Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER SIX tions and labour-saving devices. For the time being, the future electrical genius contented himself by building tiny waterwheels and a motor powered by June bugs. When Nikola was seven the family moved to the larger town of Gospic, where he attended school until, as a young adolescent, he was sent to a higher school at Carlstadt, Croatia. The boy was a good pupil, excelling in retaining mathematical formulae in his head. His enthusiasm for the new science of electricity was so strong that he taught himself English in order to read Edison's papers. Tesla's self-imposed struggle towards genius took a new turn when he apparently made the conscious decision to grow into a pure intellect. At some point in his teens he began to distrust emotion and to argue that it hindered true intellectual development. From that time on, Nikola Tesla seems to have trained himself to suppress all emotion and feeling and to avoid the closer forms of human contact. If he was to grow into a superman then it would be by pure reason alone. As Nikola neared the end of his school life, military service loomed ahead. The Tesla legend has it that the boy deliberately contracted cholera and became seriously ill in order to avoid being drafted. This is certainly a dramatic story but how much truth is there in it? As an adult, Tesla wrote part of his autobiography and was given to all manner of pronouncements in the newspapers and magazines. Much of what I read remained elusive, the kernel of truth missing or obscured by excessive claims and predictions. Tesla the man seems as difficult to pin down as do his ideas and, on many occasions, I find myself questioning incidents from his life. Were all the stories strictly true, had they been embellished in the telling or had they been invented, even by Tesla himself, as a means of obscuring the truth? No matter what the origin of Tesla's illness, he certainly avoided military service and found himself instead at the polytechnic in Graz, Austria. There he came under the influence of a physics teacher, Professor Poeschl, who introduced him to the invention of Zénobe Théophile Gramme. In 1871, Gramme had demonstrated a new direct current dynamo, which came to be known as the Gramme motor. Although other motors had been built before Gramme's, his was the first to possess commercial 60
