Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA transmission or a careful history of Tesla's life. Instead it would carry the flavour of my interaction with a man long dead. It would tell how I came to see the shadows and echoes of Tesla's dreams and how two scientists from different times and different cultures were, in some curious way, able to reach across the gulf which separated them. What I had captured from Tesla's life was a series of vivid impressions, points of contact across a century of time. Out of all of these, I was struck most vividly by the inventor's account of what had happened that afternoon in Budapest when, during a walk, the invention of the induction motor had appeared to him. Tesla's life was steeped in enigma yet his greatest mystery was crystal clear. The plans of his inventions had appeared crystal clear in a waking vision. Was Tesla blessed with some unique gift of hidden knowledge or had this experience occurred to other men of genius, and, to a lesser extent, to the whole of humankind? It did not take me long to find a number of examples from the lives of other scientists, artists and inventors. Two will suffice. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.' 137 377
