In Search of Nikola Tesla Page 138

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of consciousness of effort. The first is an account of how the German chemist, von Kekulé, discovered the structure of the benzene molecule in 1865 and the second, related in the third person, describes Coleridge's composition of the poem Kubla Khan. These two passages are strikingly similar to Tesla's own account. In all cases it appears that a period of concentration on some problem has been followed by relaxation. During the latter receptive period a graphic vision appears which is complete and entire. Nikola Tesla had trained his memory and was, therefore, able to retain the vision in all its detail when he came to build his working models and write down detailed plan drawings. Coleridge was not so lucky, for while copying down his vision he was interrupted by a visitor from the village of Porlock and the complete poem was lost to the world. Any creative worker knows that, after a long period spent worrying about an 'insoluble' problem, the answer will come during a period of relaxation or recreation when the mind is particularly receptive. At such moments it appears that the mind no longer operates upon ‘logical' lines, oscillating this way and that in the face of a paradox of reason. Rather, it leaps across the problem, transcending limitations and producing something creative and new. Nikola Tesla's ability to create directly from the imagination seems to have been particularly highly developed. Just because other artists have possessed a similar ability does not make it commonplace. Is there perhaps some clue which can guide us into this unknown territory of creativity, this mapless land of the unknown? Let me leave Nikola Tesla for several pages and attempt to gain some understanding of the ability he possessed in abundance – the power to - 138