Hands On

INVENTOR NIKOLA TESLA SAW REALITY IN HIS OWN WAY.

By Bruce Sterling

IT’S A TOY IN A MUSEUM: AN EGG IN A bowl. The egg shifts restlessly. It rocks and it rolls. The wandering egg explores the bowl’s limits. It dances arcs within the bowl’s tall rim.

Then, just when it seems about to free itself and fly out of the bowl toward its viewers, the egg hesitates. Somehow, mystically, the egg wriggles upright onto one of its ends.

The egg is spinning like a top. It has achieved some kind of post-chaotic feat of stability, and now drifts smoothly back to the spot where it started: the center of the bowl. There, dead center, it spins like crazy, self-contained and untouchable, defying gravity, friction, and common sense.

On its aging shelf inside Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla

Museum, the Egg of Columbus spins like a turbine. The egg is a turbine — the conceptual ancestor of pretty much every electrical motor in the world.

Technologists tinker. They engage with the grain of the material, testing empirical realities, pushing strange people and flew through the air, were lucid for higher performance. Scientists seek out unifying dreams. His existential loathing for pearls was prob-laws and principles that make sense of the natural ably a phobia. Tesla forced himself to read all 100 world. Nikola Tesla, an inventor, did neither of these volumes of Voltaire’s complete works, in French, things. He saw reality in his own way. which indicates that he likely suffered from obses-

Tesla’s testament, My Inventions, written in later sive-compulsive disorder. He had hallucinations on years when he was drifting through fleabag New tap as an everyday mental utility. Tesla could visual-York hotels and feeding pigeons, is a painfully sincere ize imaginary machines down to the last detail, even account of what life felt like for him. The work is the rust and wear-marks. intensely psychedelic: visual hallucinations were Except for his invention of the alternating-current always the most exciting and significant things that induction motor, a huge advance that transformed happened to Tesla. A true visionary, Tesla experienced civilization and later contributed to what is known mind-bending flashes of insight, sometimes accom- today as the greenhouse effect, Tesla’s genius was panied by tongues of fire. mostly a personal matter. Wizards prize spiritual

Tall, good-looking, and sturdy, Tesla was capable advancement over mere cash and power. Poverty and of handling various and sundry tools: he could wire privation were an adventure for Tesla. Even when his a ship, fix a fire engine, and dig a ditch. But Tesla did pockets were brimming with money (rather often), he not hack; he didn’t tinker. He invented through his took a positive pleasure in systematically depriving immensely detailed and vivid mental visions. himself of food, booze, gambling, cigarettes, and

Although Tesla blew through college in mere women. In the long decades of his adult life, Tesla months, absently memorizing entire books and never changed weight: he liked to volumetrically

deftly speaking multiple languages, he didn’t consider himself a genius. Tesla had an older brother who was much brighter, more capable, and more ambitious than himself, but who (maybe luckily for the human race) died young.

There may not be adequate words to describe the extreme events that took place within Tesla’s skull. The shattering flashes of light that paralyzed him were likely migraines. The childish bedtime trips into imaginary Oz-like cities, where he befriended

Tesla could visualize imaginary machines down to the last detail, even the rust and wear-marks.

Photograph by Bruce Sterling

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