Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA microbes. I can remember that even before I could read I would sit beside my aunt hour after hour and ask her to talk about these pictures. As I grew a little older I began to build a laboratory in the coal shed outside my home and, until darkness drove me indoors, I would experiment with gases and acids and all the transformations of matter which were at my disposal. At school the subjects of chemistry and physics offered little magic compared with the wonders I could create in my secret laboratory, yet one teacher in particular began to open a new world to me. He showed me how the myriad facts and wonders of nature, all observations and phenomena, could be linked together through reason and logic to form a scientific theory. He also hinted that the theory itself possessed its own unique beauty. A seed had been planted. In my late teens, I went to pubs and tennis club dances, attended university and argued all night on any topic under the sun. But my thirst for knowledge continued and I spent the long winter evenings hunched over an electric fire trying to keep warm with a textbook on my knee. A few years later I had obtained my first degree and had begun scientific research. There was a challenge in all this yet, at the same time, the romance had been tarnished. It seemed that, for those around me, research involved small problems and narrow fields of enquiry. As I was worrying about the direction my experimental research should take I met another creative teacher. He was a theoretical physicist, and he showed me that the world of the imagination need have no bounds, that through mathematics it was possible to create a scientific universe which is limited only by one's ability. In theoretical physics I would be able to plunge through a problem at the speed of thought, I would feel the very shapes of ideas and speculations. It was not many weeks after my first discussion with this man that I renounced the chemist's laboratory forever and turned to theoretical speculations. Scientific papers were published; a few years passed. I came to Canada, taught at a university, then moved to the Government research institute in Ottawa. For a time I was content, absorbed in the various physics problems before me. I had music and books in the evenings, friends who would drop in for a chat. I visited conferences in Europe and the States, gave lec17
