Nikola Tesla Books
Tesla equipped himself with the best technical education that Europe and America could furnish. He mastered all that men who had gone before him had accomplished, then reasoned for himself. Nothing of importance that Tesla ever discovered was by accident. For a quarter of a century, he lived with his entire consciousness near to the bosom of Nature. He wrested her secrets from her. He learned the source of her power, then harnessed it, that mankind might be much happier.
One story of major interest, which relates to his discovery of "remote control by wireless ", was written more than 55 years ago. Every electrical engineer and sci-entist engaged in remote control devices will find this story extremely interesting, as Tesla is the father of his remarkable development. These are Tesla's own words written in the year of 1900. Quote:
"A long time ago, when I was a boy, I was afflicted with a singular trouble, which seems to have been due to images which, by their persistence, marred the vision of real objects and interferred with my thoughts. When a word was said to me, the image of the object which it designated would appear before my eyes, many times it was impossible for me to tell whether the object I saw was real, or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety, and I tried very hard to free myself of this spell. But for a long time , I tried in vain. It was not, as I still clearly recollect, until I was about twelve years old, that I succeeded for the first time, by an effort of the will, in banishing an image which presented itself. My happiness will never be as complete as it was then, but, unfortunately (as I thought at the time), the old trouble returned and with it my anxiety. And then I noted, mainly, that whenever the image of an object appeared before my eyes, I had seen something which reminded me of it. In the first instances, I thought this to be purely accidental, but soon I con-vinced myself that it was not so. A visual impression, consciously received, in-variably preceded the appearance of the image. Gradually, the desire arose in me to find out, everytime, what caused the image to appear, and the satisfaction of this desire soon became a necessity."
"The next observation I made was that, just as these images followed as a result of something I had seen, so also the thought which I conceived were suggested in like manner . Again, I experienced the same desire to locate the image which had caused the thought, and this search for the original visual impression soon grew to become second nature. My mind became automatic, as it were, and in the cour se of years of continued, almost unconscious performance, I acquired the ability of locating every time and, as a rule, instantly, the visual impression which started the thought. Nor is this all. It was not long before I was aware that also all of my movements were prompted in the same way, and so, searching, observing, and verifying continuously, year after year, I have by every thought and every act of mine , demonstrated, and do so daily, to my absolute satisfaction, that I am an automaton endowed with the power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli beating upon my sense organs, and thinks and acts and moves accordingly. I remember only one or two cases in my entire life, in which I was unable to locate the first impression which prompted a movement or a thought, or even a dream."
Tesla continued, "with these experiences, it was only natural that, long ago, I conceived the idea of constructing an automaton which would mechanically represent me, and which would respond, as I do myself, but of course, in a much more primitive manner to external influences. This machine, I reasoned, would perform
