Nikola Tesla Books
from such situations, but his almost regal bearing never deserted him. To protect himself from such moments he became a virtual recluse.
This extreme sensitivity was a part of the mechanism through which Tesla received his inspirations for his discoveries. As part of his method of protecting himself he would divert all efforts to discuss his genius with a remark: "Forget it. We are nothing but meat machines."
Tesla could assume such a lordly, dominating attitude that one needed the greatest amount of courage to disagree with him. On one visit the writer took his courage in his hands and said to him: "I know, Dr. Tesla, that you do not believe we are meat machines, despite what you say. I know, also, that you do not get your inspiration in the way you say and that there are very unusual phenomena connected with the way in which you receive your revelations."
The Tesla that the writer knew after that conversation was a far different person than the Tesla he had previously known. It took him almost ten years, however, to get to the point of confiding: "You know me better than anyone else in the world. You understand things that I need not talk about."
Tesla's discoveries always were made in their entirety before he ever touched a piece of apparatus to construct a model. He knew they would work and how they would work. He knew this not in the way the average scientist or engineer works, by extensive calculating and planning and making preliminary experiments.
When inspiration was fermenting in his mind Tesla would go into a "silence" and the discovery would then appear before his eyes as an operating model complete in every detail. That to Tesla was the basic form of reality. The model which he would construct was just an imitation of the real thing. To everyone else the working model was the real thing and they cared little about the method by which Tesla had "invented" it.
The number of "discoveries" that Tesla developed to the extent of making working models or applying them was a very small fraction of the number of revelations he received. This genius lived in a frail body. He would have needed a thousand such bodies to have kept pace with the productivity of his mind, and an unlimited treasury
