Originally published by Ives Washburn, New York, 1944; Published in Great Britain by Neville Spearman Ltd., 1968; Reprinted in the United States by Angriff Press, Los Angeles, 1973

(C)1994 Brotherhood of Life, Inc., 110 Dartmouth, SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106 USA

New Typeset Edition - First printing, 1994, Reprinted 1996

Uploaded to the Internet October, 1996

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, without permission in writing from the publisher. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN 0-914732-33-1

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NOTE: what appear to be misspellings are actually "expert characters" not available in HTML. Substitute in most instances the letters "fl" for "X" ; "fi" for "W" ; "ff" for "V" ; "ffi" for "Y".

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first part

LIGHT AND POWER

ONE

"SPECTACULAR'' is a mild word for describing the strange experiment with life that comprises the story of Nikola Tesla, and ``amazing'' fails to do adequate justice to the results that burst from his experiences like an exploding rocket. It is the story of the dazzling scintillations of a superman who created a new world; it is a story that condemns woman as an anchor of the Xesh which retards the development of man and limits his accomplishment--and, paradoxically, proves that even the most successful life, if it does not include a woman, is a dismal failure.

Even the gods of old, in the wildest imaginings of their worshipers, never undertook such gigantic tasks of world-wide dimension as those which Tesla attempted and accomplished. On the basis of his hopes, his dreams, and his achievements he rated the status of the Olympian gods, and the Greeks would have so enshrined him. Little is the wonder that so-called practical men, with their noses stuck in proWt-and-loss statements, did not understand him and thought him strange.

The light of human progress is not a dim glow that gradually becomes more luminous with time. The panorama of human evolution is illumined by sudden bursts of dazzling brilliance in intellectual accomplishments that throw their beams far ahead to give us a glimpse of the distant future, that we may more correctly guide our wavering steps today. Tesla, by virtue of the amazing discoveries and inventions which he showered on the world, becomes one of the most resplendent Xashes that has ever brightened the scroll of human advancement.

Tesla created the modern era; he was unquestionably one of the world's greatest geniuses, but he leaves no oVspring, no legatees of his brilliant mind, who might aid in administering that world; he created fortunes for multitudes of others but himself died penniless, spurning wealth that might be gained from his discoveries. Even as he walked among the teeming millions of New York he became a fabled individual who seemed to belong to the far-distant future or to have come to us from the mystical realm of the gods, for he seemed to be an admixture of a Jupiter or a Thor who hurled the shafts of lightning; an Ajax who deWed the Jovian bolts; a Prometheus who transmuted energy into electricity to spread over the earth; an Aurora who would light the skies as a terrestrial electric lamp; a Mazda who created a sun in a tube; a Hercules who shook the earth with his mechanical vibrators; a Mercury who bridged the ambient realms of space with his wireless waves--and a Hermes who gave birth to an electrical soul in the earth that set it pulsating from pole to pole.

This spark of intellectual incandescence, in the form of a rare creative genius, shot like a meteor into the midst of human society in the latter decades of the past century; and he lived almost until today. His name became synonymous with magic in the intellectual, scientiWc, engineering and social worlds, and he was recognized as an inventor and discoverer of unrivaled greatness. He made the electric current his slave. At a time when electricity was considered almost an occult force, and was looked upon with terror-stricken awe and respect, Tesla penetrated deeply into its mysteries and performed so many marvelous feats with it that, to the world, he became a master magician with an unlimited repertoire of scientiWc legerdemain so spectacular that it made the accomplishments of most of the inventors of his day seem like the work of toy-tinkers.

Tesla was an inventor, but he was much more than a producer of new devices: he was a discoverer of new principles, opening many new empires of knowledge which even today have been only partly explored. In a single mighty burst of invention he created the world of power of today; he brought into being our electrical power era, the rock-bottom foundation on which the industrial system of the entire world is builded; he gave us our mass-production system, for without his motors and currents it could not exist; he created the race of robots, the electrical mechanical men that are replacing human labor; he gave us every essential of modern radio; he invented the radar forty years before its use in World War II; he gave us our modern neon and other forms of gaseous-tube lighting; he gave us our Xuorescent lighting; he gave us the high-frequency currents which are performing their electronic wonders throughout the industrial and medical worlds; he gave us remote control by wireless; he helped give us World War II, much against his will--for the misuse of his superpower system and his robot controls in industry made it possible for politicians to have available a tremendous surplus of power, production facilities, labor and materials, with which to indulge in the most frightful devastating war that the maniacal mind could conceive. And these discoveries are merely the inventions made by the master mind of Tesla which have thus far been utilized--scores of others remain still unused.

Yet Tesla lived and labored to bring peace to the world. He dedicated his life to lifting the burdens from the shoulders of mankind; to bringing a new era of peace, plenty and happiness to the human race. Seeing the coming of World War II, implemented and powered by his discoveries, he sought to prevent it; oVered the world a device which he maintained would make any country, no matter how small, safe within its borders--and his oVer was rejected.

More important by far, however, than all his stupendously signiWcant electrical discoveries is that supreme invention--Nikola Tesla the Superman--the human instrument which shoved the world forward with an accelerating lunge like an airplane cast into the sky from a catapult. Tesla, the scientist and inventor, was himself an invention, just as much as was his alternating-current system that put the world on a superpower basis.

Tesla was a superman, a self-made superman, invented and designed speciWcally to perform wonders; and he achieved them in a volume far beyond the capacity of the world to absorb. His life he designed on engineering principles to enable him to serve as an automaton, with utmost eYciency, for the discovery and application of the forces of Nature to human welfare. To this end he sacriWced love and pleasure, seeking satisfaction only in his accomplishments, and limiting his body solely to serving as a tool of his technically creative mind.

With our modern craze for division of labor and specialization of eVort to gain eYciency of production in our industrial machine, one hesitates to think of a future in which Tesla's invention of the superman might be applied to the entire human race, with specialization designed for every individual from birth.

The superman that Tesla designed was a scientiWc saint. The inventions that this scientiWc martyr produced were designed for the peace, happiness and security of the human race, but they have been applied to create scarcity, depressions and devastating war. Suppose the superman invention were also developed and prostituted to the purposes of war-mongering politicians? Tesla glimpsed the possibilities and suggested the community life of the bee as a threat to our social structure unless the elements of individual and community lives are properly directed and personal freedom protected.

Tesla's superman was a marvelously successful invention--for Tesla--which seemed, as far as the world could observe, to function satisfactorily. He eliminated love from his life; eliminated women even from his thoughts. He went beyond Plato, who conceived of a spiritual companionship between man and woman free from sexual desires; he eliminated even the spiritual companionship. He designed the isolated life into which no woman and no man could enter; the self-suYcient individuality from which all sex considerations were completely eliminated; the genius who would live entirely as a thinking and a working machine.

Tesla's superman invention was a producer of marvels, and he thought that he had, by scientiWc methods, succeeded in eliminating love from his life. That abnormal life makes a fascinating experiment for the consideration of the philosopher and psychologist, for he did not succeed in eliminating love. It manifested itself despite his conscientious eVorts at suppression; and when it did so it came in the most fantastic form, providing a romance the like of which is not recorded in the annals of human history.

Tesla's whole life seems unreal, as if he were a fabled creature of some Olympian world. A reporter, after writing a story of his discoveries and inventions, concluded, ``His accomplishments seem like the dream of an intoxicated god.'' It was Tesla's invention of the polyphase alternating-current system that was directly responsible for harnessing Niagara Falls and opened the modern electrical superpower era in which electricity is transported for hundred of miles, to operate the tens of thousands of mass-production factories of industrial systems. Every one of the tall Martian-like towers of the electrical transmission lines that stalk across the earth, and whose wires carry electricity to distant cities, is a monument to Tesla; every powerhouse, every dynamo and every motor that drives every machine in the country is a monument to him.

Superseding himself, he discovered the secret of transmitting electrical power to the utmost ends of the earth without wires, and demonstrated his system by which useful amounts of power could be drawn from the earth anywhere merely by making a connection to the ground; he set the entire earth in electrical vibration with a generator which spouted lightning that rivaled the Wery artillery of the heavens. It was as a minor portion of this discovery that he created the modern radio system; he planned our broadcasting methods of today, forty years ago when others saw in wireless only the dot-dash messages that might save ships in distress.

He produced lamps of greater brilliance and economy than those in common use today; he invented the tube, Xuorescent and wireless lamps which we now consider such up-to-the-minute developments; and he essayed to set the entire atmosphere of the earth aglow with his electric currents, to change our world into a single terrestrial lamp and to make the skies at night shine as does the sun by day.

If other Wrst-magnitude inventors and discoverers may be considered torches of progress, Tesla was a conXagration. He was the vehicle through which the blazing suns of a brighter tomorrow focused their incandescent beams on a world that was not prepared to receive their light. Nor is it remarkable that this radiant personality should have led a strange and isolated life. The value of his contributions to society cannot be overrated. We can now analyze, to some extent, the personality that produced them. He stands as a synthetic genius, a self-made superman, the greatest invention of the greatest inventor of all times. But when we consider Tesla as a human being, apart from his charming and captivating social manners, it is hard to imagine a worse nightmare than a world inhabited entirely by geniuses.

When Nature makes an experiment and achieves an improvement it is necessary that it be accomplished in such a way that the progress will not be lost with the individual but will be passed on to future generations. In man, this requires a utilization of the social values of the race, cooperation of the individual with his kind, that the improved status may be propagated and become a legacy of all. Tesla intentionally engineered love and women out of his life, and while he achieved gigantic intellectual stature, he failed to achieve its perpetuation either through his own progeny or through disciples. The superman he constructed was not great enough to embrace a wife and continue to exist as such. The love he sought to suppress in his life, and which he thought was associated only with women, is a force which, in its various aspects, links together all members of the human race.

In seeking to suppress this force entirely Tesla severed the bonds which might have brought to him the disciples who would, through other channels, have perpetuated the force of his prodigal genius. As a result, he succeeded in imparting to the world only the smallest fraction of the creative products of his synthetic superman.

The creation of a superman as demonstrated by Tesla was a grand experiment in human evolution, well worthy of the giant intellect that grew out of it, but it did not come up to Nature's standards; and the experiment will have to be made many times more before we learn how to create a super race with the minds of Teslas that can tap the hidden treasury of Nature's store of knowledge, yet endowed too with the vital power of love that will unlock forces, more powerful than any which we now glimpse, for advancing the status of the human race.

There was no evidence whatever that a superman was being born

when the stroke of midnight between July 9 and 10, in the year 1856, brought a son, Nikola, to the home of the Rev. Milutin Tesla and Djouka, his wife, in the hamlet of Smiljan, in the Austro-Hungarian border province of Lika, now a part of Yugoslavia. The father of the new arrival, pastor of the village church, was a former student in an oYcers' training school who had rebelled against the restrictions of Army life and turned to the ministry as the Weld in which he could more satisfactorily express himself. The mother, although totally unable to read or write, was nevertheless an intellectually brilliant woman, who without the help of literal aids became really well educated.

Both father and mother contributed to the child a valuable heritage of culture developed and passed on by ancestral families that had been community leaders for many generations. The father came from a family that contributed sons in equal numbers to the Church and to the Army. The mother was a member of the Mandich family whose sons, for generations without number, had, with very few exceptions, become ministers of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and whose daughters were chosen as wives by ministers.

Djouka, the mother of Nikola Tesla (her given name in English translation would be Georgina), was the eldest daughter in a family of seven children. Her father, like her husband, was a minister of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Her mother, after a period of failing eyesight, had become blind shortly after the seventh child was born; so Djouka, the eldest daughter, at a tender age was compelled to take over the major share of her mother's duties. This not alone prevented her from attending school: her work at home so completely consumed her time that she was unable to acquire even the rudiments of reading and writing through home study. This was a strange situation in the cultured family of which she was a member. Tesla, however, always credited his unlettered mother rather than his erudite father with being the source from which he inherited his inventive ability. She devised many household labor-saving instruments. She was, in addition, a very practical individual, and her well-educated husband wisely left in her hands all business matters involving both the church and his household.

An unusually retentive memory served this remarkable woman as a good substitute for literacy. As the family moved in cultured circles she absorbed by ear much of the cultural riches of the community. She could repeat, without error or omission, thousands of verses of the national poetry of her country--the sagas of the Serbs--and could recite long passages from the Bible. She could narrate from memory the entire poetical- philosophical work Gorski Venac (Mountain Wreath), written by Bishop Petrovich Njegosh. She also possessed artistic talent and a versatile dexterity in her Wngers for expressing it. She earned wide fame throughout the countryside for her beautiful needlework. According to Tesla, so great were her dexterity and her patience that she could, when over sixty, using only her Wngers, tie three knots in an eyelash.

The remarkable abilities of this clever woman who had no formal education were transmitted to her Wve children. The elder son, Dane Tesla, born seven years before Nikola, was the family favorite because of the promise of an outstanding career which his youthful cleverness indicated was in store for him. He foreshadowed in his early years the strange manifestations which in his surviving brother were a prelude to greatness.

Tesla's father started his career in the military service, a likely choice for the son of an oYcer; but he apparently did not inherit his father's liking for Army life. So slight an incident as criticism for failure to keep his brass buttons brightly polished caused him to leave military school. He was probably more of a poet and philosopher than a soldier. He wrote poetry which was published in contemporary papers. He also wrote articles on current problems which he signed with a pseudonym, ``Srbin Pravicich.'' This, in Serb, means ``Man of Justice.'' He spoke, read and wrote Serbo-Croat, German and Italian. It was probably his interest in poetry and philosophy that caused him to be attracted to Djouka Mandich. She was twenty-Wve and Milutin was two years older. He married her in 1847. His attraction to the daughter of a pastor probably inXuenced his next choice of a career, for he then entered the ministry and was soon ordained a priest.

He was made pastor of the church at Senj, an important seaport with facilities for a cultural life. He gave satisfaction, but apparently he achieved success among his parishioners on the basis of a pleasing personality and an understanding of problems rather than by using any great erudition in theological and ecclesiastical matters.

A few years after he was placed in charge of this parish, a new archbishop, elevated to head of the diocese, wished to survey the capabilities of the priests in his charge and oVered a prize for the best sermon preached on his oYcial visit. The Rev. Milutin Tesla was bubbling over, at the time, with interest in labor as a major factor in social and economic problems. To preach a sermon on this topic was, from the viewpoint of expediency, a totally impractical thing to do. Nobody, however, had ever accused the Rev. Mr. Tesla of being practical, so doing the impractical thing was quite in harmony with his nature. He chose the subject which held his greatest interest; and when the archbishop arrived, he listened to a sermon on ``Labor.''

Months later Senj was surprised by an unanticipated visit from the archbishop, who announced that the Rev. Mr. Tesla had preached the best sermon, and awarded him a red sash which he was privileged to wear on all occasions. Shortly afterward he was made pastor at Smiljan, where his parish then embraced forty homes. He was later placed in charge of the much larger parish in the nearby city of Gospic. His Wrst three children, Milka, Dane and Angelina, were born at Senj. Nikola and his younger sister, Marica, were born at Smiljan.

Tesla's early environment, then, was that of an agricultural community in a high plateau region near the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea in the Velebit Mountains, a part of the Alps, a mountain chain stretching from Switzerland to Greece. He did not see his Wrst steam locomotive until he was in his `teens, so his aptitude for mechanical matters did not grow out of his environment.

Tesla's homeland is today called Yugoslavia, a country whose name means ``Land of the Southern Slavs.'' It embraces several former separate countries, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Dalmatia and also Slovenia. The Tesla and Mandich families originally came from the western part of Serbia near Montenegro. Smiljan, the village where Tesla was born, is in the province of Lika, and at the time of his birth this was a dependent province held by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as part of Croatia and Slovenia.

Tesla's surname dates back more than two and a half centuries. Before that time the family name was Draganic (pronounced as if spelled Drag'-a-nitch). The name Tesla (pronounced as spelled, with equal emphasis on both syllables), in a purely literal sense, is a trade name like Smith, Wright or Carpenter. As a common noun it describes a woodworking tool which, in English, is called an adz. This is an axe with a broad cutting blade at right angles to the handle, instead of parallel as in the more familiar form. It is used in cutting large tree trunks into squared timbers. In the Serbo-Croat language, the name of the tool is tesla. There is a tradition in the Draganic family that the members of one branch were given the nickname ``Tesla'' because of an inherited trait which caused practically all of them to have very large, broad and protruding front teeth which greatly resembled the triangular blade of the adz.

The name Draganic and derivatives of it appear frequently in other branches of the Tesla family as a given name. When used as a given name it is frequently translated ``Charlotte,'' but as a generic term it holds the meaning ``dear'' and as a surname is translated ``Darling.''

The majority of Tesla's ancestors for whom age records are available lived well beyond the average span of life for their times, but no deWnite record has been found of the ancestor who, Tesla claimed, lived to be one hundred and forty years of age. (His father died at the age of Wfty-nine, and his mother at seventy-one.)

Although many of Tesla's ancestors were dark eyed, his eyes were a gray-blue. He claimed his eyes were originally darker, but that as a result of the excessive use of his brain their color changed. His mother's eyes, however, were gray and so are those of some of his nephews. It is probable, therefore, that his gray eyes were inherited, rather than faded by excessive use of the brain.

Tesla grew to be very tall and very slender--tallness was a family and a national trait. When he attained full growth he was exactly two meters, or six feet two and one-quarter inches tall. While his body was slender, it was built within normal proportions. His hands, however, and particularly his thumbs, seemed unusually long.

Nikola's older brother Dane was a brilliant boy and his parents gloried in their good fortune in being blessed with such a Wne son. There was, however, a diVerence of seven years in the two boys' ages, and since the elder brother died as the result of an accident at the age of twelve, when Nikola was but Wve years old, a fair comparison of the two seems hardly possible. The loss of their Wrst-born son was a great blow to his mother and father; the grief and regrets of the family were manifest in idealizing his talents and predicting possibilities of greatness he might have realized, and this situation was a challenge to Nikola in his youth.

The superman Tesla developed out of the superboy Nikola. Forced to rise above the normal level by an urge to carry on for his dearly beloved departed brother, and also on his own account to exceed the great accomplishment his brother might have attained had he lived, he unconsciously drew upon strange resources within. The existence of these resources might have remained unsuspected for a lifetime, as happens with the run of individuals, if Nikola had not felt the necessity for creating a larger sphere of life for himself.

He was aware as a boy that he was not like other boys in his thoughts, in his amusements and in his hobbies. He could do the things that other lads his age usually do, and many things that they could not do. It was these latter things that interested him most, and he could Wnd no companions who would share his enthusiasms for them. This situation caused him to isolate himself from contemporaries, and made him aware that he was destined for an unusual place if not great accomplishments in life. His boyish mind was continually exploring realms which his years had not reached, and his boyhood attainments frequently were worthy of men of mature age.

He had, of course, the usual experience of unusual incidents that fall to the lot of a small boy. One of the earliest events which Tesla recalled was a fall into a tank of hot milk that was being scalded in the process used by the natives of that region as a hygienic measure, anticipating the modern process of pasteurizing.

Shortly afterward he was accidentally locked in a remote mountain chapel which was visited only at widely separated intervals. He spent the night in the small building before his absence was discovered and his possible hiding place determined.

Living close to Nature, with ample opportunity for observing the Xight of birds, which has ever Wlled men with envy, he did what many another boy has done with the same results. An umbrella, plus imagination, oVered to him a certain solution of the problem of free Xight through the air. The roof of a barn was his launching platform. The umbrella was large, but its condition was much the worse for many years of service; it turned inside out before the Xight was well started. No bones were broken, but he was badly shaken up and spent the next six weeks in bed. Probably, though, he had better reason for making this experiment than most of the others who have tried it. He revealed that practically all his life he experienced a peculiar reaction when breathing deeply. When he breathed deeply he was overcome by a feeling of lightness, as if his body had lost all weight; and he should, he concluded, be able to Xy through the air merely by his will to do so. He did not learn, in boyhood, that he was unusual in this respect.

One day when he was in his Wfth year, one of his chums received a gift of a Wshing line, and all the boys in the group planned a Wshing trip. On that day he was on the outs with his chums for some unremembered reason. As a result, he was informed he could not join them. He was not permitted even to see the Wshing line at close range. He had glimpsed, however, the general idea of a hook on the end of a string. In a short time he had fashioned his own interpretation of a hook. The reWnement of a barb had not occurred to him and he also failed to evolve the theory of using bait when he went oV on his own Wshing expedition. The baitless hook failed to attract any Wsh but, while dangling in the air, much to Tesla's surprise and satisfaction it snared a frog that leaped at it. He came home with a bag of nearly two dozen frogs. It may have been a day on which the Wsh were not biting, but at any rate his chums came home from the use of their new hook and line without any Wsh. His triumph was complete. When he later revealed his technique, all the boys in the neighborhood copied his hook and method, and in a short time the frog population of the region was greatly depleted.

The contents of birds' nests always excited Tesla's curiosity. He rarely disturbed their contents or occupants. On one occasion, however, he climbed a rocky crag to investigate an eagle's nest and took from it a baby eagle which he kept locked in a barn. A bird on the wing he considered fair prey for his sling shot, with which he was a star performer.

About this time he became intrigued with a piece of hollow tube cut from a cane growing in the neighborhood. This he played with until he had evolved a blow gun and later, by making a plunger and plugging one end of the tube with a wad of wet hemp, a pop gun. He then undertook the making of larger pop guns, and contrived one in which the end of the plunger was held against the chest and the tube pulled energetically toward the body. He engaged in the manufacture of this article for his chums, as a Wve-year-old businessman. When a number of window panes happened to get broken accidentally by getting in the way of his hemp wad, his inventive proclivities in this Weld were quickly curbed by the destruction of the pop guns and the administration of the parental rod.

Tesla started his formal education by attending the village school in Smiljan before he reached his Wfth birthday. A few years later his father received his appointment as pastor of a church in the nearby city of Gospic, so the family moved there. This was a sad day for young Tesla. He had lived close to Nature, and loved the open country and the high mountains among which he had thus far spent all of his life. The sudden transition to the artiWcialities of the city was a very deWnite shock to him. He was out of harmony with his new surroundings.

His advent into the city life of Gospic, at the age of seven, got oV to an unfortunate start. As the new minister in town, his father was anxious to have everything move smoothly. Tesla was required to dress in his best clothes and attend the Sunday services. Naturally, he dreaded this ordeal and was very happy when assigned the task of ringing the bell summoning the worshipers to the service and announcing the close of the ceremonies. This gave him an opportunity to remain unseen in the belfry while the parishioners, their daughters and dude sons were arriving and departing.

Thinking he had waited long enough after the close of the service for the church to be cleared on this Wrst Sunday, he came downstairs three steps at a time. A wealthy woman parishioner wearing a skirt with a long train that fashionably dragged along the ground, and who had come to the service with a retinue of servants, remained after the other parishioners to have a talk with the new pastor. She was just making an impressive exit when Tesla's Wnal jump down the stairs landed him on the train, ripping this dignity-preserving appendage from the woman's dress. Her mortiWcation and rage and his father's anger came upon him simultaneously. Parishioners loitering outside rushed back to revel in the spectacle. Thereafter no one dared be pleasant to this youngster who had enraged the wealthy dowager who domineered it over the social community. He was practically ostracized by the parishioners, and continued so until he redeemed himself in a spectacular manner.

Tesla felt strange and defeated in his ignorance of city ways. He met the situation Wrst by avoidance. He did not care to leave his home. The boys of his age were neatly dressed every day. They were dudes and he did not belong. Even as a child Tesla was meticulously careful in dress. At the earliest moment, however, he would slip work clothes over his dress clothes and go wandering in the woods or engage in mechanical work. He could not enjoy life if limited to the activities in which he could engage while dressed up. Tesla, however, possessed ingenuity, and there was rarely a situation in which he was not able to use it. He also possessed knowledge of the ways of Nature. These gave him a distinct superiority over the city boys.

About a year after the family moved to Gospic a new Wre company was organized. It was to be supplied with a pump which would replace the useful but inadequate bucket brigade. The members of the new organization obtained brightly colored uniforms and practiced marching for parades. Eventually the new pump arrived. It was a man-power pump to be operated by sixteen men. A parade and demonstration of the new apparatus was arranged. Almost everyone in Gospic turned out for the event and followed to the river front for the pump demonstration. Tesla was among them. He paid no attention to the speeches but was all eyes for the brightly painted apparatus. He did not know how it worked but would have loved to take it apart and investigate the insides.

The time for the demonstration came when the last speaker, Wnishing his dedicatory address, gave the order to start the pumping operation that would send a stream of water shooting skyward from the nozzle. The eight men regimented on either side of the pump bowed and rose in alternate unison as they raised and lowered the bars that operated the pistons of the pump. But nothing else happened, not a drop of water came from the nozzle!

OYcials of the Wre company started feverishly to make adjustments and, after each attempt, set the sixteen men oscillating up and down at the pump handles, but each time without results. The lines of hose between the pump and the nozzle were straightened out, they were disconnected from the pump and connected again. But no water came from the far end of the hose to reward the eVorts of the perspiring Wremen.

Tesla was among the usual group of urchins that always manages to get inside the lines on such occasions. He tried to see everything that was going on from the closest possible vantage point and undoubtedly got on the nerves of the vexed oYcials when their repeated eVorts were frustrated by continuous failures. As one of the oYcials turned for the tenth time to vent his frustration on the urchins and order them away from his range of action, Tesla grabbed him by the arm.

``I know what to do, Mister,'' said Tesla. ``You keep pumping.''

Dashing for the river, Tesla peeled his clothes oV quickly and dove into the water. He swam to the suction hose that was supposed to draw the water supply from the river. He found it kinked, so that no water could Xow into it, and Xattened by the vacuum created by the pumping. When he straightened out the kink, the water rushed into the line. The nozzlemen had stood at their post for a long time, receiving a continuous repetition of warnings to be prepared each time an adjustment was made, but, as nothing happened on these successive occasions, they had gradually relaxed their attention and were giving little thought to the direction in which the nozzle was pointed. When the stream of water did shoot skyward, down it came on the assembled oYcials and townspeople. This item of unexpected drama excited the crowd at the other end of the line near the pump, and to give vent to their joy they seized the scantily dressed Tesla, boosted him to the shoulders of a couple of the Wremen, and led a procession around the town. The seven-year-old Tesla was the hero of the day.

Later on Tesla, in explaining the incident, said that he had had not the faintest idea of how the pump worked; but as he watched the men struggle with it, he got an intuitive Xash of knowledge that told him to go to the hose in the river. On looking back to that event, he said, he knew how Archimedes must have felt when, after discovering the law of the displacement of water by Xoating objects, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting ``Eureka!

At the age of seven Tesla had tasted the pleasures of public acclaim

for his ingenuity. And further, he had done something which the dudes, the boys of his age in the city, could not do and which even their fathers could not do. He had found himself. He was now a hero, and it could be forgotten that he had jumped on a woman's skirt and ripped the train oV.

Tesla never lost an opportunity to hike through the nearby mountains where he could again enjoy the pleasures of his earlier years spent so close to Nature. On these occasions he would often wonder if there was still operating a crude water wheel which he made and installed, when he was less than Wve years old, across the mountain brook near his home in Smiljan.

The wheel consisted of a not too well-smoothed disk cut from a tree trunk in some lumbering operations. Through its center he was able to cut a hole and force into it a somewhat straight branch of a tree, the ends of which he rested in two sticks with crotches which he forced into the rock on either bank of the brook. This arrangement permitted the lower part of the disk to dip in the water and the current caused it to rotate. To the lad there was a great deal of originality employed in making this ancient device. The wheel wobbled a bit but to him it was a marvelous piece of construction, and he got no end of pleasure out of watching his water wheel obtain power from the brook.

This experiment undoubtedly made a life-long impression on his young plastic mind and endowed him with the desire, ever afterward manifested in his work, of obtaining power from Nature's sources which are always being dissipated and always being replenished.

In this smooth-disk water wheel we Wnd an early clue to his later invention of the smooth-disk turbine. In his later experience he discovered that all water wheels have paddles--but his little water wheel had operated without paddles.

Tesla's Wrst experiment in original methods of power production was made when he was nine years old. It demonstrated his ingenuity and originality, if nothing else. It was a sixteen-bug-power engine. He took two thin slivers of wood, as thick as a toothpick and several times as long, and glued them together in the form of a cross, so they looked like the arms of a windmill. At the point of intersection they were glued to a spindle made of another thin sliver of wood. On this he slipped a very small pulley with about the diameter of a pea. A piece of thread acting as a driving belt was slipped over this and also around the circumference of a much larger but light pulley which was also mounted on a thin spindle. The power for this machine was furnished by sixteen May bugs (June bugs in the United States). He had collected a jar full of the insects, which were very much of a pest in the neighborhood. With a little dab of glue four bugs were aYxed, heading in the same direction, to each of the four arms of the windmill arrangement. The bugs beat their wings, and if they had been free would have Xown away at high speed. They were, however, attached to the cross arms, so instead they pulled them around at high speed. These, being connected by the thread belt to the large pulley, caused the latter to turn at low speed; but it developed, Tesla reports, a surprisingly large torque, or turning power.

Proud of his bug-power motor and its continuous operation--the bugs did not cease Xying for hours--he called in one of the boys in the neighborhood to admire it. The lad was a son of an Army oYcer. The visitor was amused for a short time by the bug motor, until he spied the jar of still unused May bugs. Without hesitation he opened the jar, Wshed out the bugs--and ate them. This so nauseated Tesla that he chased the boy out of the house and destroyed the bug motor. For years he could not tolerate the sight of May bugs without a return of this unpleasant reaction.

This event greatly annoyed Tesla because he had planned to add more spindles to the shaft and stick on more Xiers until he had more than a one-hundred-bug-power motor.

TWO

TESLA'S years in school were more important for the activities in which he engaged in after-school hours than for what he learned in the classroom. At the age of ten, having Wnished his elementary studies in the Normal School, Tesla entered the college, called the Real Gymnasium, at Gospic. This was not an unusually early age to enter the Real Gymnasium, as that school corresponds more to our grammar school and junior high school than to our college.

One of the requirements, and one to which an unusually large percentage of the class time was devoted throughout the four years, was freehand drawing. Tesla detested the subject almost to the point of open rebellion, and his marks were accordingly very low, but not entirely owing to a lack of ability.

Tesla was left-handed as a boy, but later became ambidextrous. Left-handedness was a deWnite handicap in the freehand-drawing studies, but he could have done much better work than he actually produced and would have gotten higher marks if it were not for a piece of altruism in which he engaged. A student whom he could excel in drawing was striving hard for a scholarship. Were he to receive the lowest marks in freehand drawing, he would be unable to obtain the scholarship. Tesla sought to help his fellow student by intentionally getting the lowest rating in the small class.

Mathematics was his favorite subject and he distinguished himself in that study. His unusual proWciency in this Weld was not considered a counterbalancing virtue to make amends for his lack of enthusiasm for freehand drawing. A strange power permitted him to perform unusual feats in mathematics. He possessed it from early boyhood, but had considered it a nuisance and tried to be rid of it because it seemed beyond his control.

If he thought of an object it would appear before him exhibiting the appearance of solidity and massiveness. So greatly did these visions possess the attributes of actual objects that it was usually diYcult for him to distinguish between vision and reality. This abnormal faculty functioned in a very useful fashion in his school work with mathematics.

If he was given a problem in arithmetic or algebra, it was immaterial to him whether he went to the blackboard to work it out or whether he remained in his seat. His strange faculty permitted him to see a visioned blackboard on which the problem was written, and there appeared on this blackboard all of the operations and symbols required in working out the solution. Each step appeared much more rapidly than he could work it out by hand on the actual slate. As a result, he could give the solution almost as quickly as the whole problem was stated.

His teachers, at Wrst, had some doubts about his honesty, thinking he had worked out some clever deceit for getting the right answers. In due time their skepticism was dispelled and they accepted him as a student who was unusually apt at mental arithmetic. He would not reveal this power to anyone and would discuss it only with his mother, who in the past had encouraged him in his eVorts to banish it. Now that the power had demonstrated some deWnite usefulness, though, he was not so anxious to be completely rid of it, but desired to bring it under his complete control.

Work that Tesla did outside school hours interested him much more than his school work. He was a rapid reader and had a memory that was retentive to the point, almost, of infallibility. He found it easy to acquire foreign languages. In addition to his native Serbo-Croat language he became proWcient in the use of German, French and Italian. This opened to him great stores of knowledge to which other students did not have access, yet this knowledge, apparently, was of little use to him in his school work. He was interested in things mechanical but the school provided no manual training course. Nevertheless, he became proWcient in the working of wood and metals with tools and methods of his own contriving.

In the classroom of one of the upper grades of the Real Gymnasium models of water wheels were on exhibition. They were not working models but nevertheless they aroused Tesla's enthusiasm. They recalled to him the crude wheel he had constructed in the hills of Smiljan. He had seen pictures of the magniWcent Niagara Falls. Coupling the power possibilities presented by the majestic waterfalls and the intriguing possibilities he saw in the models of the water wheels, he aroused in himself a passion to accomplish a grand achievement. Waxing eloquent on the subject, he told his father, ``Some day I am going to America and harness Niagara Falls to produce power.'' Thirty years later he was to see this prediction fulWlled.

There were many books in his father's library. The knowledge in those books interested him more than that which he received in school and he wished to spend his evenings reading them. As in other matters, he carried this to an extreme, so his father forbade him to read them, fearing that he would ruin his eyes in the poor light of tallow candles then used for illumination. Nikola sought to circumvent this ruling by taking candles to his room and reading after he was sent to bed, but his violation of orders was soon discovered and the family candle supply was hidden. Next he fashioned a candle mould out of a piece of tin and made his own candles. Then, by plugging the keyhole and the chinks around the door, he was able to spend the night hours reading volumes purloined from his father's bookshelves. Frequently, he said, he would read through the entire night and feel none the worse for the loss of sleep. Eventual discovery, however, brought paternal discipline of a vigorous nature. He was about eleven years old at this time.

Like other boys of his age he played with bows and arrows. He made bigger bows, and better, straighter shooting arrows, and his marksmanship was excellent. He was not willing to stop at that point. He started building arbalists. These could be described as bow-and-arrow guns. The bow is mounted on a frame and the string pulled back and caught on a peg from which it is released by a trigger. The arrow is laid on the midpoint of the bow, its end against the taut string. The bow lies horizontal on the frame whereas in ordinary manual shooting the bow is held in vertical position. For this reason the device is sometimes called the crossbow. In setting an arbalist the beam is placed against the abdomen and the string pulled back with all possible force. Tesla did this so often, he said, that his skin at the point of pressure became calloused until it was more like a crocodile's hide. When shot into the air the arrows from his arbalist were never recovered, for they went far out of sight. At close range they would pass through a pine board an inch thick.

Tesla got a thrill out of archery not experienced by other boys. He was, in imagination, riding those arrows which he shot out of sight into the blue vault of the heavens. That sense of exhilaration he experienced when breathing deeply gave him such a feeling of lightness he convinced himself that in this state it would be relatively easy for him to Xy through the air if he only could devise some mechanical aid that would launch him and enable him to overcome what he thought was only a slight remaining weight in his body. His earlier disastrous jump from the barn roof had not disillusioned him. His conclusions were in keeping with his sensations; but a twelve-year-old lad exploring this diYcult Weld alone cannot be condemned too severely for not discovering that our senses sometimes deceive us, or rather that we sometimes deceive ourselves in interpreting what our senses tell us.

In breathing deeply he was overventilating his lungs, taking out some of the residual carbon dioxide which is chemical ``ashes,'' and largely inert, and replacing it with air containing a mixture of equally inert nitrogen and very active oxygen. The latter being present in more than normal proportions immediately began to upset chemical balances throughout the body. The reaction on the brain produces a result which does not diVer greatly from alcohol intoxication. A number of cults use this procedure to induce ``mystical'' or ``occult'' experiences. How was a twelve-year-old boy to know all these things? He could see that birds did an excellent job in Xying. He was convinced that some day man would Xy, and he wanted to produce the machine that would get him oV the ground and into the air.

The big idea came to him when he learned about the vacuum--a space within a container from which all air had been exhausted. He learned that every object exposed to the air was under a pressure of about fourteen pounds per square inch, while in a vacuum objects were free of such pressure. He Wgured that a pressure of fourteen pounds should turn a cylinder at high speed and he could arrange to get advantage of such pressure by surrounding one half of a cylinder with a vacuum and having the remaining half of its surface exposed to air pressure. He carefully built a box of wood. At one end was an opening into which a cylinder was Wtted with a very high order of accuracy, so that the box would be airtight; and on one side of the cylinder the edge of the box made a right-angle contact. On the cylinder's other side the box made a tangent, or Xat, contact. This arrangement was made because he wanted the air pressure to be exerted at a tangent to the surface of the cylinder--a situation that he knew would be required in order to produce rotation. If he could get that cylinder to rotate, all he would have to do in order to Xy would be to attach a propeller to a shaft from the cylinder, strap the box to his body and obtain continuous power from his vacuum box that would lift him through the air. His theory of course was fallacious, but he had no means of knowing that at the time.

The workmanship on this box was undoubtedly of a very high order, considering it was made by a self-instructed twelve-year-old mechanic. When he connected his vacuum pump, an ordinary air pump with its valves reversed, he found the box was airtight, so he pulled out all the air, watching the cylinder intently while doing so. Nothing happened for many strokes of the pump except that it made his back lame to pull the pump handle upward while he created the most ``powerful'' possible vacuum. He rested for a moment. He was breathing deeply from exertion, overventilating his lungs, and getting that joyous, dizzy, light-as-air feeling which was a highly satisfactory mental environment for his experiment.

Suddenly the cylinder started to turn--slowly! His experiment was a success! His vacuum-power box was working! He would Xy!

Tesla was delirious with joy. He went into a state of ecstasy. There was no one with whom he could share this joy, as he had taken no one into his conWdence. It was his secret and he was forced to endure its joys alone. The cylinder continued to turn slowly. It was no hallucination. It was real. It did not speed up, however, and this was disappointing. He had visualized it turning at a tremendous speed but it was actually turning extremely slowly. His idea, at least, he Wgured, was correct. With a little better workmanship, perhaps he could make the cylinder turn faster. He stood spellbound watching it turn at a snail's pace for less than half a minute--and then the cylinder stopped. That broke the spell and ended for the time his mental air Xights.

He hunted for the trouble and quickly located what he was sure was the cause of the diYculty. Since the vacuum, he theorized, is the source of power, then, if the power stops, it must be because the vacuum is gone. His pump, he felt sure, must be leaking air. He pulled up the handle. It came up easily and that meant very deWnitely he had lost the vacuum in the box. He again pumped out the air--and again when he reached a high vacuum the cylinder started to turn slowly and continued to do so for a fraction of a minute. When it stopped he again pumped a vacuum and again the cylinder turned. This time he continued to operate the pump and the cylinder continued to turn. He could keep it turning as long as he desired by continuing to pump the vacuum.

There was nothing wrong with his theory, as far as he could see. He went over the pump very carefully, making improvements which would give him a high vacuum, and studied the valve to make that a better guard of the vacuum in the box. He worked on the project for weeks but despite his best eVorts he could get no better results than the slow movement of the cylinder.

Finally the truth came to him in a Xash--he was losing the vacuum in the box because the air was leaking in around the cylinder on that side where the Xat board was tangent to the surface of the cylinder. As the air Xowed into the box it pulled the cylinder around with it very slowly. When the air stopped Xowing into the box the cylinder stopped turning. He knew now his theory was wrong. He had supposed that even with the vacuum being maintained, and no air leaking in, the air pressure would be exerted at a tangent to the surface of the cylinder and the pressure would produce motion in the same way as pushing on the rim of a wheel will cause it to turn. He discovered later, however, that the air pressure is exerted at right angles to the surface of the cylinder at all points, like the direction of the spokes of a wheel, and therefore it could not be used to produce rotation in the way he planned.

This experiment, nevertheless, was not a total loss, even though it greatly disheartened him. The knowledge that the air leaking into a vacuum had actually produced even a small amount of rotation in a cylinder remained with him and led directly, many years later, to his invention of the ``Tesla turbine,'' the steam engine that broke all records for horsepower developed per pound of weight--what he called ``a power house in a hat.''

Nature seemed to be constantly engaged in staging spectacular demonstrations for young Tesla, revealing to him samples of the secret of her mighty forces.

Tesla was roaming in the mountains with some chums one winter day after a storm in which the snow fell moist and sticky. A small snowball rolled on the ground quickly gathered more snow to itself and soon became a big one that was not too easy to move. Tiring of making snowmen and snow houses on level stretches of ground, the boys took to throwing snowballs down the sloping ground of the mountain. Most of them were duds--that is, they got stalled in the soft snow before they accumulated additional volume. A few rolled a distance, grew larger and then bogged down and stopped. One, however, found just the right conditions; it rolled until it was a large ball and then spread out, rolling up the snow at the sides as if it were rolling up a giant carpet, and then suddenly it turned into an avalanche. Soon an irresistible mass of snow was moving down the steep slope. It stripped the mountainside clean of snow, trees, soil and everything else it could carry before it and with it. The great mass landed in the valley below with a thud that shook the mountain. The boys were frightened because there was snow above them on the mountain that might have been shaken into a downward slide, carrying them along buried in it.

This event made a profound impression on Tesla and it dominated a great deal of his thinking in later life. He had witnessed a snowball weighing a few ounces starting an irresistible, devastating movement of thousands of tons of inert matter. It convinced him that there are tremendous forces locked up in Nature that can be released in gigantic amounts, for useful as well as destructive purposes, by the employment of small trigger forces. He was always on the lookout for such triggers in his later experiments.

Tesla even as a boy was an original thinker and he never hesitated to think thoughts on a grand scale, always carrying everything to its largest ultimate dimension as a means of exploring the cosmos. This is demonstrated by another event that took place the following summer. He was wandering alone in the mountains when storm clouds started to Wll the sky. There was a Xash of lightning and almost immediately a deluge of rain descended on him.

There was implanted in his thirteen-year-old mind on that occasion a thought which he carried with him practically all his life. He saw the lightning Xash and then saw the rain come down in torrents, so he reasoned that the lightning Xash produced the downpour. The idea become Wrmly Wxed in his mind that electricity controlled the rain, and that if one could produce lightning at will, the weather would be brought under control. Then there would be no dry periods in which crops would be ruined; deserts could be turned into vineyards, the food supply of the world would be greatly increased, and there would be no lack of food anywhere on the globe. Why could he not produce lightning?

The observation and the conclusions drawn from it by young Tesla were worthy of a more mature mind, and it would require a genius among the adults to have evolved the project of controlling the world's weather through such means. There was, however, a Xaw in his observation. He saw the lightning come Wrst and the rain afterward. Further investigation would have revealed to him that the order of events was reversed higher in the air. It was the rain that came Wrst and the lightning afterward up in the cloud. The lightning, however, arrived Wrst because it made the trip from the cloud in less than 1/100,000 of a second, while the raindrops required several seconds to fall to the ground.

At this time there was planted in Tesla's mind the seed of a project which matured more than thirty years later when, in the mountains of Colorado, he actually produced bolts of lightning, and planned later to use them to bring rain. He never succeeded in convincing the U.S. Patent OYce of the practicability of the rain-making plan.

Tesla, as a boy, knew no limits to the universe of his thinking; and as a result he built an intellectual realm suYciently large to provide ample space in which his more mature mind could operate without encountering retarding barriers.

Tesla Wnished his course at the Real Gymnasium in Gospic in 1870,

at the age of fourteen. He had distinguished himself as a scholar. In one grade, however, his mathematics professor gave him less than a passing mark for his year's work. Tesla felt an injustice had been done him, so he went to the director of the school and demanded that he be given the strictest kind of examination in the subject. This was done in the presence of the director and the professor, and Tesla passed it with an almost perfect mark.

His Wne work at school and the recognition by the towns-people that he possessed a broader scope of knowledge than any other youth in town led the trustees of the public library to ask him to classify the books in their possession and make a catalogue. He had already read most of the books in his father's extensive library, so he was pleased to have close access to a still larger collection and undertook the task with considerable enthusiasm. He had scarcely begun work on this project when it was interrupted by a long intermittent illness. When he felt too depressed to go to the library he had quantities of the books brought to his home, and these he read while conWned to his bed. His illness reached a critical stage and physicians gave up hope of saving his life.

Tesla's father knew that he was a delicate child and, having lost his other son, tried to throw every possible safeguard around this one. He was greatly pleased over his son's brilliant accomplishments in almost every activity in which he engaged, but he recognized as a danger to Nikola's health the great intensity with which he tackled projects. Nikola's trend toward engineering was to him a dangerous development, as he thought work in that Weld would make too heavy demands upon him, not only because of the nature of the work but in the extended years of study in which he would have to engage. If, however, the boy entered the ministry, it would not be necessary for him to extend his studies beyond the Real Gymnasium which he had just completed. For this reason his father favored a career for him in the Church.

Illness threw everything into a somber aspect. When the critical stage of his illness was reached and his strength was at its lowest ebb, Nikola manifested no inclination to help himself get better by developing an enthusiasm for anything. It was in this stage of his illness that he glanced listlessly at one of the library books. It was a volume by Mark Twain. The book held his interest and then aroused his enthusiasm for life, enabling him to pass a crisis, and his health gradually returned to normal. Tesla credited the Mark Twain book with saving his life, and when, years later, he met Twain, they became very close friends.

At the age of Wfteen Tesla, in 1870, continued his studies at the Higher Real Gymnasium, corresponding to our college, at Karlovac (Carlstadt) in Croatia. His attendance at this school was made possible by an invitation from a cousin of his father's, married to a Col. Brankovic, whose home was in Karlovac, to come and live with her and her husband, a retired Army oYcer, while attending school. His life there was none too happy. Scarcely had he arrived when he contracted malaria from the mosquitoes in the Karlovac lowlands, and he was never free from the malady for years afterward.

Tesla relates that he was hungry all during the three years he spent at Karlovac. There was plenty of deliciously prepared food in the home, but his aunt held the theory that because his health seemed none too rugged he should not eat heavy meals. Her husband, a gruV and rugged individual, when carving a second helping for himself, would sometimes try to slip a healthy slice of meat onto Tesla's plate; but the Colonel was always overruled by his wife, who would take back the slice and carve one to the thinness of a sheet of paper, warning her husband, ``Niko is delicate and we must be very careful not to overload his stomach.''

His studies at Karlovac interested him, however, and he completed the four-year course in three years, tackling the school work with a dangerous enthusiasm, partly as an escape mechanism to divert his attention from the none too pleasing conditions where he was living. The lasting favorable impression which Tesla carried away from Karlovac concerned his professor of physics, a clever and original experimenter, who amazed him with the feats he performed with laboratory apparatus. He could not get enough of this course. He wanted to devote his whole time henceforth to electrical experimenting. He knew he would not be satisWed in any other Weld. His mind was made up; he had selected his career.

His father wrote to him shortly before his graduation advising him not to return home when school was closed but to go on a long hunting trip. Tesla, however, was anxious to get home--to surprise his parents with the good news that he had completed his work at the Higher Real Gymnasium a year ahead of schedule, and to announce his decision to make the study of electricity his life work. Greatly worried, his parents, who at that moment were making strenuous eVorts to protect his health, were doubly alarmed. Wrst, there was his violation of the instruction sent him not to return to Gospic. The reason for this advice they had not disclosed--an epidemic of cholera was raging. And second, there was his decision to enter on a career which they feared would make dangerous demands on his delicate health. On returning home, he found his plan deWnitely opposed. This made him very unhappy. In addition, he would shortly have to face a situation which was even more repugnant than entering upon a career in the Church, and that was the compulsory three-years' service in the Army. Those two powerful factors were operating against him and seeking to thwart him in his burning desire to start immediately unraveling the mystery and harnessing the great power of electricity.

Nothing, he thought, could exceed the diYculty of the predicament in which he found himself. In this, however, he was mistaken, for he was soon to face a much more serious problem. On the very day after his arrival home, while these issues were still red hot, he became ill with cholera. He had come home malnourished because of the inadequate amount of food to which he had been limited and the strain of his intense application to his studies. Besides, he was still suVering from malaria. Then came the cholera. Now all other problems became secondary to the immediate one of maintaining life itself against the deadly scourge. His physical condition made the doctors despair of saving him. Nevertheless, he survived the crisis, but it left him in a thoroughly weakened and run-down condition. For nine months he lay in bed almost a physical wreck. He had frequent sinking spells and from each successive one it seemed harder to rally him.

Life held no incentive for him. If he survived he would be forced to enter the Army and, if nothing happened to prevent him from Wnishing that term of something worse than slavery, he would be forced to study for the ministry. He did not care whether he survived or not. Left to his own decision, he would not have rallied from earlier sinking spells; but the decision was not left to him. Some force stronger than his own consciousness carried him through, but it had to succeed in spite of him and not because of any assistance he was giving. The sinking spells came on with startling regularity, each one with increasing depth. It seemed a miracle that he had come out of the last one, and now with less reserve strength he was sinking into another and edging rapidly into unconsciousness. His father entered his room and tried desperately to rouse him and stir him to a more cheerful and hopeful attitude in which he could help himself and do more than the doctors could do for him, but without results.

``I could--get well--if you--would let me--study electrical--engineering,'' said the prostrate young man in a hardly audible whisper. He had scarcely enough energy left for even this eVort; and having made the speech, he seemed to be dropping over the edge of nothingness. His father, bending intently over him and fearing the end had come, seized him.

``Nikola,'' he commanded, ``you cannot go. You must stay. You will be an engineer. Do you hear me? You will go to the best engineering school in the world and you will be a great engineer. Nikola, you must come back, you must come back and become a great engineer.''

The eyes of the prostrate Wgure opened slowly. Now there was a light shining in the eyes where before they presented a death-like glaze. The face moved a little, very little, but the slight change this movement made seemed to be in the direction of a smile. It was a smile, a weak one, and he was able to keep his eyes open although it was very apparently a struggle for him to do so.

``Thank God'' said his father. ``You heard me, Nikola. You will go to an engineering school and become a great engineer. Do you understand me?''

There was not enough energy for voice but the smile became a little more deWnite.

Another crisis in which he had escaped death by the narrowest margin had been passed. His rise out of this situation seemed almost miraculous. It seemed to him, Tesla later related, that from that instant he felt as if he were drawing vital energy from his loved ones who surrounded him; and this he used to rally himself out of the shadow.

He was again able to whisper. ``I will get well,'' he said weakly. He breathed deeply, as deep as his frail tired frame would permit, of the oxygen which he had found so stimulating in the past. It was the Wrst time he had done so in the nine months since he became ill. With each breath he felt reinvigorated. He seemed to get stronger by the minute.

In a very short time he was taking nourishment and within a week he was able to sit up. In a few days more he was on his feet. Life now would be glorious. He would be an electrical engineer. Everything he dreamed of would come true. As the days passed he recovered his strength at a remarkably rapid rate and his hearty appetite returned. It was now early summer. He would prepare himself to enter the fall term at an engineering school.

But there was something he had forgotten, everyone in the family had forgotten, in the stress of his months of illness. It was now brought sharply to his and their attention. An Army summons--he must face three years' military servitude! Was his remarkable recovery to be ruined by this catastrophe, which seemed all the worse now that his chosen career seemed otherwise nearer? Failure to respond to a military summons meant jail--and after that the service in addition. How would he solve this problem?

There is no record of what took place. This spot in his career Tesla glossed over with the statement that his father considered it advisable for him to go oV on a year's hunting expedition to recover his health. At any rate, Nikola disappeared. He left with a hunting outWt and some books and paper. Where he spent the year, no one knows--probably at some hideaway in the mountains. In the meantime, he was a fugitive from Army service.

For any ordinary individual this situation would be a most serious one. For Tesla it had all the gravity associated with ordinary cases, plus the complication that his family on his father's side was a traditional military family whose members had won high rank and honors in Army activities, and many of whom were now in the service of Austria-Hungary. For a member of that family to become equivalent to a ``draft dodger'' and a ``conscientious objector,'' both, was a serious blow to its prestige, and could provoke a scandal if word of the situation got into circulation. Tesla's father used this circumstance and the fact of NikoIa's delicate health as talking points to induce his relatives in Army positions to use their inXuence to enable his son to escape conscription and avoid punishment for failing to respond to the Army call. In this he was successful, apparently, but required considerable time in which to make the arrangements.

Hiding in the mountains and with a year's time to kill, on this enforced vacation Tesla was able to indulge in working out totally fantastic plans for some gigantic projects. One of the plans was for the construction and operation of an under-ocean tube, connecting Europe and the United States, by which mail could be transported in spherical containers moved through the tube by water pressure. He discovered early in his calculations that the friction of the water on the walls of the tube would require such a tremendous amount of power to overcome it that it made the project totally impracticable. Since, however, he was working on the project entirely for his own amusement, he eliminated friction from the calculations and was then able to design a very interesting system of high-speed intercontinental mail delivery. The factor which made this interesting project impracticable--the drag of the water on the sides of the tube--Tesla was later to utilize when he invented his novel steam turbine.

The other project with which he amused himself was drawn upon an even larger scale and required a still higher order of imagination. He conceived the project of building a ring around the earth at the Equator, somewhat resembling the rings around the planet Saturn. The earth ring, however, was to be a solid structure whereas Saturn's rings are made up of dust particles.

Tesla loved to work with mathematics, and this project gave him an excellent opportunity to use all of the mathematical techniques available to him. The ring which Tesla planned was to be a rigid structure constructed on a gigantic system of scaVolding extending completely around the earth. Once the ring was complete, the scaVolding was to be removed and the ring would stay suspended in space and rotating at the same speed as the earth.

Some use might be found for the project, Tesla said, if someone could Wnd a means of providing reactionary forces that could make the ring stand still with respect to the earth while the latter whirled underneath it at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. This would provide a high-speed ``moving'' platform system of transportation which would make it possible for a person to travel around the earth in a single day.

In this project, he admitted, he encountered the same problem as did Archimedes, who said ``Give me a fulcrum and a lever long enough and I will move the earth.'' ``The fulcrum in space on which to rest the lever was no more attainable than was the reactionary force needed to halt the spinning of the hypothetical ring around the earth,'' said Tesla. There were a number of other factors which he found necessary to ignore in this project, but ignore them he did so that they would not interfere with his mathematical practice and his cosmical engineering plans.

With his health regained, and the danger of punishment by the Army removed, Tesla returned to his home in Gospic to remain a short time before going to Grätz, where he was to study electrical engineering as his father had promised he could do. This marked the turning point in his life. Finished with boyhood dreams and play, he was now ready to settle down to his serious life work. He had played at being a god, not hesitating to plan refashioning the earth as a planet. His life work was to produce accomplishments hardly less fantastic than his boyhood dreams.

THREE

TESLA entered manhood with a deWnite knowledge that nameless forces were shaping for him an unrevealed destiny. It was a situation he had to feel rather than be able to identify and describe in words. His goal he could not see and the course leading to it he could not discern. He knew very deWnitely the Weld in which he intended to spend his life, and using such physical laws as he knew he decided to plan a life which, as an engineering project, would be operated under principles that would yield the highest index of eYciency. He did not, at this time, have a complete plan of life drawn up, but there were certain elements which he knew intuitively he would not include in his operations, so he avoided all activities and interests that would bring them in as complications. It was to be a single-purpose life, devoted entirely to science with no provisions whatever for play or romance.

It was with this philosophy of life that Tesla in 1875, at the age of 19, went to Grätz, in Austria, to study electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute. He intended henceforth to devote all his energies to mastering that strange, almost occult force, electricity, and to harness it for human welfare.

His Wrst eVort to put this philosophy to a practical test almost resulted in disaster despite the fact that it worked successfully. Tesla completely eliminated recreation and plunged into his studies with such enthusiastic devotion that he allowed himself only four hours' rest, not all of which he spent in slumber. He would go to bed at eleven o'clock and read himself to sleep. He was up again in the small hours of the morning, tackling his studies.

Under such a schedule he was able to pass, at the end of the Wrst term, his examinations in nine subjects--nearly twice as many as were required. His diligence greatly impressed the members of the faculty. The dean of the technical faculty wrote to Tesla's father, ``Your son is a star of Wrst rank.'' The strain, however, was aVecting his health. He desired to make a spectacular showing to demonstrate to his father in a practical way his appreciation of the permission he gave to study engineering. When he returned to his home at the end of the school term with the highest marks that could be awarded in all the subjects passed, he expected to be joyfully received by his father and praised for his good work. Instead, his parent showed only the slightest enthusiasm for his accomplishment but a great deal of interest in his health, and criticized Nikola for endangering it after his earlier narrow escape from death. Unknown to Tesla until several years afterward, the professor at the Polytechnic Institute had written to his father early in the term, asking him to take his son out of the school, as he was in danger of killing himself through overwork.

On his return to the Institute for the second year he decided to limit his studies to physics, mechanics and mathematics. This was fortunate because it gave him more time in which to handle a situation that arose later in his studies, and was to lead to his Wrst and perhaps greatest invention.

Early in his second year at the Institute there was received from Paris a piece of electrical equipment, a Gramme machine, that could be used as either a dynamo or motor. If turned by mechanical power it would generate electricity, and if supplied with electricity it would operate as a motor and produce mechanical power. It was a direct-current machine.

When Prof. Poeschl demonstrated the machine, Tesla was greatly impressed by its performance except in one respect--a great deal of sparking took place at the commutator. Tesla stated his objections to this defect.

``It is inherent in the nature of the machine,'' replied Prof. Poeschl. ``It may be reduced to a great extent, but as long as we use commutators it will always be present to some degree. As long as electricity Xows in one direction, and as long as a magnet has two poles each of which acts oppositely on the current, we will have to use a commutator to change, at the right moment, the direction of the current in the rotating armature.''

``That is obvious,'' Tesla countered. ``The machine is limited by the current used. I am suggesting that we get rid of the commutator entirely by using alternating current.''

Long before the machine was received, Tesla had studied the theory of the dynamo and motor, and he was convinced that the whole system could be simpliWed in some way. The solution of the problem, however, evaded his grasp, nor was he at all sure the problem could be solved--until Prof. Poeschl gave his demonstration. The assurance then came to him like a commanding Xash.

The Wrst sources of current were batteries which produced a small steady Xow. When man sought to produce electricity from mechanical power, he sought to make the same kind the batteries produced: a steady Xow in one direction. The kind of current a dynamo would produce when coils of wire were whirled in a magnetic Weld was not this kind of current--it Xowed Wrst in one direction and then in the other. The commutator was invented as a clever device for circumventing this seeming handicap of artiWcial electricity and making the current come out in a one- directional Xow.

The Xash that came to Tesla was to let the current come out of the dynamo with its alternating directions of Xow, thus eliminating the commutator, and feed this kind of current to the motors, thus eliminating the need in them for commutators. Many another scientist had played with that idea long before it occurred to Tesla, but in his case it came to him as such a vivid, illuminating Xash of understanding that he knew his visualization contained the correct and practical answer. He saw both the motors and dynamos operating without commutators, and doing so very eYciently. He did not, however, see the extremely important and essential details of how this desirable result could be accomplished, but he felt an overpowering assurance that he could solve the problem. It was for this reason that he stated his objections to the Gramme machine with a great deal of conWdence to his professor. What he did not expect was to draw a storm of criticism.

Prof. Poeschl, however, deviated from his set program of lectures and devoted the next one to Tesla's objections. With methodical thoroughness he picked Tesla's proposal apart and, disposing of one point after another, demonstrated its impractical nature so convincingly that he silenced even Tesla. He ended his lecture with the statement: ``Mr. Tesla will accomplish great things, but he certainly never will do this. It would be equivalent to converting a steady pulling force like gravity into rotary eVort. It is a perpetual motion scheme, an impossible idea.''

Tesla, although silenced temporarily, was not convinced. The professor had paid him a nice compliment in devoting a whole lecture to his observation, but, as is so often the case, the compliment was loaded with what was expected by the professor to be a crushing defeat for the one whom he complimented. Tesla was nevertheless greatly impressed by his authority; and for a while he weakened in his belief that he had correctly understood his vision. It was as clear-cut and deWnite as the visualizations that came to him of the solutions of mathematical problems which he was always able to prove correct. But perhaps, after all, he was in this case a victim of a self-induced hallucination. All other things Prof. Poeschl taught were solidly founded on demonstrable fact, so perhaps his teacher was right in his objections to the alternating-current idea.

Deep down in his innermost being, however, Tesla held Wrmly to the conviction that his idea was a correct one. Criticism only temporarily submerged it, and soon it came bobbing back to the surface of his thinking. He gradually convinced himself that, contrary to his usual procedure, Prof. Poeschl had in this case demonstrated merely that he did not know how to accomplish a given result, a deWciency which he shared with everyone else in the world, and therefore could not speak with authority on this subject. And, in addition, Tesla reasoned, the closing remark with which Prof. Poeschl believed he had clinched his argument--``It would be equivalent to converting a steady pulling force like gravity into a rotary eVort--was contradicted by Nature, for was not the steady pulling force of gravity making the moon revolve around the earth and the earth revolve around the sun?

``I could not demonstrate my belief at that time,'' said Tesla, ``but it came to me through what I might call instinct, for lack of a better name. But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We undoubtedly have in our brains some Wner Wbers which enable us to perceive truths which we could not attain through logical deductions, and which it would be futile to attempt to achieve through any wilful eVort of thinking.''

His enthusiasm and conWdence in himself restored, Tesla tackled the problem with renewed vigor. His power of visualization--the ability to see as solid objects before him the things that he conceived in his mind, and which he had considered such a great annoyance in childhood--now proved to be of great aid to him in trying to unravel this problem. He made an elastic rebound from the intellectual trouncing administered by his Professor and was tackling the problem in methodical fashion.

In his mind he constructed one machine after another, and as he visioned them before him he could trace out with his Wnger the various circuits through armature and Weld coils, and follow the course of the rapidly changing currents. But in no case did he produce the desired rotation. Practically all the remainder of the term he spent on this problem. He had passed so many examinations during the Wrst term that he had plenty of time to spend on this problem during the second.

It seemed, however, that he was doomed to fail in this project, for at the term's end he was no nearer the solution than he was when he started. His pride had been injured and he was Wghting on the defensive side. He did not know that those seeming failures in his mental and laboratory experiments were to serve later as the raw material out of which yet another vision was to be created.

A radical change had taken place in Tesla's mode of life while at Grätz. The Wrst year he had acted like an intellectual glutton, overloading his mind and nearly wrecking his health in the process. In the second year he allowed more time for digesting the mental food of which he was partaking, and permitted himself more recreation. About this time Tesla took to card-playing as a means of relaxation. His keen mental processes and highly developed powers of deduction enabled him to win more frequently than he lost. He never retained the money he won but returned it to the losers at the end of the game. When he lost, however, this procedure was not reciprocated by the other players. He also developed a passion for billiards and chess, in both of which he became remarkably proWcient.

The fondness for card-playing which Tesla developed at Grätz got him into an embarrassing situation. Toward the end of the term his father sent him money to pay for his trip to Prague and for the expenses incident to enrolling as a student at the university. Instead of going directly to Prague, Tesla returned to Gospic for a visit to the family. Sitting in at a card game with some youths of the city, Tesla found his usual luck had deserted him, and he lost the money set aside for his university expenses. He confessed to his mother what he had done. She did not criticize him. Perhaps the fates were using this method for protecting him from overwork that might ruin his health, she reasoned, since he needed rest and relaxation. Losses of money were much easier to handle than loss of health. Borrowing some money from a friend, she gave it to Tesla with the words, ``Here you are. Satisfy yourself.'' Returning to the game, he experienced a change in luck and came out of it not only with the money his mother had given him but practically all of the university expense money he had previously lost. These winnings he did not return to the losers as was his previous custom. He returned home, gave his mother the money she had advanced him, and announced that he would never again indulge in card-playing.

Instead of going to the University of Prague in the fall of 1878 as he had planned, Tesla accepted a lucrative position that was oVered him in a technical establishment at Maribor, near Grätz. He was paid sixty Xorins a month and a separate bonus for the completed work, a very generous compensation compared with the prevailing wages. During this year Tesla lived very modestly and saved his earnings.

The money he had saved at Maribor enabled him to pay his way through a year at the University of Prague, where he extended his studies in mathematics and physics. He continued experimenting with the one big challenging alternating-current idea that was occupying his mind. He had explored, unsuccessfully, a large number of methods and, though his failures gave support to Prof. Poeschl's contention that he would never succeed, he was unwilling to give up his theory. He still had faith that he would Wnd the solution of his problem. He knew electrical science was young and growing, and felt deep within his consciousness that he would make the important discovery that would greatly expand the infant science to the powerful giant of the future.

It would have been a pleasure to Tesla to have continued his studies, but it now was necessary for him to make his own living. His father's death, following Tesla's graduation from the University at Prague, made it necessary for him to be self-supporting. Now he needed a job. Europe was extending an enthusiastic reception to Alexander Graham Bell's new American invention, the telephone, and Tesla heard that a central station was to be installed in Budapest. The head of the enterprise was a friend of the family. The situation seemed a promising one.

Without waiting to ascertain the situation in Budapest, Tesla, full of youthful hope and the self-assurance which is typical of the untried graduate, traveled to that city, expecting to walk into an engineering position in the new telephone project. He quickly discovered, on his arrival, that there was no position open; nor could one be created for him, as the project was still in the discussion stage.

It was, however, urgently necessary for Wnancial reasons, that he secure immediately a job of some kind. The best he could obtain was a much more modest one than he had anticipated. The salary was so microscopically small he would never name the amount, but it was suYcient to enable him to avoid starvation. He was employed as draftsman by the Hungarian Government in its Central Telegraph OYce, which included the newly developing telephone in its jurisdiction.

It was not long before Tesla's outstanding ability attracted the attention of the Inspector in Chief. Soon he was transferred to a more responsible position in which he was engaged in designing and in making calculations and estimates in connection with new telephone installations. When the new telephone exchange was Wnally started in Budapest in 1881, he was placed in charge of it.

Tesla was very happy in his new position. At the age of twenty-Wve he was in full charge of an engineering enterprise. His inventive faculty was fully occupied and he made many improvements in telephone central-station apparatus. Here he made his Wrst invention, then called a telephone repeater, or ampliWer, but which today would be more descriptively called a loud speaker--an ancestor of the sound producer now so common in the home radio set. This invention was never patented and was never publicly described, but, Tesla later declared, in its originality, design, performance and ingenuity it would make a creditable showing alongside his better-known creations that followed. His chief interest, however, was still the alternating-current motor problem whose solution continued to elude him.

Always an indefatigable worker, always using up his available energy with the greatest number of activities he could crowd into a day, always rebelling because the days had too few hours in them and the hours too few minutes, and the seconds that composed them were of too short duration, and always holding himself down to a Wve-hour period of rest with only two hours of that devoted to sleep, he continually used up his vital reserves and eventually had to balance accounts with Nature. He was forced Wnally to discontinue work.

The peculiar malady that now aVected him was never diagnosed by the doctors who attended him. It was, however, an experience that nearly cost him his life. To doctors he appeared to be at death's door. The strange manifestations he exhibited attracted the attention of a renowned physician, who declared medical science could do nothing to aid him. One of the symptoms of the illness was an acute sensitivity of all of the sense organs. His senses had always been extremely keen, but this sensitivity was now so tremendously exaggerated that the eVects were a form of torture. The ticking of a watch three rooms away sounded like the beat of hammers on an anvil. The vibration of ordinary city traYc, when transmitted through a chair or bench, pounded through his body. It was necessary to place the legs of his bed on rubber pads to eliminate the vibrations. Ordinary speech sounded like thunderous pandemonium. The slightest touch had the mental eVect of a tremendous blow. A beam of sunlight shining on him produced the eVect of an internal explosion. In the dark he could sense an object at a distance of a dozen feet by a peculiar creepy sensation in his forehead. His whole body was constantly wracked by twitches and tremors. His pulse, he said, would vary from a few feeble throbs per minute to more than one hundred and Wfty.

Throughout this mysterious illness he was Wghting with powerful desire to recover his normal condition. He had before him a task he must accomplish--he must attain the solution of the alternating-current motor problem. He felt intuitively during his months of torment that the solution was coming ever nearer, and that he must live in order to be there when it crystallized out of his unconscious mind. During this period he was unable to concentrate on this or any other subject.

Once the crisis was past and the symptoms diminished, improvement came rapidly and with it the old urge to tackle problems. He could not give up his big problem. It had become a part of him. Working on it was no longer a matter of choice. He knew that if he stopped he would die, and he knew equally well that if he failed he would perish. He was enmeshed in an invisible web of intangible structure that was tightening around him. The feeling that it was bringing the solution nearer to him--just beyond his Wnger tips--was cause for both regret and rejoicing. That problem when solved would leave a tremendous vacancy in his life, he feared.

Yet in spite of his feeling of optimism it was still a tremendous problem without a solution.

When the acute sensitivity reduced to normal, permitting him to resume work, he took a walk in the city park of Budapest with a former classmate, named Szigeti, one late afternoon in February, 1882. While a glorious sunset overspread the sky with a Xamboyant splash of throbbing colors, Tesla engaged in one of his favorite hobbies--reciting poetry. As a youth he had memorized many volumes, and he was now pleased to note that the terriWc punishment his brain had experienced had not diminished his memory. One of the works which he could recite from beginning to end was Goethe's Faust.

The prismatic panorama which the sinking sun was painting in the sky reminded him of some of Goethe's beautiful lines:

The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;

It yonder hastes, new Welds of life exploring;

Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,

Upon its track to follow, follow soaring. . . .

Tesla, tall, lean and gaunt, but with a Wre in his eye that matched the Xaming clouds of the heavens, waved his arms in the air and swayed his body as he voiced the undulating lines. He faced the color drama of the sky as if addressing the red-glowing orb as it Xung its amorphous masses of hue, tint and chrome across the domed vault of heaven.

Suddenly the animated Wgure of Tesla snapped into a rigid pose as if he had fallen into a trance. Szigeti spoke to him but got no answer. Again his words were ignored. The friend was about to seize the towering motionless Wgure and shake him into consciousness when instead Tesla spoke.

``Watch me!'' said Tesla, blurting out the words like a child bubbling over with emotion: ``Watch me reverse it.'' He was still gazing into the sun as if that incandescent ball had thrown him into a hypnotic trance.

Szigeti recalled the image from Goethe that Tesla had been reciting: ``The glow retreats . . . It yonder hastes, new Welds of life exploring" a poetic description of the setting sun, and then his next words--''Watch me! Watch me reverse it.'' Did Tesla mean the sun? Did he mean that he could arrest the motion of the sun about to sink below the horizon, reverse its action and start it rising again toward the zenith?

``Let us sit and rest for a while,'' said Szigeti. He turned him toward a bench, but Tesla was not to be moved.

``Don't you see it?'' expostulated the excited Tesla. ``See how smoothly it is running? Now I throw this switch--and I reverse it. See! It goes just as smoothly in the opposite direction. Watch! I stop it. I start it. There is no sparking. There is nothing on it to spark.''

``But I see nothing,'' said Szigeti. ``The sun is not sparking. Are you ill?''

``You do not understand,'' beamed the still excited Tesla, turning as if to bestow a benediction on his companion. ``It is my alternating-current motor I am talking about. I have solved the problem. Can't you see it right here in front of me, running almost silently? It is the rotating magnetic Weld that does it. See how the magnetic Weld rotates and drags the armature around with it? Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it sublime? Isn't it simple? I have solved the problem. Now I can die happy. But I must live, I must return to work and build the motor so I can give it to the world. No more will men be slaves to hard tasks. My motor will set them free, it will do the work of the world.''

Szigeti now understood. Tesla had previously told him about his attempt to solve the problem of an alternating-current motor, and he grasped the full meaning of the scientist's words. Tesla had never told him, however, about his ability to visualize objects which he conceived in his mind, so it was necessary to explain the vision he saw, and that the solution had come to him suddenly while they were admiring the sunset.

Tesla was now a little more composed, but he was Xoating on air in a frenzy of almost religious ecstasy. He had been breathing deeply in his excitement, and the overventilation of his lungs had produced a state of exhilaration.

Picking up a twig, he used it as a scribe to draw a diagram on the dusty surface of the dirt walk. As he explained the technical principles of his discovery, his friend quickly grasped the beauty of his conception, and far into the night they remained together discussing its possibilities.

The conception of a rotating magnetic Weld was a majestically beautiful one. It introduced to the scientiWc world a new principle of sublime grandeur whose simplicity and utility opened a vast new empire of useful applications. In it Tesla had achieved the solution which his professor had declared was impossible of attainment.

Alternating-current motors had heretofore presented what seemed an insoluble problem because the magnetic Weld produced by alternating currents changed as rapidly as the current. Instead of producing a turning force they churned up useless vibration.

Up to this time everyone who tried to make an alternating-current motor used a single circuit, just as was in direct current. As a result the projected motor proved to be like a single-cylinder steam engine, stalled at dead center, at the top or bottom of the stroke.

What Tesla did was to use two circuits, each one carrying the same frequency of alternating-current, but in which the current waves were out of step with each other. This was equivalent to adding to an engine a second cylinder. The pistons in the two cylinders were connected to the shaft so that their cranks were at in angle to each other which caused them to reach the top or bottom of the stroke at diVerent times. The two could never be on dead center at the same time. If one were on dead center, the other would be oV and ready to start the engine turning with a power stroke.

This analogy oversimpliWes the situation, of course, for Tesla's discovery was much more far-reaching and fundamental. What Tesla had discovered was a means of creating a rotating magnetic Weld, a magnetic whirlwind in space which possessed fantastically new and intriguing properties. It was an utterly new conception. In direct-current motors a Wxed magnetic Weld was tricked by mechanical means into producing rotation in an armature by connecting successively through a commutator each of a series of coils arranged around the circumference of a cylindrical armature. Tesla produced a Weld of force which rotated in space at high speed and was able to lock tightly into its embrace an armature which required no electrical connections. The rotating Weld possessed the property of transferring wirelessly through space, by means of its lines of force, energy to the simple closed circuit coils on the isolated armature which enabled it to build up its own magnetic Weld that locked itself into the rotating magnetic whirlwind produced by the Weld coils. The need for a commutator was completely eliminated.

Now that this magniWcent solution of his most diYcult scientiWc problem was achieved, Tesla's troubles were not over; they were just beginning; but, during the next two months, he was in a state of ecstatic pleasure playing with his new toy. It was not necessary for him to construct models of copper and iron: in his mental workshop he constructed them in wide variety. A constant stream of new ideas was continuously rushing through his mind. They came so fast, he said, that he could neither utilize nor record them all. In this short period he evolved every type of motor which was later associated with his name.

He worked out the design of dynamos, motors, transformers and all other devices for a complete alternating-current system. He multiplied the eVectiveness of the two-phase system by making it operate on three or more alternating currents simultaneously. This was his famous polyphase power system.

The mental constructs were built with meticulous care as concerned size, strength, design and material; and they were tested mentally, he maintained, by having them run for weeks--after which time he would examine them thoroughly for signs of wear. Here was a most unusual mind being utilized in a most unusual way. If he at any time built a ``mental machine,'' his memory ever afterward retained all of the details, even to the Wnest dimensions.

The state of supreme happiness which Tesla was enjoying was

destined soon, however, to end. The telephone central station by which he was employed, and which was controlled by Puskas, that friend of the family, was sold. When Puskas returned to Paris, he recommended Tesla for a job in the Paris establishment with which he was associated, and Tesla gladly followed up his opportunity. Paris, he reasoned, would be a wonderful springboard from which to catapult his great invention on the world.

The budding superman Tesla came to Paris light in baggage but with his head Wlled to bursting with his wonderful discovery of the rotating magnetic Weld and scores of signiWcant inventions based on it. If he had been a typical inventor, he would have gone among people wearing a look indicating that he knew something important, but maintaining absolute secrecy concerning the nature of his inventions. He would be fearful that someone would steal his secret. But Tesla's attitude was just the reverse of this. He had something to give to the world and he wanted the world to know about it, the whole fascinating story with all the revealing technical details. He had not then learned, and never did learn, the craft of being shrewd and cunning. His life plan was on a secular basis. He cared less for the advantages of the passing moment, more for the ultimate goal; and he wanted to give his newly discovered polyphase system of alternating-current to the human race that all men could beneWt from it. He knew there was a fortune in his invention. How he could extract this fortune he did not know. He knew that there was a higher law of compensation under which he would derive adequate beneWts from the gift to the world of his discovery. The method by which this would work out did not interest him nearly so much as the necessity for getting someone to listen to the details of his fascinating invention.

Six feet two inches tall, slender, quiet of demeanor, meticulously neat in dress, full of self-conWdence, he carried himself with an air that shouted, ``I defy you to show me an electrical problem I can't solve''--an attitude that was consistent with his twenty-Wve years, but also matched by his ability.

Through Puskas's letter of recommendation he obtained a position with the Continental Edison Company, a French company organized to make dynamos, motors and install lighting systems under the Edison patents.

He obtained quarters on the Boulevard St. Michel, but in the evenings visited and dined at the best cafes as long as his salary lasted. He made contact with many Americans engaged in electrical enterprises. Wherever he could get a patient ear, among those who had an understanding of electrical matters, he described his alternating-current system of dynamos and motors.

Did someone steal his invention? Not the slightest danger. He could not even give it away. No one was even slightly interested. The closest approach to a nibble was when Dr. Cunningham, an American, a foreman in the plant where Tesla was employed, suggested formation of a stock company.

With his great alternating-current-system invention pounding at his brain and demanding some way in which it could be developed, it was a hardship for him to be forced to work all day on direct-current machines. Nowadays, though, his health was robust. He would arise shortly after Wve o'clock in the morning, walk to the Seine, swim for half an hour, and then walk to Ivry, near the gates of Paris, where he was employed, a trip that required an hour of lively stepping. It was then half-past seven. The next hour he spent in eating a very substantial breakfast which never seemed suYcient to keep his appetite from developing into a disturbing factor long before noon.

The work to which he was assigned at the Continental Edison Company factory was of a variegated character, largely that of a junior engineer. In a short time he was given a traveling assignment as a ``trouble shooter'' which required him to visit electrical installations in various parts of France and Germany. Tesla did not relish ``trouble shooting'' but he did a conscientious job and studied intensely the diYculties he encountered at each powerhouse. He was soon able to present a deWnite plan for improving the dynamos manufactured by his company. He presented his suggestions and received permission to apply them to some machines. When tested they were a complete success. He was then asked to design automatic regulators, for which there was a great need. These too gave an excellent performance.

The company had been placed in an embarrassing position and was threatened with heavy loss through an accident at the railroad station in Strassburg in Alsace, then in Germany, where a powerhouse and electric lights had been installed. At the opening ceremony, at which Emperor William I was present, a short circuit in the wiring caused an explosion that blew out one of the walls. The German government refused to accept the installation. Tesla was sent, early in 1883, to put the plant in working order and straighten out the situation. The technical problem presented no diYculties but he found it necessary to use a great deal of tact and good judgment in handling the mass of red tape extruded by the German government as precaution against further mishaps.

Once he got the job well under way he gave some time to constructing an actual two-phase alternating-current motor embodying his rotary-magnetic-Weld discovery. He had constructed so many in his mind since that never-to-be-forgotten day in Budapest when he made his great invention. He had brought materials with him from Paris for this purpose and found a machine shop near the Strassburg station where he could do some of the work. He did not have as much time available as he had expected, and, while he was a clever amateur machinist, nevertheless the work took time. He was very fussy, making every piece of metal exact in dimensions to better than the thousandth of an inch and then carefully polishing it.

Eventually there was a miscellaneous collection of parts in that Strassburg machine shop. They had been constructed without the aid of working drawings. Tesla could project before his eyes a picture, complete in every detail, of every part of the machine. These pictures were more vivid than any blueprint and he remembered exact dimensions which he had calculated mentally for each item. He did not have to test parts through partial assembly. He knew they would Wt.

From these parts Tesla quickly assembled a dynamo, to generate the two-phase alternating current which he needed to operate his alternating-current motor, and Wnally his new induction motor. There was no diVerence between the motor he built and the one which he vis