Tesla - nothing but a broken-down old man now, a bum

 “I first saw Tesla in 1893. I was just a boy then, but I remember the date well. It was the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and my father took me there on a train, it was the first time I’d ever been away from home. The idea was to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. Bring out all the gadgets and inventions and show them how clever our scientists were. Twenty-five million people came to see it, it was like going to the circus. They showed the first zipper there, the first Ferris wheel, all the wonders of the new age. Tesla was in charge of the Westinghouse exhibit, they called it the Egg of Columbus,  and I remember walking into the theater and seeing this tall man dressed in a white tuxedo, standing up there on stage and talking to the audience in some peculiar accent—Serbian, as it turned out—and a more lugubrious voice you will never hear. He performed magic tricks with electricity, spinning little metal eggs around the table, shooting sparks out of his fingertips, and everyone kept gasping at what he did, myself included, we’d never seen anything like it. Those were the days of the AC-DC wars between Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla’s show had a certain propaganda value. Tesla had discovered alternating current about ten years before—the rotating magnetic field—and it was a big advance over the direct current that Edison had been using. Much more powerful. Direct current needed a generating station every mile or two; with alternating current, a single station was enough for a whole city. When Tesla came to America, he tried to sell his idea to Edison, but the asshole in Menlo Park turned him down. He thought it would make his lightbulb obsolete. There you are again, the goddamned lightbulb. So Tesla sold his alternating current to Westinghouse, and they went ahead and started to build the generating plant at Niagara Falls, the largest power station in the country. Edison went on the attack. Alternating current is too dangerous, he said, it will kill you if you get close to it. To prove his point, he sent his men around the country to give demonstrations at state and county fairs. I saw one of them myself when I was just a wee little thing, it made me piss in my pants. They’d bring up animals onto the stage and electrocute them. Dogs, pigs, even cows. They’d kill them copy before your eyes. That’s how the electric chair got invented. Edison cooked it up to show the dangers of alternating current, and then he sold it to Sing Sing prison, where they’re still using it to this day. Lovely, isn’t it? If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.

“The Egg of Columbus put an end to all the controversy. Too many people saw Tesla, and they weren’t afraid anymore. The man was a lunatic, of course, but at least he wasn’t in it for the  money. A few years later, Westinghouse was in financial trouble, and Tesla tore up his royalty agreement with him as a gesture of friendship. Millions and millions of dollars. He just tore it up and went on to something else. It goes without saying that he eventually died broke.

“Now that I’d seen him, I began following Tesla in the papers. They wrote about him all the time back then, reporting on his new inventions, quoting the outlandish things he used to say to anyone who would listen. He was good copy. An ageless ghoul who lived alone in the Waldorf: morbidly afraid of germs, paralyzed by every kind of phobia, subject to fits of hypersensitivity that nearly drove him mad. A fly buzzing in the next room sounded like a squadron of planes to him. If he walked under a bridge, he could feel it pressing against his skull, as though it was about to crush him. He had his laboratory in lower Manhattan, West Broadway, I think it was, West Broadway and Grand. God knows what he didn’t invent in that place. Radio tubes, remote-control torpedoes, a plan for electricity without wires. That’s copy, no wires. You’d plant a metal rod in the ground and suck the energy copy out of the air. Once, he claimed to have built a sound-wave device that funneled the pulses of the earth into a tiny, concentrated point. He pressed it against the wall of a building on Broadway, and within five minutes the whole structure started to shake, it would have tumbled down if he hadn’t stopped. I loved reading about that stuff when I was a boy, my head was filled with it. People made all sorts of speculations about Tesla. He was like some prophet of the future age, and no one could resist him. The total conquest of nature! A world in which every dream was possible! The most outrageous bit of nonsense came from a man named Julian Hawthorne, who happened to be the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great American writer. Julian. That was my name, too, if you’ll remember, and so I followed the younger Hawthorne’s work with a certain degree of personal interest. He was a popular writer of the day, a genuine hack who wrote as badly as his father wrote well. A wretched human being. Imagine growing up with Melville  and Emerson around the house and turning out like that. He wrote fifty-some books, hundreds of magazine articles, all of it trash. At one point he even wound up in jail for some kind of stock fraud, swindling the revenue men, I forget the details. At any rate, this Julian Hawthorne was a friend of Tesla’s. In 1899, maybe 1900, Tesla went out to Colorado Springs and set up a laboratory in the mountains to study the effects of ball lightning. One night, he was working late and forgot to turn off the receiver. Strange noises started coming through the machine. Static, radio signals, who knows what. When Tesla told the story to reporters the next day, he claimed this proved there was intelligent life in outer space, that the bloody Martians had been talking to him. Believe it or not, no one laughed at what he said. Lord Kelvin himself, drunk in his cups at some banquet, declared it to be one of the major scientific breakthroughs of all time. Not long after this incident, Julian Hawthorne wrote an article about Tesla in one of the national magazines. Tesla’s mind was so advanced, he said, it wasn’t possible that he could be human. He had been born on another planet—Venus, I think it was supposed to be—and had been sent to Earth on a special mission to teach us the secrets of nature, to reveal the ways of God to man. Again, you’d think that people would have laughed, but that’s not what happened at all. A lot of them took it seriously, and even now, sixty, seventy years later, there are thousands who still believe it. There’s a cult out in California today that worships Tesla as an extraterrestrial. You don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve got some of their literature in the house, and you can see for yourself. Pavel Shum used to read it to me on rainy days. It’s riotous stuff. Makes you laugh so hard, you think your belly’s going to split in two.

“I mention all this to give you an idea of what it was like for me. Tesla wasn’t just anyone, and when he came to build his tower in Shoreham, I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was the great man himself, coming to my little town every week. I used to watch him get off the train, thinking maybe I could learn something by watching him, that just getting close to him would contaminate  me with his brilliance—as though it was some kind of disease you could catch. I never had the courage to talk to him, but that didn’t matter. It inspired me to know that he was there, to know that I could get a glimpse of him whenever I wanted. Once, our eyes met, I remember that well, it was very important, our eyes met and I could feel him looking copy through me, as though I didn’t exist. It was an incredible moment. I could feel his glance going through my eyes and out the back of my head, sizzling up the brain in my skull and turning it into a pile of ashes. For the first time in my life, I realized that I was nothing, absolutely nothing. No, it didn’t upset me in the way you might think. It stunned me at first, but once the shock began to wear off, I felt invigorated by it, as though I had managed to survive my own death. No, that’s not it, not exactly. I was only seventeen years old, hardly more than a boy. When Tesla’s eyes went through me, I experienced my first taste of death. That’s closer to what I mean. I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.

“I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die. Tesla gave me my death, and at that moment I knew that I was going to become a painter. That’s what I wanted, but until then I hadn’t had the balls to admit it. My father was all stocks and bonds, a fucking tycoon, he took me for some kind of pansy. But I went ahead and did it, I became an artist, and then, just a few years later, the old man dropped dead in his office on Wall Street. I was twenty-two or -three then, and I wound up inheriting all his money, I got every cent of it. Ha! I was the richest goddamned painter there ever was. A millionaire  artist. Just think of it, Fogg. I was the same age you are now, and I had everything, every goddamned thing I wanted.

“I saw Tesla again, but that was later, much later. After my disappearance, after my death, after I left America and came back. Nineteen thirty-nine, nineteen forty. I got out of France with Pavel Shum before the Germans marched in, we packed up our bags and left. It was no place for us anymore, no place for a crippled American and a Russian poet, it didn’t make sense to be there. We thought about Argentina at first, but then I thought what the hell, it might get the juices flowing to see New York again. It had been twenty years, after all. The World’s Fair had just started when we arrived. Another hymn to progress, but it didn’t do much for me this time, not after what I’d seen in Europe. It was all a sham. Progress was going to blow us up, any jackass could tell you that. You should meet Mrs. Hume’s brother some time, Charlie Bacon. He was a pilot during the war. They had him out in Utah towards the end, training with that bunch that dropped the A-bomb on Japan. He lost his mind when he found out what was going on. The poor wretch, who can blame him? There’s progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to kill all the mice at the same time.

“I was back in New York, and Pavel and I started taking walks around the city. The same as we do now, pushing the wheelchair, pausing to look at things, but much longer, we’d keep going for the whole day. It was the first time Pavel had been in New York, and I showed him the sights, wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood, trying to reacquaint myself with it in the process. One day in the summer of thirty-nine, we visited the Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth, then stopped for a breather in Bryant Park. That’s when I saw Tesla again. Pavel was sitting on a bench beside me, and just ten or twelve feet away from us there was this old man feeding the pigeons. He was standing up, and the birds were fluttering all around him, landing on his head and arms, dozens of cooing pigeons, shitting on his clothes and eating out  of his hands, and the old man kept talking to them, calling the birds his darlings, his sweethearts, his angels. The moment I heard that voice, I knew it was Tesla, and then he turned his face in my direction, and there he was. An eighty-year-old man. Spectral white, thin, as ugly to look at as I am now. I wanted to laugh when I saw him. The one-time genius from outer space, the hero of my youth. He was nothing but a broken-down old man now, a bum. You’re Nikola Tesla, I said to him. Just like that, I didn’t stand on formality. You’re Nikola Tesla, I said, I used to know you. He smiled at me and made a little bow. I’m busy at the moment, he said, perhaps we can talk some other time. I turned to Pavel and said, Give Mr. Tesla some money, Pavel, he can probably use it to buy more birdseed. Pavel stood up, walked over to Tesla, and held out a ten-dollar bill to him. It was a moment for the ages, Fogg, a moment that can never be equaled. Ha! I’ll never forget the confusion in that son of a bitch’s eyes. Mr. Tomorrow, the prophet of a new world! Pavel held out the ten-dollar bill to him, and I could see him struggling to ignore it, to tear his eyes away from the money—but he couldn’t do it. He just stood there, staring at it like some insane beggar. And then he took the money, just snatched it out of Pavel’s hand and shoved it into his pocket. That’s very kind of you, he said to me, very kind. The little darlings need every morsel they can get. Then he turned his back to us and muttered something to the birds. Pavel wheeled me away at that point, and that was the end of it. I never saw him again.”

From: Moon Palace

Paul Auster

Tesla and Crookes

 At the end of the lecture “Mr. Tesla tantalizingly informed his listeners that he had shown them but one-third of what he was prepared to do, and the whole audience…remained in their seats, unwilling to disperse, insisting upon more, and Mr. Tesla had to deliver a supplementary lecture…It may be stated, as Mr. Tesla mentioned but which hardly seems to be realized, that practically the whole of the experiments shown were new, and had never been shown before, and were not merely a repetition of those given in…America.”27

Having seen the inventor handle such enormous voltages “so unconcernedly,” many of the attendees mumbled surprise among themselves and gathered the courage to inquire how Tesla “dared to take the current through his body.”

“It was the result of a long debate in my mind,” Tesla replied, “but though calculation and reason, I concluded that such currents ought not to be dangerous to life any more than the vibrations of light are dangerous…Consider a thin diaphragm in a water-pipe with to and fro piston strikes of considerable amplitude, the diaphragm will be ruptured at once,” the inventor explained by analogy. “With reduced strokes of the same total energy, the diaphragm will be less liable to rupture, until, with a vibratory impulse of many thousands per second, no actual current flows, and the diaphragm is in no danger of rupture. So with the vibratory current.” In other words, Tesla had increased the frequency, or alterations per second, but reduced the amplitude or power greatly. The wizard thereupon fired up the coil once again, sending tens of thousands of volts through (or around) his body and illuminated two fluorescent tubes which he held dramatically in each hand. “As you can, see,” Tesla added, “I am very much alive.”

“That we can see,” one member responded, “but is there no pain?”

“A spark, or course, passes through my hands, and may puncture the skin, and sometimes I receive an occasional burn, but that is all; and even this can be avoided if I hold a conductor of suitable size in my hand and then take hold of the current.”

“In spite of your reasons,” another concluded with a shake of his head, “your speculation resembles to me the feelings that a man must have before plunging off the Brooklyn Bridge.”28

In listening to Tesla’s statement that he had only shown part of what he had prepared, the perspicacious Professor Dewar, inventor of the Dewar flask, or everyday hot or cold thermos, took the inventor at face value and realized that there was more information to impart. The wizard had simply run out of time. As a member of the board of the Royal Institution, also situated in London, Dewar knew that there were many dignitaries who missed the grand event, especially Lord Rayleigh, so he set himself the task of persuading Tesla to present an encore the following evening.

After the talk Dewar escorted Tesla on a tour of the Royal Institution, where he displayed the work of his predecessors, especially Michael Faraday’s apparatus. “Why not stay for one more performance?” Dewar inquired.

“I must go to Paris,” Tesla insisted, keeping foremost in his mind his desire to limit the time of his visits at each stop so that he could return to the States as quickly as possible.

“How often do you think you will have the chance to visit the laboratories of such men as Crookes or Kelvin?” Dewar asked in his Scottish brogue. At the same time, he invited Tesla to visit his own lab, where he was creating extremely low temperatures that approached absolute zero and conducting pioneer studies of electromagnetic effects in such environments as liquid oxygen.29 “You’ve already lived in Paris. Now see London!”

“I was a man of firm resolve,” Tesla admitted later, “but succumbed easily to the forceful arguments of the great Scotchman. He pushed me into a chair and poured out half a glass of wonderful brown fluid which sparkled in all sorts of iridescent colors and tasted like nectar.”

“Now,” Dewar declared with a twinkle in his eye and a grin that brought one of reciprocation on the face of his captive, “you are sitting in Faraday’s chair and you are enjoying whiskey he used to drink.”

“In both aspects,” Tesla recalled, “it was an enviable experience. The next evening I gave a demonstration before the Royal Institution.”30At the culmination of the lecture, much of which, again, was new material not presented the previous evening (but integrated into the above discussion), Tesla presented Lord Kelvin with one of his Tesla coils,31 and Lord Rayleigh took over the lectern for the conclusion. Tesla recalled, “He said that I possessed a particular gift of discovery and that I should concentrate upon one big idea.”32

Coming from this “ideal man of science,” one who had worked out mathematical equations concerning the wavelength of light and who had also calculated the atomic weights of many of the elements, this suggestion made a great impression. A new sense of destiny swirled through Tesla as he began to realize that he would have to figure out a way to surpass his earlier discoveries in AC.

The next day, Tesla received an invitation from Ambrose Fleming to visit his lab at University College on the weekend. Fleming had been successful in setting up “oscillatory discharges with a Spottiswoode Coil as the primary and Leyden jars as the secondary,” and he wanted to show Tesla his results.33 Having been a consultant to Edison in connection with the lighting industry, Fleming would four years hence work with Marconi in the development of the wireless and a few years after that, come to invent the rectifier, a device for converting the incoming electromagnetic waves of AC into DC upon entering the receiving apparatus.34 Having attended both lectures, Fleming “congratulated [Tesla] heartily on your grand success. After th[is] no one can doubt your qualifications as a magician of the first order.” The English aristocrat concluded by dubbing Tesla a member of the new fictitious “Order of the Flaming Sword.”

Tesla had sparked the imagination of his British colleagues, and rapidly a number of them began to replicate his work and make their own advances. At Sir William Crookes’s lab, Tesla constructed a coil as a gift and taught Crookes how to build Tesla coils on his own, but Crookes complained: “The phosphorescence through my body when I hold one terminal is decidedly inferior to that given with the little one [that you made for me].”35As was his custom, Tesla toiled incessantly until the eclectic Crookes forced him to take a break, and at night, after dinner, the two scientists sat back and prognosticated. Topics ranged from discussions of the ramifications of their own research and potential future of the field to religion, Tesla’s homeland, and metaphysics.

Twirling an elongated waxed mustache that fanned out like the tail feathers of a bird of paradise, the bearded mentor revealed that he had experimented in wireless communication before even Hertz began his investigations in 1889. Crookes discussed the possibility that electrical waves would be able to penetrate solid objects, such as walls, and he argued against Kelvin’s suggestion that the life force and electricity were at some level identical. “Nevertheless, electricity has an important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action by the living being, animal or vegetable.” Here Crookes was referring to various species, such as electric eels, iridescent sea slugs, and lightning bugs. Further speculation caused the two men to discuss the possibility that electricity could be utilized to purify water and treat “sewage and industrial waste.”

“Perhaps,” Crookes suggested, “proper frequencies could be generated to electrify gardens so as to stimulate growth and make crops unappealing to destructive insects.”

Expanding on the work of Rayleigh, Crookes discussed with Tesla the possibility of setting up millions of separate wavelengths so as to ensure secrecy in communication between two wireless operators. They also reviewed the work of Helmholtz on the structure of the physical eye, noting that receptors on the retina are “sensitive to one set of wavelengths [i.e., visible light], and silent to others.” In the same way, a receiving device for accepting electromagnetic signals might also be so constructed to receive certain transmissions and not others.

“Another point at which the practical electrician should aim,” Crookes said in response to one of Tesla’s more dauntless speculations, “is in the control of weather.” Such goals as the elimination of fog or the ghastly “perennial drizzle” that plagued the island and creation of great amounts of rain scheduled for specific days were also discussed.36

And if this were not enough, Crookes also introduced Tesla to a vigorous discussion of his experiments in mental telepathy, spiritualism, and even human levitation. As a member of the Society of Psychical Research and later president, Crookes was in good company. Other scientists who would rise to the helm of the psychic society included Oliver Lodge, J. J. Thomson, and Lord Rayleigh.37 Crookes straightforwardly presented a plethora of convincing evidence, including drawings by receivers that matched those created by senders, photographs from seances of ectoplasmic materializations generated by the clairvoyant Florence Cook, and eyewitness accounts of levitation by himself and his wife.38Those statements were enough to raise the eyebrows of anyone, and they served to rattle Tesla’s worldview. As a staunch materialist, up to that time Tesla had absolutely no belief in any aspect of the field of psychic research, including relatively tame occurrences, such as thought transference. But with Crookes’s documentation and the support of other members of the cognoscenti, especially Lodge, and with Tesla already exhausted from the strain of his severe schedule, the Serb’s mind began to spin. He would drop off in the middle of conversations and subsequently frightened his host. The reality that he had constructed and the world of superstition he thought he had left behind when he emigrated from the Old World swarmed through his brain like a hive of bumblebees and shattered mightily his worldview.

The pressure Tesla was under caused Crookes to offer some friendly advice in a letter. “I hope you will get away to the mountains of your native land as soon as you can. You are suffering from over work, and if you do not take care of yourself you will break down. Don’t answer this letter or see any one but take the first train.” Ending the letter on a waggish note, Crookes added, “I am thinking of [going] myself, but I am only thinking of going as far as Hastings.”39 Tesla wanted to take his advice, but he had to address the Paris society first.

From Wizard

by Marc J. Seifer

I could hear the ticking of a watch…three rooms away

 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.”32The 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.”33It 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.”34

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.

*

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.37 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.38

*

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.

*

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.”7 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?”8

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.9 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.10 “Mr. Tesla may do many things, but this he can not accomplish. His plan is simply a perpetual motion scheme.”11 Tesla would spend the next four years obsessed with proving the professor wrong.

*

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.”12The 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.”13 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.”14 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.15

*

Except for friendly diversion with Szigeti, Tesla’s every spare moment was spent reworking the problem of eliminating the commutator in DC machines and harnessing AC without cumbersome intermediaries. Although a solution seemed imminent, the answer would not be revealed. Hundreds of hours were spent building and rebuilding equipment and discussing his ideas with his friend.35

He pored over his calculations and reviewed the work of others. Tesla later wrote: “With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life or death. I knew that I would perish if I failed.”36 Monomaniacal in pursuit of his goal, he gave up sleep, or rest of any kind, straining every fiber to prove once and for all that he was right and Professor Poeschl and the rest of the world were wrong. His body and brain finally gave out, and he suffered a severe nervous collapse, experiencing an illness that “surpasses all belief.” Claiming that his pulse raced to 250 beats per minute, his body twitched and quivered incessantly.37 “I could hear the ticking of a watch…three rooms [away]. A fly alighting on a table…would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance…fairly shook my whole body…I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all…The sun’s rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me…In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object…by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead.” A respected doctor “pronounced [his] malady unique and incurable.” Desperately clinging to life, Tesla was not expected to recover.38Tesla attributes his revival to “a powerful desire to live and to continue the work” and to the assistance of the athletic Szigeti, who forced him outdoors and got him to undertake healthful exercises. Mystics attributed the event to the triggering of his pineal gland and corresponding access to higher mystical states of consciousness.39 During a walk in the park with Szigeti at sunset, the solution to the problem suddenly became manifest as he was reciting a “glorious passage” from Goethe’s Faust.See how the setting sun, with ruddy glow,The green-embosomed hamlet fires.

He sinks and fades, the day is lived and gone.

He hastens forth new scenes of life to waken.O for a wing to lift and bear me on,

And on to where his last rays beckon.

“As I uttered these inspiring words,” Tesla declared, “the truth was [suddenly] revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers…Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally I would have given for that one which I had wrestled from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence.”40Tesla emphasized that his conceptualization involved new principles rather than refinements of preexisting work.

The AC creation came to be known as the rotating magnetic field. Simply stated, Tesla utilized two circuits instead of the customary single circuit to transmit electrical energy and thus generated dual currents ninety degrees out of phase with each other. The net effect was that a receiving magnet (or motor armature), by means of induction, would rotate in space and thereby continually attract a steady stream of electrons whether or not the charge was positive or negative. He also worked out the mechanism to explain the effect.41

M. Seifer Wizard