Nikola Tesla Books
but since he made no notes of any kind, he remembered none of it afterward. In one letter to his friend he says how he struggled for six weeks with certain experiments, but without any success; only later, from his notes, was he able to discern that eight months earlier he had carried out those same experiments with equally negative results. This forgetfulness was an obvious result of strenuous mental labor, which was not the case with Tesla.
For a genius, knowledge of foreign languages is not an essential condition of creativity. Many great and brilliant men, apart from their mother tongue, knew no other languages. When, in his old age, Mendeleev visited his birthplace Tobolsk in Siberia, he went to the hill on which, after completing their final school examination, he and his classmates had ceremoniously burned their Latin grammars and dictionaries. On one occasion, at a ceremony in Manchester held in his honor, he was supposed to give a speech; but not knowing the English language, he stood up and, according to Russian custom, bowed deeply and - sat down again. There exists one of his letters addressed to the famous German chemist Kekulé, which was written in very poor German, although Mendeleev had spent two years studying in Germany. And as a speaker he was also very weak. His thoughts flowed faster than he could keep up with them in speech.
If, therefore, neither intensive reading, nor exceptional memory, nor knowledge of foreign languages is an essential condition of creativity, what then is? When Isaac Newton was asked in what way he arrived at his discoveries, he replied: "By constant reflection upon it." Quite analogously, the great French chemist Marcellin Berthelot answered: "By thinking." Nikola Tesla spoke in the same way, as we shall see later.
