Nikola Tesla (Feb. 26, 1894)

An Accurate Sketch of the Wonderful Serbian Wizard Who Deals in Electricity.

HIS REMARKABLE GENIUS

Sees "The Low Lights Flickering on Tangible New Continents of Science" — Inherits His Inventive Turn From His Mother — Early History of a Romantic Life.

The readers of THE GAZETTE will appreciate the following sketch of Nikola Tesla, the famous electrician who has frequently visited here. It is taken from the February Century and is by Thomas C. Martin. Nikola Tesla was born in Servia, a land so famous for its poetry that Goethe is said to have learned the musical tongue in which it is written, rather than lose any of its native beauty. There is no record of any one having ever studied Servian for the sake of Servian science; and indeed a great Slav orator has recently reproached his one hundred and twenty million fellows in Eastern Europe with their utter inability to invent even a mousetrap. But even racial conditions leave genius its freedom, and once in a while nature herself rights things by producing a man whose transcendent merit compensates his nation for the very defects to which it has long been sensitive.

Of course such a man as Tesla could not long remain in an unfavorable environment; genius is its own passport. He gravitated via Paris to America, the true fatherland of such men as he. Mr. Tesla's career suggests an interesting inquiry into the essential likeness between poet and inventor. He comes of an old Servian family, whose members for centuries have kept watch and ward along the Turkish frontier. Yet, remote as such people and conditions are to us, it is with apparatus based on ideas and principles originating amongst them that the energy from Niagara Falls is to be widely distributed by electricity, in the various forms of light, heat, and power. This, in itself, would seem enough to confer fame, but Mr. Tesla has done and will do much more. Could he be tamed to moderation in work, it would be difficult to set limits to the solutions of many deep problems he might give us. But when an inventor believes that creative fertility is restricted to the term of youth, it is no wonder that night and day witness his anxious activity.

A Slav of the Slavs, with racial characteristics strongly stamped in look, speech and action, Mr. Tesla is a notable exemplification of the outcropping, in unwonted form, of tendencies suppressed. I have never heard him speak of a picture or a piece of music, but his numerous inventions, and the noble lectures that embody his famous investigations with currents of high frequency and high potential, betray the poetic temperament throughout. Has the Servian poet become inventor, or is the inventor a poet? Mr. Tesla has been held a visionary, deceived by the flash of casual shooting stars; but the growing conviction of his professional brethren is that, because he saw further, he was the first to see the low lights flickering on tangible new continents of science. The perceptive and imaginative qualities of the mind are not often equally marked in the same man of genius. Overplus of imagination may argue dimness of perception; an ability to dream dreams may imply a want of skill in improving reapers. Now and then the two elements combine in the creative poet of epic and drama. Occasionally they give us the prolific inventor like Tesla.

Nikola Tesla's bent toward invention may surely be traced to his mother, who, as the wife of an eloquent clergyman in the Greek Church, made looms and churns for a pastoral household, while her husband preached. Tesla's electrical work started when, as a boy in the Polytechnic School at Gratz, he first saw a direct-current Gramme machine, and was told that the commutator was a vital and necessary feature in all such apparatus. His intuitive judgment or latent spirit of invention at once challenged the statement of his instructor, and that moment began the process of reasoning and experiment which led him to his discovery of the rotating magnetic field, and to the practical polyphase motors, in which the commutator and brushes, fruitful and endless source of trouble, are absolutely done away with. These perfect inventions did not come at once; they never do. The conditions that surrounded this youth in the airy fastnesses of the Dinaric Alps all made against the hopes he nursed of becoming an electrician; and not the least impediment was the fond wish of his parents at Smiljan Lika that he should maintain the priestly tradition, and benefit by the preferment likely to come from his uncle, now Metropolitan in Bosnia. But Tesla felt himself destined to serve at other altars than those of his ancient faith, with other means of approach to the invisible and unknown. He preserved in mathematical and mechanical studies, mastered incidentally half-a-dozen languages, and at last became an assistant in the Government Telegraph Engineering Department at Buda-Pesth. At this period it was telephony on which he wasted his meager substance in riotous invention. Desirous of going to a tete with some friends and unwilling to spend on clothes the money that might buy magnets and batteries, the brilliant idea occurred to him to turn his only pair of trousers inside out and disport in them as new. He sat up all night tailoring, but the fete came and went before he could reappear in public. This episode is quite in keeping with his boyish efforts to fly from the steep roof of the house at Smiljan, using an old umbrella as an aerostat; or with the peculiar tests, stopped by the family doctor before the results could be determined, as to how long he could suspend the beating of his heart by will power.