Thinking of Tesla

This winter, I plan to revisit Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor. I became completely engrossed in his life story some years ago after a friend lent me the definitive Margaret Cheney book, Tesla: Man Out of Time. His life story reads like that of so many under-appreciated geniuses; if it is possible to have fallen in love with a man long-dead, I did it, and I wish I could have known Tesla in his time.



Some humans are, quite simply, plugged into the divine. Mozart was one. I’d put Goya or Magritte on the list, too. And Tesla was most certainly out of his time, well beyond his time. It galls me that the Smithsonian gives him only a glancing mention, reserving the lion’s share of its praise for Edison. And to understand that resentment, you’d have to know about Tesla’s theory of alternating current and how Edison basically collaborated in burying the idea.

I was so enraptured by Tesla’s story that when I finished the book, I immediately read it again. I was so fired up by him, I spent days researching everything I could find on the web. I began a screenplay (which, to this day, starts and ends with the opening scene and imaginary credits. No, that’s not quite true. I actually have a few scenes more than that. And the beginning rocks. I can so see it on the big screen.)

Methinks with a long winter ahead, I might just haul it out of the dusty old “miscellaneous” folder and continue working on it…

Someone out there has already written a screenplay about Tesla and pitched it (so far, unsuccessfully) to Spielberg. At first I was ragingly jealous that this writer had beaten me to the punch, but the continued absence of a Tesla movie gives me hope. There were moments in the inventor’s life that were hilarious and others that were heartbreaking. (To wit: once, while experimenting alone in his lab, he unwittingly plunged the entire town around him into darkness; so engrossed was he, he had no idea of the havoc he was creating until a policeman banged on his door. At the end of his life, ill, disappointed, virtually friendless and subsisting almost entirely on milk alone, he found solace and an outlet for his love in feeding pigeons.)

There are lots of Tesla links out there. This one contains an anecdote from his childhood inventing days.

His sixteen-bug-power motor was, likewise, not an unqualified success. This was a light contrivance made of splinters forming a windmill, with a spindle and pulley attached to live June bugs. When the glued insects beat their wings, as they did desperately, the bug-power engine prepared to take off. This line of research was forever abandoned, however, when a young friend dropped by who fancied the taste of June bugs. Noticing a jarful standing near, he began cramming them into his mouth.

The youthful inventor threw up.
From "Tesla: Man Out of Time", by Margaret Cheney, 1981.

(Afterthought: the world has not entirely forgotten about Tesla: In the PC game Red Alert – which I played for more hours than I care to count -- you can purchase Tesla Coils to zap your enemies into tiny piles of dust; and the Teen and I saw the same coils used in an outdoor home security system in a very bad sci-fi movie, Curse of the Komodo. Cool. Just imagine having the lethal equivalent of giant tasers positioned around the perimeter of your yard. The motion-activated coil shoots out a stream of jagged lightning, and there goes the mailman.)