As a child in the Lika hills, Nikola Tesla could not always tell what was real. A word spoken aloud would summon the thing it named, vivid and present, hanging in the air in front of him. Let him witness “a funeral or some such nerve-racking spectacle,” he wrote, and then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, the scene would thrust itself before his eyes and persist despite every effort to banish it — accompanied by flashes of light that “marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action.” He would push his hand straight through an image to be rid of it, and sometimes the picture hung there anyway, “fixt in space.” He was, he wrote, “quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not.”
He was, by his own account in the memoir My Inventions, a tormented boy. The same faculty that tormented him would, two decades later, let him build a working electric motor entirely in his mind and run it there — without ever touching a tool. The two were never separate things. They were one organ, used two ways, and they ran together the length of his life.
Two Uses of One Organ
The visions were not imagined scenes, Tesla insisted. They were memories — real objects and places he had actually seen, returning unbidden and unwelcome. To get free of them, he discovered a trick. He would conjure new images on purpose, deliberately traveling in his mind to places he had never been, meeting people who did not exist, building whole imaginary worlds. “My best comfort,” he wrote, “was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time.”
It was self-administered therapy. It was also training. A boy who spent his nights constructing detailed mental cities was, without knowing it, teaching himself to model anything in three dimensions and hold it steady.
But the same machinery that produced those cities also produced the aversions, and those never left him. “I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women.” “The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit.” “I would get a fever by looking at a peach.” He could not bear to touch another person’s hair “except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver.” Camphor anywhere in the house caused him acute distress. And he had already begun to count: the steps in his walks, the cubic contents of his soup plates and coffee cups and the food on them, otherwise the meal was spoiled. Any act he repeated had to come out divisible by three. If he lost the thread, he started over, “even if it took hours.”
The gift and the affliction shared a single trait — a mind that could not let an image go, that finished every pattern it began. Aimed at a wall, it built phobias. Aimed at a problem, it built machines.
The Motor That Ran in the Air
In February 1882 the problem-aimed half came due. Tesla was twenty-five and in Budapest, wanting a motor that ran on alternating current without the sparking brushes and commutators that plagued direct-current machines. He had also just suffered what he called “the complete breakdown of the nerves” — a pulse that swung as high as two hundred and sixty, his whole body twitching, his hearing so raw he could catch a watch ticking three rooms away. What pulled him out of it, he wrote, was a will to keep working and “the assistance of a devoted friend, an athlete.” Recovered enough to walk, he was in the City Park at sunset with his friend Anthony Szigeti, reciting from memory a passage of Goethe’s Faust.
The solution arrived whole. Tesla saw, in the air before him, a motor with no brushes at all — a magnetic field that simply rotated, dragging the rotor around with it, driven by two alternating currents pushed ninety degrees out of step. He stopped mid-verse, took a stick, and drew the diagram in the sand for Szigeti — the same diagram, he noted, that he would present six years later in his address to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
This was the rotating magnetic field, the principle behind nearly every electric motor that has hummed since. And Tesla did not build it on a bench. He ran it in his head.
It was the boyhood trick again, scaled up. He later claimed he could picture his machines so completely that they were “absolutely real and tangible in every detail, even to the minute marks and signs of wear” — and that he could set them going in his head and judge them there. “It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop,” he wrote. “I even note if it is out of balance.” He said he delighted in imagining the motors constantly running, and that in less than two months he had evolved virtually every type of motor now identified with his name. Five years later, when a New York laboratory finally gave him the means to build them, the machines that came out of it were, he insisted, “exactly as I had imagined them.” The faculty that had once shown him a dead man’s funeral against his will now showed him a working machine on command.
The Rituals Close In
The same mind never stopped exacting its price, and as Tesla aged the price rose. In his later years the counting and the aversions hardened into a full architecture of compulsion, sharpened by a terror of germs. He stopped shaking hands. He wore soft leather gloves rather than touch anyone. He asked for hotel rooms whose number was divisible by three. In his seventies he settled into the Hotel New Yorker, in room 3327 on the thirty-third floor — a number that divides by three, and the room he would die in.
His meals became ceremonies. He ate alone, at the same table, served on a fresh tablecloth. He demanded a stack of clean napkins — his first biographer, John O’Neill, counted two dozen, later tellings settled on eighteen, six times three — and used them to wipe every dish and piece of silver as it came from the kitchen. He calculated the volume of each dish before eating, as he had since boyhood, and would not enjoy a meal he could not measure.
The patterns that had once run quietly underneath the work now ran the whole day. He had, by then, largely withdrawn from people. He never married, and said an inventor should not — that “in giving himself to a woman he might love, he would give everything, and so take everything from his chosen field.”
The Pigeon, and the Last Light
What he gave his affection to instead were the pigeons of New York. He fed them in the parks and let them into his rooms, and among them was one white female he singled out from all the rest. “I loved that pigeon,” he told O’Neill, “as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.” He claimed he could call her with a wish and she would find him anywhere.
He said she came to him one night in 1922, into his room at the Hotel St. Regis, as she was dying. And from her eyes, he insisted, “there came a light — powerful beams of light.” A real light, he said, more intense than any he had ever produced with the most powerful lamps in his laboratory. When she died, something went out of his life, and he knew his life’s work was finished.
The light that had marred a boy’s sight in the Lika hills had returned, sixty years on, in the eyes of a dying bird — and once again he could not say for certain whether it was outside his head or inside it.
He lived two more decades after that, increasingly alone and short of money, the man whose patents had electrified the world moving from hotel to hotel and leaving unpaid bills behind him. On January 7, 1943, a maid found him dead in room 3327. He was eighty-six.
The visions that had frightened a boy had built the twentieth century’s electrical grid and then, at the last, narrowed to a single white bird and a beam of light only he could see.