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Tesla's early life
was tormented
by various
afflictions.
1: The Man Behind the Mind
In the small village of Smiljan, Croatia (then Austria-Hungary),
Nikola Tesla was born exactly at the stroke of midnight between July 9
and 10, 1856 -- an incidental schism that befits the beginnings of a
man who always seemed out of time with the world around him.
From early childhood, it was apparent that Nikola possessed an
extraordinary mind. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a minister who
trained Nikola to strengthen his memory and reasoning skills through a
variety of regular mental exercises. But Tesla gave the highest credit
for his talents to his mother's side of the family, whom he referred
to as a long line of inventors. Despite Djouka Tesla's lack of formal
education, she created numerous original tools for sewing and other
tasks around her household.
Tesla had an older brother, Dane, whom he considered his superior in
every way. When Nikola was five and Dane was twelve, Nikola was
jealous of Dane's white stallion, which their father said Nikola was
too young to ride. One day Nikola used a blow gun to shoot a pea at
the horse, causing it to throw Dane from its back. Dane later died
from his injuries. Feelings of guilt over this tragedy haunted Tesla
throughout his life. No matter how great his achievements, he always
believed that Dane could have outdone him.
During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time
again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of
light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by
hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or
idea he might come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he
would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. The flashes and
images caused Tesla great discomfort, and by the time he reached his
teens he had taught himself to repress them from occurring except in
certain times of stress. When they did happen, they sometimes had a
nature that might be described as psychic.
In one case, the young Tesla recklessly attempted to swim beneath a
large floating structure that extended further than he realized.
Finding himself trapped in the dark water with no sign of the surface,
a flash appeared, and with it a vision of a small opening to air.
Tesla's vision turned out to be correct, and the strange curse
apparently saved him from drowning. Upon the deaths of his father and
mother, Tesla claimed to have detailed premonitions just before each
passing. In his later years, Tesla boasted of successfully
transmitting an image from his mind into that of a person in another
room.
Shortly after his graduation from high school, Tesla suffered a
devastating bout with cholera and nearly died. He was bedridden for
nine months, and doctors announced that he would not live much longer.
Tesla was occupying his still-active mind by reading as much as his
body would permit, when he encountered a strange new kind of
literature: "Innocents Abroad," by Mark Twain. Tesla was captivated by
the humor and humanity of this up-and-coming American author, whose
work so raised his spirits that he made a miraculously abrupt recovery
to health. Years later in the United States, Tesla met Samuel Clemens
and was able to thank him for having saved his life. Clemens went on
to become one of Tesla's few close friends.
Tesla underwent another debilitating trauma a few years after
recovering from cholera. This time, the nature of the illness and its
causes were a complete mystery. Tesla's physical senses, which had
always been remarkably acute, seemed to go inexplicably into
overdrive, paralyzing him with an overabundance of sensation. The
ticking of a pocket watch had become painfully deafening to him, even
from several rooms away. He needed rubber cushion inserted beneath the
feet of his bed to lessen the vibrations from outside passersby, which
felt to him like an earthquake. Exposure to light was excruciating not
only for his eyes, but to the surface of his skin, as well. After a
time, the crippling condition eased, and Tesla returned to normal
sensory perception with a mental breakthrough that led him to the
invention of the alternating current motor.
The physical and emotional travails of Tesla's early life undoubtedly
helped shape him into the singular man he was: a man of immense
brilliance, and a nearly equal level of eccentricity. Tesla shunned
physical contact with other people, with a special aversion to
touching hair. To avoid shaking hands with people he met, he lied that
he had injured his hands in a laboratory accident. He apparently never
took part in a romantic relationship of any kind. A female
acquaintance who grew enamored of Tesla reportedly once took the
initiative to kiss him, causing the startled inventor to flee in
agony. Still, Tesla exhibited some appreciation for feminine beauty by
demanding that his secretaries conform to an exacting standard of
dress and physique. His female employees were forbidden to wear
pearls, which Tesla for some reason found hideously repulsive.
Other behaviors of Tesla's seemed to drift into the realm of
compulsive-obsessive disorder. He required any repeated actions in his
daily life (such as the footsteps he took in a walk) to be divisible
by three, and would keep repeating them until he arrived at a suitable
total. Quantities of twenty-seven were the most prized of all, since
that number was three cubed. Tesla also felt compelled to calculate
the exact volume of his food before he ate it. This involved measuring
his meal portions with a ruler and dipping pieces in water to
determine how many cubic centimeters they displaced. He was especially
fond of saltine crackers because of their uniformity of volume. Many
times, such as during the heat of a major project, Tesla would forget
to eat altogether, and work for days without sleep. At one point his
all-consuming devotion to the laboratory brought on an exhaustion so
severe that for several days he lost all memory of who he was.
Tesla asserted that it was not until he reached adulthood that he
discovered he was an inventor. He discounted his early years (perhaps
unreasonably) as a time of undisciplined impulses, entirely lacking
focus. But he did invent a wide array of creations and schemes as a
child. The first was a simple hook-and-line device for catching frogs.
All his young friends imitated it, and the mechanisms performed so
well that the local frog population was nearly eradicated. He also
built a miniature water wheel which was unique in that it propelled
itself without blades. This memory would later inspire his innovation
of the bladeless turbine.
The young Tesla created a remarkable machine powered by another
natural energy source: June bugs (or, as Europeans call them, May
bugs). He glued sixteen of the live insects to the blades of a small
windmill-like structure, and they set the rotor spinning vigorously in
their vain attempt to fly away. Some accounts have jokingly cited this
effort as one of Tesla's rare failures, although the inventor himself
remained rather proud of the June bug motor. In his autobiography,
Tesla explained why he discontinued his research into insect energy:
"These creatures were remarkably efficient, for once they were
started, they had no sense to stop and continued whirling for hours
and hours and the hotter it was, the harder they worked. All went well
until a strange boy came to the place. He was the son of a retired
officer in the Austrian army. That urchin ate May-bugs alive and
enjoyed them as though they were the finest blue-point oysters."
Adding one more entry to his long list of idiosyncrasies, after
beholding that spectacle Tesla refused ever to touch another insect
again.
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