In the Footsteps of Genius Page 19

of the relation to the most immediate of all symbols of the mother finally prevailed…”³⁸

Hence, he says, Tesla’s elaborate ceremony for dinner: the arrival in evening dress at a determined time, the escort to the table, and then the service of the head waiter who becomes a surrogate mother.

Eisenbud also recalls Tesla’s choice of food. “In a true clinical example, he punishes the breasts which did not feed him (the other side of the medal is his strong need to feed pigeons) and eats only meat from both sides of the breast.”

After the wheel of his life had come full circle, Tesla began to eat only warm milk. Then there followed “the event with the white dove and the dazzlingly white beam of light — as a symbol of the stream of milk from the mother’s breasts…”³⁹

Behaviorists would probably gladly debate such Freudian-Jungian conclusions, endeavoring to prove that Tesla’s obsessive neuroses were a consequence of the emotional suppression of some traumatic events in childhood.

Unfortunately, the lack of complete facts leaves the most room only for conjecture.

Lost works

Tesla was never a member of any scientific group or institution. Because of that he never had the opportunity to discuss his works with colleagues or to make notes and reports such as would satisfy certain formal requirements. He worked almost entirely alone — if the announcements for the press are excluded — in secret. Thus many of his inventions, which he neither patented nor publicly disclosed, remained shrouded in secrecy. Since all his documentation has still not been found, Tesla’s scientific achievements are partially and still unknown.

Tesla left behind him a series of puzzles. Three are among the main ones: Was his unfulfilled concept of the wireless transmission of energy scientifically founded? What was the nature of his experiments with the death ray? And what happened to Tesla’s unpublished works and other sensitive documents immediately after his death?

With the development of space research interest in Tesla’s work has grown again, especially in the field of microwaves and “death rays.” In Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries of the world research based on Tesla’s pioneering works has begun, from the control of the weather to nuclear fusion. Some of the research is conducted by isolated individuals, while others are designated as strictly confidential and are under the control of state institutions.

The greatest source of inspiration for the continuation of Tesla’s work are his secret experiments conducted in Colorado Springs in 1899. When in 1978 the book (the Belgrade “Nolit” edition) Notes from Colorado Springs, based on Tesla’s documents which are preserved in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, was published, the English edition was very quickly sold out because of the great interest of scientists. However, even after this book many questions still remained unexplained.

Either Tesla or a computer

Some aspects of his investigations are not in the book at all, and some are present only fragmentarily, so that it is difficult to grasp the whole work.

Sometime in the course of 1928 O’Neill noticed an advertisement in the newspapers in which six boxes of Tesla’s materials, left at a pawnbroker’s, were offered for sale. O’Neill went to Tesla and proposed to him that he organize a fund for the collection of money for the purchase of the materials. “Tesla, however, assured me that he was in a position to manage his affairs himself and that he did not need help in that regard,” O’Neill wrote.

Soon after Tesla’s death O’Neill informed Sava Kosanović about the boxes. Kosanović never confirmed to him that he had succeeded in getting the boxes, but he assured him that there was no reason for worry.

Many others too were interested in Tesla’s documentation. A young American engineer asked Tesla to help him in the solution of certain ballistic problems, for at that time he could not get access to a computer, and many then compared Tesla’s mind to that device. Soon he showed great interest in Tesla’s scientific papers, and Tesla allowed him to take them in satchels to his apartment, where he, together with another engineer, diligently studied them all night. He would return them the next day, and this continued for two weeks before Tesla’s death.

After Tesla died, two engineers,