Nikola Tesla's smarter brother
Who doesn't love a freebie ? The autobiography: My Inventions by Nikola Tesla was presented in 6 parts of the February to June and October 1919 editions of The Electrical Experimenter magazine.
Find them on the wonderful World Radio History site:
https://worldradiohistory.com/Electrical_Experimenter.htm
Here are the links along with my notes:
part 1: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/EE-1919-02.pdf
Tesla's smarter brother died in a confrontation with a horse
His Father talked to himself, had a prodigious memory
His Mother was source of his inventiveness
he saw "visions", could visualize inventions in minds eye
a sort of mental simulation, he could do various versions in
his mind before actually building something for real
kind of like iterative computer simulation
he felt the Edison way was a waste of time
his father didn't want him reading his books (afraid tesla would ruin his eyesight)
he developed a strong will to tame his visions ?
part 2: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/EE-1919-03.pdf
he had his own opinions on health, coffee, tea: delicious but BAD, tobacco and chewing gum also BAD
he had an unfettered childhood and dodged many potentially deadly situations
he found out (as Houdini knew) that there is an air gap between covered water
(whether a sheet of ice or man-made covering) that has breathable air
he was left handed as a child, ambi later
first invention mentioned: a method for catching frogs with a bare hook
2nd: a may fly powered spindle
after they moved to town, he fixed the new fire engine pump
he resolved to harness the power of Niagara as a child
part 3: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/EE-1919-04.pdf
he was not good at drawing
he attributed his recovery from a life threatening illness during school to reading the
early works of Mark Twain, later he met Twain and Twain cried when Telsa told him about the recovery
he was sick with cholera after getting out of school, the man got sick a lot
he had very acute hearing and eyesight, the hearing bothered him, esp. sleeping
the induction system came to him in a flash while walking in a Budapest park
part 4: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/EE-1919-05.pdf
he meets Charles Batchelor (Edison friend) in Paris after working in Budapest for the telephone/telegraph
Batchelor gets him to travel to the USA to work for Edison, doesn't work out, $50k offered by an Edison foreman was a "joke"
1st Tesla company arc lighting
1887, a second company for the motors, sold idea to Westinghouse 1888
gets interested in higher freq AC, starts fooling with Tesla coil
part 5: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/EE-1919-06.pdf
boasts about his Tesla turbine
uses Tesla coil to light bulbs wirelessly
goes to England and wows them with demos
he seems prone to correlation versus causation errors
he builds a really big Tesla coil in CO
likes to claim things that may well not be true or at least are unreproducible
used the earth to transmit energy ?
mentions the Long Island tower and how it was destroyed a couple of years before the article date
also mentions JP Morgan as a benefactor
part 6: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/EE-1919-10.pdf
an admitted bs'er, he claimed to be Steve Brodie (BASE) in a bar, was chased out back to his lab
was big on teleautomatics, guess we'd call it remote control RC or a drone now
Ford engineers wanted to talk psychic phenomena not his turbine in middle 19-teens
he didn't believe in spiritualism or psychology but he did believe in automatism
(we respond to physical stimulus, we are like fundamental particles of physics ?)
he proposed self driving cars before the 20th century
he says that the league of nations won't work
next war will be even more terrible, terms of peace for this war shouldn't have been so punitive
but if we adopt his flying machines and wireless power, smooth sailing and no problems !
I can see where latter day biographers have used these articles as a source:
https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/05/tesla-his-tremendous-and-troubled-life.html
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm