He had always had very well-developed senses, and his mind and nervous system worked in an unconventional way. In 1881, during a trip to Budapest, he experienced a severe attack of sensory hypersensitivity. He later described how he’d been deafened by the sun’s rays, the sounds of flies and a clock, and how the earth and buildings had vibrated painfully. Allegedly, his pulse was ranging from below normal to 260 beats per minute. Lying in complete darkness, Tesla could sense the unpleasant presence of objects from a distance of 3.5 metres, so he was isolated from his surroundings using rubber mats. He claimed to hear a shuddering in his head that sounded like randomly collated words. When the symptoms subsided and he felt better, he and his friend went for a walk in the park. The setting sun evoked in Tesla a passage of Faust, which he recited; and then, like an epiphany, an exact model of an AC motor appeared in his mind. When he returned home, he was bombarded with images: a multiphase induction motor, single-phase induction with an auxiliary phase, multiphase synchronous induction, single- and multiphase motors for the production, transmission and use of electric current. He assembled and dismantled them in his head like three-dimensional models, eliminated all the flaws, then drew the motors ready for production on sheets of paper.
Tesla goes to war
After leaving the corporation, the young engineer ran into financial trouble. Reportedly, at that time he was employed as a small-scale foreman and pit digger. Eventually, however, he met someone with money who financed his work on alternating current and also patented the devices he had invented in Budapest. His innovative solutions caught the attention of someone with even more money – George Westinghouse, who wanted to challenge Edison General Electric on the electricity market. Westinghouse bought the rights to Tesla’s power systems and hired him in his company. Edison launched a preventive strike, financing a media campaign to smear alternating current. False information about large-scale fatal electrocutions linked to AC began to appear in the press. In order to reveal the hidden truth about the threat that awaited the American people, General Electric employees organized public executions of dogs, cats and horses connected to AC power. Edison pushed through and publicized plans for its use in the recently manufactured electric chair. In an exchange of blows that lasted several years, which the newspapers called ‘the war of the currents’, Westinghouse followed an opposing strategy. At fairs and exhibitions, Tesla, dressed all in white, surrounded by constructions and signs made from bent fluorescent lamps (17 years before the invention of the neon light), presented to the public his new devices, powerful floodlights and striking lighting systems powered by AC. The biggest sensation occurred at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 where Tesla organized a high-voltage coil display at Westinghouse’s pavilion that involved him passing a huge electrical discharge through his body. The press announced that sparks were still shooting from his head long after the show. Tesla thus proved to the audience that, when controlled, AC is safe – and he was the man who had tamed it.
The campaign led to a victory for Westinghouse. His company won the competition for the construction of power generators at Niagara Falls in 1893. Tesla designed the world’s most powerful hydroelectric power plant; it operated for 65 years and the solutions he implemented are still used to this day. Not long after that, the US government officially ordered the use of AC in the electrification of the country. AC motors and generators were probably Tesla’s greatest historical achievement, but at the same time the inventor was already working on other technologies. His next patents included the solar battery, radar, fluorescent lamp, enhancements for X-ray cameras, and numerous radio design solutions (the dispute over whether the first actual radio was built by him or Guglielmo Marconi may never be solved, but Marconi certainly used Tesla’s patents). Tesla also constructed the ‘teleautomaton’, the first radio-controlled robot, simultaneously inaugurating robotics and a new field of expertise in remote navigation. The teleautomaton was a metre-long boat that could be steered and submerged using radio waves. During a show at Madison Square Garden, stunned New Yorkers accused him of witchcraft, and of hiding a small, intelligent monkey on board the boat.
What on Earth is Tesla?
Tesla’s patented inventions were accompanied by even more spectacular ideas, which he described to the press and his friends. From time to time, especially in the second half of his life, Tesla claimed to be working on a new revolutionary device that would soon go public. However, he did not file any patents or give public presentations, and no evidence of the device was found in his documentation. In the same way, Tesla announced success in wireless energy transmission over a distance of 26 miles, the creation of an interplanetary communication machine, and the development of a mysterious anti-access weapon called the ‘death beam’. The fact that he was also giving interviews about making contact with Martians and his telepathic communication with his beloved dove did not help his statements to be taken seriously. There were indications that the scientist, although brimming with ideas, was grappling with money problems and slowly losing touch with reality.
Proponents of conspiracy theories believe that the suggestion that Tesla was struggling with mental health problems in the second half of his life was merely one of the typical discrediting techniques used by the secret services and large corporations, much like the tactics that have been used to ridicule conspiracy theorists themselves. According to this narrative, the establishment doesn’t want ordinary people to benefit from Tesla’s egalitarian inventions. His undisclosed achievements were the most important, but those plans ended up in the hands of the US government (or the USSR, or Hitler’s bodyguard…). The FBI were indeed interested in Tesla – after his death, the government secured his belongings, and the evaluation of the documents was handled by the engineer at the heart of the establishment: John G. Trump, Donald’s uncle. According to these theories, when the US handed over the documents to the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade in 1957, the most important designs were no longer there; secret research on these plans continues. The results of this research are believed by some to be linked to Hurricane Katrina, the 2011 tsunami in Japan and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370.
In the corners of the internet dedicated to Tesla, alongside the conspiracy theories, there are huge collections of popularizing texts and films produced by technology enthusiasts for whom the inventor was, above all, a visionary who was misunderstood by his contemporaries, living in voluntary celibacy, and enjoying his solitary work in the lab. They have made him into the greatest science and technology buff in history, their patron. For both the devotees and the conspiracy theorists, it is significant that the genius died alone, in debt, in the small hotel room where he lived. The latter group drew strength and anger from this fact, making Tesla the founding victim of their fight against the government, large corporations and millionaires. Meanwhile, for technology enthusiasts, it is actually the multimillionaire Elon Musk who restored the credit Tesla deserved, naming his corporations in his honour and sending a dummy into space in a convertible.
Damn you, Tesla!
The unavoidable fact is that after Tesla’s death on 7th January 1943, his contribution to the development of science was marginalized for many years. However, at the end of the 20th century, after decades of silence, the name of the inventor erupted into popular culture with redoubled strength, and instead of gaining the attention of researchers, critics and authors of scientific papers, Tesla started gaining fans. Books, comics and games have created an ever-expanding universe in which the engineer fights or collaborates with other historical and fictional figures: Leonardo da Vinci, Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Newton, Harry Houdini, Superman, Galileo, Rasputin, Jules Verne, Aleister Crowley, Sonia Marmeladova, Howard Stark, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and many more. The popular culture industry has recycled every narrative about Tesla, including those created by technology enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists. The scientist’s character manages to be both a member of sinister affiliations and the only righteous force fighting against them. People with leftist views have their own Tesla, a man who wanted to give everyone access to free, clean and inexhaustible energy from the movement of the planet. The alt-right, meanwhile, position him as an opponent of feminism, a supporter of eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and the mentally ill.
So, for a long time, Nikola Tesla has been crushed between layers of stories, styles and plot outlines whose constituents have shifted, twisted and combined to create his various characters. When I was working on this text – as well as the two comics that preceded it, which took advantage of Tesla’s many different images – I wondered how best to write about him. The inventor was raised on Serbian romantic literature, which he later translated into English. A poem full of Gothic images written by his friend Robert Underwood Johnson in 1895, In Tesla’s Laboratory, describes a dark and disturbing space under the influence of the demons of misfortune, suffering and crime, full of “Thoughts to unlock the fettering chains of Things; The Better Time; the Universal Good.” In his autobiography, Tesla also describes his role (in a rather effusive manner) as a lonely struggle of Faustian genius with evil, atoned for with sacrifices and great suffering. At the end of the 19th century, during the period of rivalry with Edison, he had the opportunity to develop his acting talents; aware of the widespread fear of the electric current, he consciously created his image as that of a mysterious master of electricity. He understood the power of the media at a time when every scientific project needed commercial financing. He began to play the game, sending announcements of his discoveries to the newspapers and posing for photos surrounded by lightning and the obligatory mysterious expression. The press eagerly broadcast these rumours from the laboratory where work was ongoing on man’s salvation. The romantic image of a mysterious genius created by Tesla himself, and reproduced with relish by the tabloid press, went into a curious hibernation throughout most of the 20th century, only returning in the last few decades in the entertainment industry, pop-culture fandom and subcultures of online detectives revealing an alternative truth about reality. This is a unique case of the direct transmission of myths from the collective imagination at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries to the mass imagination a century later. All of which goes to show that the character of Tesla is yet another of Tesla’s inventions.
Translated from the Polish by Kate Webster
Read similar:
