In the Footsteps of Genius Page 5

The man who brought current to the Third Planet

Tesla was an enigma even in his lifetime. None of his friends could boast that he knew him, or that he could explain him well enough. At the least, a man who did not live like all other people aroused interest, sometimes ridicule and disbelief. Legends circulated about him. One bewildered woman writer, who devoted a whole book to this “oddity,” tried to explain him as the embodiment of a superior being from the planet Venus!

In the shadow of his brother’s death

Tesla’s indifference to the stories which circulated about him turned him into one of the many New York attractions. Every evening at eight o’clock Tesla came to dinner in the Palm Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It was an opportunity for the town’s gourmands to watch his unusual manners in person. On the table there were, as usual, eighteen linen napkins. At that time Nikola Tesla no longer remembered why he loved numbers divisible by three, why he was feverishly afraid of dirt, or, in general, what was the immediate cause of the whole series of strange obsessions which he carried with him all his life.

At the table he carefully wiped the already gleaming silver and crystal, always using a second napkin. Then, as the food arrived, he quickly calculated the volume of the food in the dishes. Otherwise he could not enjoy the meal, and because of this he always lunched alone.

If we rely on psychoanalysis, the roots of Tesla’s unusual behavior should be sought in childhood.

Grown up in an unusual time, under unusual circumstances and under the influence of two strong personalities — his parents — Tesla was predestined himself to be something unusual.

Doctors gave him up at least three times, he nearly drowned several times, once he might have been boiled alive in a great cauldron of boiling milk, he came close to being burned, and he spent a whole night buried in some old tomb. Yet the deepest scar on Tesla’s psyche was left by the death of his elder brother Dane, who died in his twelfth year under unclear circumstances.

According to Tesla’s autobiography, Dane died of the consequences of injuries inflicted on him by his Arabian horse.

Everything Nikola did later seemed negligible in comparison with what his dead brother had promised.

According to the other version, Dane died of the consequences of a fall from the attic stairs. Some believe that the boy lost consciousness and in his delirium accused Nikola of having pushed him. He died later of injuries to the head, probably a hematoma. Unfortunately, to this day, neither version can be confirmed.

Many years after the tragic event Tesla had bad dreams and hallucinations, recalling his brother’s death.

One can only guess to what extent Dane’s death was the cause of the fantastic range of phobias and obsessions which Tesla displayed. The only certainty is that some eccentric manifestations of Tesla’s personality appeared already in early youth.

He was afraid of life…

For example, he had a strong aversion to earrings on women, especially pearl ones, although jewelry of precious stones attracted him greatly. The smell of camphor caused him discomfort. If a scrap of paper fell into a dish of liquid, he felt a peculiar, unpleasant taste in his mouth. He counted his steps while walking, and calculated the volume of the soup in the plate, the cups of coffee, the pieces of food.

He said that he would never touch other people’s hair, “except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver.”

Almost nothing is known of when and how his unusual fears could have arisen. Tesla said that, in the desire to make up to his parents for the loss of their son, he subjected himself to an iron discipline. He considered that he must live in a Spartan way, that he ought to learn more than others and be better in every respect. He believed that it was because of the suppression of natural impulses that, later, the unusual characteristics of his personality came about.

“Until my eighth year,” he wrote, “I dreamed of ghosts and vampires, I was afraid of life, death, God.”

From birth, his parents decided that he should succeed his father in the priest’s vestments. In preparation for this calling Tesla went through his father’s training every day: “It consisted of various exercises — I would guess what my father was thinking at that moment, discover faults in some form or expression, repeat long sentences or calculate by heart. The lessons had as their aim the development of the power of memory, of judgment, and especially of a critical attitude toward phenomena and people.”¹

Tesla discovered very early that he had still another unusual ability, like his late brother Dane: to remember events visually down to the smallest details. Images would come upon him suddenly and so strongly that sometimes he could not distinguish what was a vision and what was really before his eyes. “They were images of things or scenes which I had really seen, and never those which were only the fruit of my imagination… Because of this I was very disturbed. None of the psychologists or physiologists whom I consulted could find a satisfactory explanation of such a phenomenon…”²

Tesla’s mental images

He supposed that it was a matter of a reflex action of the brain upon the retina. These were not hallucinations, and they appeared most often during some greater excitement.

“If my explanation is correct,” he wrote, “then it is in principle possible for our internal images or visions to be projected onto