My Inventions

This autobiography traces the life and work of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian American inventor and electrical engineer, from his childhood in the rural Balkans through his major discoveries and his ambitious, unfinished plans for wireless energy transmission.

Tesla opens with a philosophical reflection on invention as the most important product of the human creative brain. He then turns to his upbringing in the village of Smiljan, in what is now Croatia. His older brother possessed extraordinary mental gifts, but the brother's premature death, caused by injuries inflicted by the family horse, left their parents inconsolable. Because anything Tesla accomplished only deepened their grief, he grew up with little confidence. His father, a clergyman of great erudition, subjected Tesla to rigorous daily mental exercises to strengthen memory and reason. His mother, whom Tesla credits as the source of his inventiveness, descended from a line of inventors.

From an early age, Tesla experienced a peculiar affliction: vivid, involuntary images of things he had actually seen, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, so forceful that he sometimes could not distinguish them from real objects. To banish these images, he began conjuring new mental pictures, eventually "traveling" in his imagination to distant cities. Around age 17, he discovered that this faculty allowed him to visualize, build, modify, and test devices entirely in his imagination without models or experiments. He claims that in 20 years this method never failed. The affliction also led him to conclude that every thought was prompted by an external impression, making him merely an automaton responding to stimuli, a concept he later connected to his work on remote-controlled machines.

Tesla catalogs other unusual experiences from his youth, including compulsive behaviors such as counting steps, needing all repeated acts to be divisible by three, and experiencing violent sensory aversions. Up to age eight, he was weak-willed and fearful, but reading Abafi, a novel by the Hungarian writer Josika, awakened his willpower. He gradually conquered a gambling addiction, aided by his mother's tactic of handing him money and telling him to lose it all, and later overcame excessive smoking and coffee consumption through the same discipline. He also recounts his inventive childhood: fashioning fishhooks, harnessing May-bugs (a type of beetle) to generate rotational power, and disassembling his grandfather's clocks.

At age six, his family moved to Gospic. During his school years, he built water turbines and, after reading about Niagara Falls, told his uncle he would go to America and harness them, a vision realized 30 years later. At the Real Gymnasium (a type of secondary school), he excelled in mathematics but fell gravely ill and recovered only after reading the works of Mark Twain, the American humorist. His parents insisted he enter the clergy, but Tesla had become passionately interested in electricity. After contracting cholera and nearly dying, he extracted a deathbed promise from his father to let him study engineering.

After convalescence, Tesla entered the Polytechnic School in Gratz, Styria (now Graz, Austria), where in his first year he worked from 3 a.m. to 11 p.m. and earned the highest marks. When a Gramme dynamo, a type of direct-current generator, sparked badly during a demonstration, Tesla suggested it might be possible to operate a motor without a commutator, the rotary switch that directs current in such machines. His physics professor, Prof. Poeschl, delivered an entire lecture refuting the idea, but Tesla remained convinced and spent years mentally investigating the problem.

In 1881, Tesla moved to Budapest to work on a new telephone exchange. There he experienced a devastating nervous breakdown marked by extraordinarily heightened senses: he could hear a watch ticking three rooms away, and sunlight felt like physical blows to his brain. Through sheer will and the help of a devoted athletic friend, he recovered. One afternoon, while walking in the Budapest City Park and reciting Goethe's Faust, the solution came to him in a flash. He drew diagrams of the rotating magnetic field—the electromagnetic principle by which alternating currents of different phase create a continuously spinning force capable of driving a motor without a commutator—in the sand and told his companion he could see his motor and reverse it. In less than two months, he mentally developed virtually all the types of alternating-current motors later identified with his name.

Tesla took a position at the Budapest Central Telegraph Office, then moved to Paris, where he worked at the Edison Company's factory. Sent to Strassburg (now Strasbourg) in early 1883 to repair a damaged lighting plant, he built a simple motor and achieved rotation by alternating currents of different phase without a commutator, the physical realization of his Budapest vision. After being denied promised compensation in Paris, he was urged by Charles Batchellor, Edison's manager, to go to America.

Arriving in New York, Tesla met Thomas Edison, whom he admired as a self-taught genius, and quickly earned Edison's confidence by repairing disabled dynamos aboard the S.S. Oregon overnight. Tesla designed 24 types of standard machines, but the promised $50,000 reward turned out to be a joke, and he resigned. After a failed arc light venture and a period of hardship, the Tesla Electric Company was organized in April 1887. The motors he built matched exactly the images from his mental visualizations, and in early 1888, he arranged with the Westinghouse Company for large-scale manufacture.

Returning to New York at the close of 1889, Tesla developed induction apparatus based on the 1856 theory of condenser discharge, the rapid release of electrical energy stored in a capacitor, advanced by Lord Kelvin, the British physicist. By 1891, he demonstrated the Tesla Coil, a high-voltage resonant transformer for generating powerful electrical sparks and oscillations, which came into universal use. In 1900, he obtained discharges of 100 feet and transmitted a current around the globe.

Tesla traces the origins of his greatest invention, the Magnifying Transmitter, a resonant transformer designed for large-scale wireless energy transmission, to a childhood fascination with how small actions can be magnified through resonance. In 1892, he lectured in London, where the scientist Sir James Dewar seated him in the chair of the pioneering physicist Michael Faraday, and the prominent scientist Lord Rayleigh praised his work. After years of development, including the loss of his laboratory to fire in 1895, he traveled to Colorado in 1899, where he spent over a year generating currents of virtually any desired tension. He outlines an ambitious "World-System" for worldwide wireless transmission of signals, energy, and information. A plant was built on Long Island with a 187-foot tower, supported in part by financier J. Pierpont Morgan, but the tower was destroyed before the system became operational.

In his final chapters, Tesla discusses his mental recuperation methods and reaffirms his belief that humans are automata controlled by external forces. He warns that releasing atomic energy could bring disaster, arguing that the greatest good comes from technologies promoting unification and harmony. He recounts a seemingly supernatural vision at the time of his mother's death, which he explains as a recalled painting combined with music from a nearby church choir. He describes his development of telautomatics, or remote-controlled automata, including a radio-controlled boat exhibited in 1898 that created a sensation. He envisions future autonomous machines and aerial devices sustained entirely by reaction. Tesla closes by arguing against government monopoly of wireless communication, connecting his vision of permanent peace to the annihilation of distance, and warning that future weapons could destroy any city from any distance.