Bookshelf

🎨 Impressions

A few weeks ago my oldest daughter and I were stranded in the city of Belgrade, Serbia, because of a missed flight connection. The airline put us into a comfortable hotel and the late flights next day offered an opportunity to get to know the city for the first time. The famous inventor Nikola Tesla is from here and people are proud of that fact. The airport is named after him. This made me realize that albeit I knew of his existence and a few things he invented in his life, I had no idea what he was really like and what an impact he had. Today, his last name is hugely famous and after reading this book it seems quite odd to me how that could have happened. What would he say about the big carmaker company and its decision to just use his last name for their name? Can you imagine a company one hundred years into the future just using your unique last name as theirs?

Anyways, I wanted to know more after visiting Belgrade. Turns out, he wrote an autobiography! This is it. It is very short and seems to me to be rather incomplete. Also, he writes as if he had attention deficit disorder, which was obviously undiagnosed and untreated back in the late 19th century. He is not a good writer, to be frank. His life though, must have been hugely interesting.

The way he describes how he worked on his inventions completely inside of his brain, iterating on them in his thoughts, even including troubleshooting and improving their designs, and only then starting to build them and make them a touchable reality when he felt he was done is so incredible I still can’t really believe it.

One example invention that you might not be aware of is his remote-controlled boat. It’s a four-foot long boat with an electronic motor inside which he controlled with a few switches in a box from a distance. This was in 1898! Nobody knew this was even possible and people thought it was a magic trick or that he trained some animal inside the boat to do the steering. Basically, he invented the drone ship a hundred years before people realized this could be used for warfare. He actually tried to sell the idea and his solution to the US military back then but people just laughed. They all failed to see the advantages. But can you imagine coming up with the idea and full solution to building a remote controlled boat from scratch? Almost none of the parts were available in a store, he had to even invent the electric motor for it! And all in his head before building one thing? If that’s true, and it might be true, he was a far bigger genius than the geniuses we usually recognized as such.

The way he describes his daily life reminds me of that of an addicted person. A workaholic to the point of seriously affecting his health. It’s also an interesting document of the times he lived in. How some illnesses played a much bigger role and were impossible to cure or took months to go away. Or the way travel worked. It makes you realize how much has happened between 1900 and 2000.

Another thing I noticed and liked was how he spelled some words in different ways that just made sense to me. Examples include the simplification of words like “thoroughly” to “thoroly”, “through” to “thru”, but he also changed many past tense verbs to end in “t” when we now usually spell them with “ed” at the end. “Possest” or “establisht”, even “checkt”. I looked it up, it was the old English convention to write words more phonetically correct. I liked that old version better than our new, more inconsistent spelling.

He was a funny person, too. I liked many of his little anecdotes and his sense of humor. But I feel like he failed at putting in proper context what his work was about, maybe due to the tunnel vision an inventor will inevitably have in regards to his or her own work. While reading the book I already looked around to find a long biography written about him but not by him which also applies the broader picture of what his inventions have consequently changed in the world. And I’m also interested in his later years – he lived until 86 years of age – which are not covered here in his own book.

All in all, it was a fun read and conveyed some impression of what sort of person he was, but I think it failed to accomplish giving me a proper overview of his life. And all the jumping around chronologically made it hard to follow.

📔 Highlights

My Early Life

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.

Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it. Sometimes it would even remain fixt in space tho I pushed my hand thru it. If my explanation is correct, it should be able to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations.

My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind.

When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it.

I have been since years planning self-controlled automata and believe that mechanisms can be produced which will act as if possest of reason, to a limited degree, and will create a revolution in many commercial and industrial departments.

When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food— otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I mist I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours.

My First Efforts At Invention

These delicious beverages superexcite and gradually exhaust the fine fibers of the brain. They also interfere seriously with arterial circulation and should be enjoyed all the more sparingly as their deleterious effects are slow and imperceptible.

The truth about this is that we need stimulants to do our best work under present living conditions, and that we must exercise moderation and control our appetites and inclinations in every direction.

I foretold to my uncle, to the minutest detail, what I intended doing. I was to hurl a stone to meet the fish, press its body against the rock, and cut it in two. It was no sooner said than done. My uncle looked at me almost scared out of his wits and exclaimed “Vade retro Satanas!” and it was a few days before he spoke to me again.

My Later Endeavors: The Discovery of the Rotating Magnetic Field

Only one trifling detail, of no consequence, was lightly dismist. I assumed an arbitrary velocity of the water and, what is more, took pleasure in making it high, thus arriving at a stupendous performance supported by faultless calculations. Subsequent reflections, however, on the resistance of pipes to fluid flow determined me to make this invention public property.

I cannot find words to describe my disappointment when later I realized that I was in the predicament of Archimedes, who vainly sought for a fixt point in the universe.

I had made up my mind to give my parents a surprise, and during the whole first year I regularly started my work at three o’clock in the morning and continued until eleven at night, no Sundays or holidays excepted.

[My father came to the conclusion that] unless he took me away from the Institution I would be killed thru overwork.

On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, “Never more!”

The Discovery of the Tesla Coil and Transformer

The genii had carried me from a world of dreams into one of realities. What I had left was beautiful, artistic and fascinating in every way; what I saw here was machined, rough and unattractive.

During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and of uniform pattern which replaced the old ones. The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task but it turned out to be a practical joke. This gave me a painful shock and I resigned my position.

The Magnifying Transmitter

It is difficult to appreciate what those strange phenomena meant at that time. We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences.

An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant.

My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

The Art of Teleautomatics

So long as it operates I am safe from danger, due to overwork, which threatens other inventors and, incidentally, I need no vacations which are indispensable to most people. When I am all but used up I simply do as the darkies, who “naturally fall asleep while white folks worry.”

My belief is firm in a law of compensation. The true rewards are ever in proportion to the labor and sacrifices made. This is one of the reasons why I feel certain that of all my inventions, the Magnifying Transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations.

The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such.

What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.

led me finally to recognize that I was but an automaton devoid of free will in thought and action and merely responsive to the forces of the environment. Our bodies are of such complexity of structure, the motions we perform are so numerous and involved, and the external impressions on our sense organs to such a degree delicate and elusive that it is hard for the average person to grasp this fact.

We are automata entirely controlled by the forces of the medium being tossed about like corks on the surface of the water, but mistaking the resultant of the impulses from the outside for free will.

Telautomata will be ultimately produced, capable of acting as if possest of their own intelligence, and their advent will create a revolution. As early as 1898 I proposed to representatives of a large manufacturing concern the construction and public exhibition of an automobile carriage which, left to itself, would perform a great variety of operations involving something akin to judgment. But my proposal was deemed chimerical at that time and nothing came from it.