Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah Read Free

I never knew before – that of doing as I willed,’ he said.
    Following the incident of the torn train, Tesla had been ostracized in Gospic. Now he managed to redeem himself. The town had recently organized a fire department and was showing off its new fire engine. The entire populace turned out for the ceremony and speeches. With the hose at the ready, the order was given to start pumping, but not a drop of water came out. While the bigwigs tried in vain to locate the trouble, Tesla felt instinctively for the suction hose that ran down into the river. He found it collapsed. Plainly there was a blockage, so he waded into the river and unblocked it. Suddenly he was the hero of the day and found himself carried shoulder high.
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    Calculus, Coils and Turbines
    At 10 years old, Tesla entered the local Real Gymnasium – the equivalent of a British prep school or an American junior high school. It had a well-equipped physics department.
    â€˜ I was interested in electricity almost from the beginning of my educational career,’ he said. ‘I read all that I could find on the subject … [and] experimented with batteries and induction coils.’
    He was also keen on waterwheels and turbines, and experimented designing a flying machine which, he realized later, could not work because it depended on perpetual motion. Then, after seeing a picture of Niagara Falls, he told his Uncle Josif that one day he would go to America and put a big wheel under the falls to harness its power.
    Finishing at the Real Gymnasium at the age of 14, Tesla fell ill. During his youth he claimed that three times he was in such a bad way that he was ‘given up by physicians’. While he was recuperating, the local library sent all the books it had not catalogued for Nikola to read and classify. It was then, for the first time, he came across the works of Mark Twain, whom he would later befriend.
    When he recovered, his father sent him to Karlovac – also known as Karlstadt – to the Higher Real Gymnasium to prepare him for the seminary. Nikola’s father was still determined that his son should follow him into the priesthood, a prospect which filled Tesla with dread. At the Higher Real Gymnasium, he showed early signs of genius, performing integral calculus in his head, leading his teachers to think he was cheating.
    Again the Gymnasium at Karlovac had a good physics department. Tesla became fascinated by the Crookes radiometer they had there. Invented by British scientist William Crookes, it consisted of four metal vanes, polished on one side, blackened on the other, mounted on a vertical pivot in a glass bulb. The mechanism spun when bright light fell on it. It was also in Karlovac, in 1870, he saw, for the first time, a steam train.
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    Contracting Cholera and Recuperating
    When he had completed his studies at Karlovac, Tesla got a message from his father telling him to go into the mountains with a hunting party. This puzzled him as his father did not approve of hunting, so he ignored the message and returned to Gospic to find it in the grip of a cholera epidemic. That was why his father wanted him to stay away. Nikola soon came down with the disease and was confined to bed for nine months. When he was at death’s door, his father tried to encourage him in the hope he would rally. Nikola seized the opportunity and said to his father: ‘Perhaps I may get well if you will let me study engineering.’ His father replied: ‘You will go to the best technical institution in the world.’ After that he pulled through.
    During his recuperation, he would take long walks in the forest. Along the way he conceived a way to send letters and parcels between continents via tubes under the oceans. Mail would be packed in balls that would be forced along the pipes by water at high pressure. However, he did not take into account the resistance to the flow of water and the system would not have worked.
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