In the Footsteps of Genius Page 6

a screen and made visible to all, just as a film is projected by means of a cinema apparatus. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can be, and will be, realized in the years before us; I must say that I too have thought a great deal about the solution of this problem.”³

From Tesla’s time to the present, parapsychologists have experimented with many people of similar abilities. The most frequent were the attempts to fix mental images on an undeveloped roll of photographic film. In more recent investigations the efforts have been directed toward the direct transmission of thoughts to electronic printers. Not one of the results achieved, so far, meets the criteria of scientific proof.

In order to drive away the imaginary images, Tesla night after night set out on an imaginary journey to new cities and countries, lived there, met people and made friends. “However incredible this seemed, the fact is that they were just as dear to me as the people of the real world.”⁴

He worked in this way until his seventeenth year, and then he realized that with a certain effort he could tame the uncontrolled visions and make them valuable servants. To his great satisfaction, he noticed that he could with ease visualize models, drawings or experiments, so that the real ones were not even necessary to him. In this he was so skilled that later, too, with very complicated research problems, he always used this method.

“My method is different,” he wrote. “I do not hurry to begin the work. When I get an idea I begin to realize it in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and experiment with the device in my thoughts. It is entirely the same to me whether it is in my head or on the workbench in the workshop. I even manage to notice whether it occupies a favorable position of equilibrium.”⁵

Logarithms as a nursery rhyme

Thus, he says, he was able to carry an idea through to perfection without previously touching anything with his hands.

“For the last twenty years I have carried out all my inventions in this way, without exception. Why should I work differently at all? There is hardly a problem which could not be treated mathematically, the effects foreseen and the results determined on the basis of the available theoretical and practical data…”⁶

Looked at in an entirely different light, he can thank his strange ability for the fact that he never had enough money. Many of his ideas failed because he did not always manage to bring his “mental work” to an end, patent the invention and achieve commercial success.

Tesla, of course, had an incredible memory. At school he solved the problems at the same time as the teacher was writing them on the board, and when a problem had been set Tesla knew the solution at once. The optical screen of his mind contained a whole logarithmic table as well.

Tesla spoke of still another strange phenomenon, common to many creative people: in moments when he was not concentrating on a problem, he suddenly realized that he knew the answer. The practical results later in life generally confirmed his intuitive feeling. The fact is that the machines Tesla built almost always functioned well at once. He might be mistaken in the understanding of a scientific principle or in the choice of material for the construction, but the devices always behaved just as he had predicted.

Remedies for genius

With all these unusual abilities, it is fortunate that in Tesla’s time there were no school psychologists. Because of the visions which appeared to him uncontrollably and disturbed his sense of reality, a psychologist with the knowledge of that time (the question is what would happen even today) could easily have supposed that the boy was suffering from schizophrenia. With appropriate medicines they would have tried to “cure” (let that be on the conscience of psychiatry) the sources of his creative genius.

One more point is interesting for a better understanding of Tesla’s psyche and manner of reasoning.

When he first discovered his mental images and established that they were always connected with real, earlier events in his life, he was convinced that he was on the threshold of understanding a phenomenon of exceptional importance. From then on he always endeavored to establish the external cause of the vision. In other words, before Freud’s method was known, Tesla was applying a kind of self-analysis. After a certain time this developed in him into an almost reflex action.

“I felt an enormous relief in connecting causes and effects. I soon became aware, with considerable surprise, that every thought of mine was a consequence of external impressions.”⁷

Reflecting on all this, he came to the thought that everything he did — and earlier he had judged it to be the result of his free will — was in fact a consequence of real circumstances and events. And if that is true, then he,