I read that last one, on "Telautomatics". He mentions his attempt to interest auto manufacturers in a self-driving car. But he also describes some kind of odd flying machine that doesn't use wings or propellers etc, relying purely on "reactions". What could he have been talking about? Inertial propulsion? Some kind of reaction against electromagnetic fields? There is a great illustration of this thing. Weird. (Incidentally, you could draw a straight line from all those magazine ads to today's YouTube versions)
I miss those old magazines, what a medium for transmitting ideas. I love Tesla but he really had some cra-cra ideas, particularly about Earth and oceans as conductors.
Interesting you say that about his ideas on earth science... because that's what I find most intriguing. I admit I don't completely understand him yet but I plan to further research it. In addition, there seem to be striking similarities with his Wardenclyffe Tower and the Great Pyramids of Giza (i.e. aquaphors) which all the more is curious for me.
"I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours."
"Our first endeavors are purely instinctive, promptings of an imagination vivid and undisciplined...but those early impulses, tho not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies."
"When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination".
"But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile."
> "But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile."
Similar to remarks on human intuition. And that's how Intuition Peak in Antarctica came to be named, by a scientist (I asked him about it).
The Commission approves Bulgarian place names in Antarctica, which are formally given by the President of the Republic according to the Bulgarian Constitution
A particular point Tesla repeats throughout the short essay is how he would spend lots of time visually imagining his inventions to each particular part. This small point is worth considering and I quite frankly enjoy doing too (I stayed up for hours last night visualizing and "editing" structures in my brain !)
I literally cannot think of anything more visually complicated than a chair in my head before the image becomes disproportionate and inconsistent. Is having a robust, precise internal visual imagination a requirement for being a good engineer? I often think about the specific mental faculties that make certain technical tasks a breeze for some and near impossible for others.
When I come up with something new and complex (either something that qualifies as an invention or just trying to solve a complex data analysis problem using a single SQL statement), I tend to first have a big blur in my brain... And then it may feel promising... and then individual structural components of the final solution start to emerge non-visually (like where to apply recursion in SQL that generates data for the remaining layers)... it's more like that I feel that there are some solid parts (vs entropy?) in that blob... the whole thing doesn't fully make sense until the last important component has "manifested" itself. Nothing visual though and often I have to "roll back" to the blurry blob from half an hour ago and wait until something better manifests itself from there. Doesn't always work and sleep helps! :-)
I would have agreed with this statement every day of my life until yesterday because Nikola Tesla has pulled apart many of my presumptions.
For example, sleep. Tesla slept 4 hours/night in his first year in college and would sleep 2-3 hours in adulthood. (wikipedia). There are some explanations of short amounts of sleep for sustained periods as demonstrated by those that practice polyphasic sleep [1]. Yet these polyphasic sleepers, obtain "bodily rest" because of hours of sitting at a desk. Yet even this seems to defy Tesla's life where he would walk 8-10 miles PER DAY (wkipedia).
Despite very little brain rest or bodily rest, he was one of the brightest minds AND lived to age 86.
Tesla was pretty healthy, as far as I can tell, despite being in abject poverty in his later decades. However, he did suffer several mental episodes in his life, and I think he probably over worked himself and experienced some emotional trauma, which could have been exacerbated by lack of sleep. He was also not overly shy regarding his talents, and despite likely being well above average intelligence and a very hard worker, he probably exaggerated many things.
Tesla is forever one of the most interesting people to me. He was truly not a man of his time in many ways and ultimately a tragic figure.
Considering how many professional chess players can play chess blindfolded/in their head, I suspect there's a lot of intuition building/chunking that happens throughout the years before such facilities can emerge in one's mind.
Very interesting point. It does make sense that Tesla who primarily worked in the field of electricity & magnetism would develop a faster intuition of inventions related the forces.
Nah man. You know how to set up the board. Its just a static file in your head but you know what it looks like, you know how the pieces move, you know the alphabet, you can count to 8. Now all you need is someone of equal skill to play against and write down the moves. The one to make an illegal move first loses.
Not at all! You can improve like any other faculty of the mind! Even Tesla described that initially the images he would see would be a big blur but after "practice" they became significantly sharper. He could then even visualize motion of objects.
It is funny. Until I read Tesla's stuff I had no idea that not everyone does this. I visualize and tear down machines and designs in my head. Design in my sleep...etc.
Sometimes when I am describing a machine and how it works my hands move as if I am positioning the machine...because in my vision..it is really there. It blocks out the "real world" if I let it.
I was always criticized in school for daydreaming...I suspect this is why.
I always love hearing about how people visualize. I have almost zero visualization abilities. Instead I seem to get by on intuition. I can sort of just sense the direction i need to go, technically, and then try it out and iterate on it. There is never a clear picture until its done. Iterating is probably way less effective than good visualization, but its all I got.
This is also something Tesla would do!
- "But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile."
Yes. I learned CAD on my own...not saying "self taught" since I used other people's videos and guides sometimes...but more "self guided" which is how I would probably describe most of my learning. I was also the "C" student who aced the standardized tests. Never enjoyed school...read ahead a lot...told "we don't care if you get the right answer...do it our way".
I don't recall any time where I couldn't visualize. I can remember back to when I was 3-4 fairly well and I always remember this being part of how I am.
For the most part I remember everything I read also...which can be bad since at times misinformation that has also been memorized makes me second guess.
As far as designing in my sleep...I mainly just focus on the problem as I am falling asleep. I find that when I wake typically there will be progress on the design which I can go mechanically work on. This is mostly during the assembly phase that I use this though...when I am actually assembling the machine and debugging the last minute "gotchas".
I suppose, for me, I've never spent time working on physical problems until now. Most of my life I've worked on programming problems or mathematical problems or other abstract problems which didn't require the highest level of visualization.
I do clearly remember daydreaming in AP Spanish about projects too lol.
I certainly do this with code. Sometimes I am working well at the computer, but sometimes I go walk in the woods for a few hours and go over architectures in my head, probing for details I might have missed that would change the design.
I feel one thing isnt mentioned often enough, or actually 2: If you invent something, start looking at the previous art sooner. 2) Limit creative insanity or genius to one thing and keep everything else as boring as possible. When the garage explodes you know why and you have at most 1 biohazard at a time.
Well I can't delve into too much detail yet but it includes a bunch of moving gears that aren't trivial to keep in place. So I'm trying to figure out some casings for the motor.
When I first read Tesla's writing last night, I began by just simply allowing my imagination to do a test run of building something. I first began by imagining a cylinder. I rotated the cylinder and observed the sharp edges. I didn't like that so I smoothed it out. Then I imagined a hollowed out cylinder with its edges smoothed out. How about adding a horizontal beam through it. Or maybe two? And what if they intersect. All of this I would imagine in my head.
Overall, it felt like a more versatile approach then spending hours tinkering with Freecad. I spent a bit more time coming up with models for my specific project before realizing it was 1:30 AM. WARNING: THIS METHOD WILL KEEP YOU AWAKE AT NIGHT FOR HOURS.
Thanks for sharing, I also enjoy staring at a blank wall and letting my mind think about various inventions and projects. Usually they are kinetic art ideas with novel movements. I probably have 20 good ideas that I keep iterating on. The other night I had a dream about a kinetic art piece and was able to wake up with full details on how it could work - this was a first for me. Now I just need to build them!
all kinds! Thinking of a good example: An ally with a vending machine at the end and a conveyor belt as the floor of the alley. If you try to smash or damage the machine the conveyor belt will prevent you from walking away.
well, you cant have the machine harm a person (however much fun that seems) but you can give them the impression they can just run away and have them run against an algo that will only just prevent it. It should be crafted perfectly to keep the test subject under the impression they almost made it. If they want to fall down and hurt themselves that is entirely up to then. There is the calm voice instructing to wait for the authorities, that is the best we can do.
If they some how run to fast or if someone comes to help them with a rope sudden stops and reversal should make the adventure more adventurous.
The goal is to convince the test subject it isn't worth damaging the machine. People like that have a hard time remembering what not to do.
I'm not a sadist, the machine will feed them however long they are stuck there.
This, written in later life, only briefly mentions the thing Tesla invented that was most useful. Tesla figured out how to get AC motors started. See his U.S. Patents #459,772 and #464,466. The second one shows how to use a starting capacitor, which is how AC motors are started today.
AC motors were known before Tesla, but getting them up to speed with the power source was tough. It usually required a second motor with a commutator to get the AC motor started.
Tesla figured out a simpler way, one that made AC motors simpler and cheaper than DC motors.
DC motors with commutators were easier to start and more controllable, but less reliable. Early motors had actual wire brushes, which arced, wore out, needed adjustment, and wore grooves in the commutator. Carbon brushes came later, and really good carbon/graphite brushes were not developed until well into the 20th century. It's one of those materials quality things that isn't thought about much any more, because it's a solved problem.
These are very interesting, thanks for sharing! This autobiography seems to illustrate the principles that went into coming up with such ideas for patents.
What's interesting about Tesla is that his visualization powess. He was gifted with insane capabilities of visualization. He said he would build assemble his inventions in his head, go to the lab to build it. And it would work on the first attempt.
That's similar to coming up with all the code in your head and passing the compiler and tests on the first try without any errors.
He was indeed gifted with insane sensitivity to his senses. However, he describes his visualization process as somewhat learned, like a brain exercise.
In the beginning, he described, images in his mind would be blurred but after "practice", they became much sharper.
Tesla was weird. I guess you have to be extraordinary to do extraordinary things. Einstein was also big on imagination, but I guess with none of the weird stuff. Another two interesting figures are Jack Parsons and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Jack was heavily involved in the occult and followed Thelema which was founded by Aleister Crowley which included lots of sex magick and the like. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry and astronautics, and he claimed to be speaking to extraterrestrial beings from time to time who would give him information.
Tesla was a lot weirder than Einstein, but Einstein's personal life was not totally normal. He wrote his wife a letter saying “You will expect no affection from me”, cheated on her with his first cousin, then married his first cousin, but only after deciding against marrying her daughter instead.
One biographer of Tesla seems to think he had an emotional relationship with Katherine Johnson, who was friends with Tesla with her husband Robert Underwood Johnson. It is my understanding that they were his closest friends and that Tesla and Katherine would exchange letters.
He was strongly convinced that electromagnetic waves as described by Maxwell and experimentally shown by Hertz were uselessly wrong theory and that Hertz didn't understand the results of his own experiment (According to Tesla electromagnetic waves were longitudinal, i.e. more like space contracting and expanding around the transmitter). His own theories generally are based around assumptions that the earth and parts of the atmosphere are really good conductors and energy would somehow flow through them almost losslessly if it just were done right. I don't think he ever published a unified theory on how exactly that would work. In contrast Maxwell's equations are still part of every physics curriculum.
I think a more basic way of describing it is that he was one of the last scientists to hold onto the theory of needing an "aether" for EM waves to travel through.
The Michelson Morley experiment was in the 1880s and Tesla held on to the "luminiferous aether" theory until he died in the 1940's I believe. I seem to remember that he thought all other theories were "flawed" like you said.
People will say "Tesla was smart but not a good businessman, etc" and obviously he was a smart guy but still a tragic figure for holding onto old theories some of which bankrupted him.
Well, he alternated between not believing in the existence of (EM) radio waves at all and claiming that they were useless for transmitting messages, which isn't the same as the luminiferous ether idea.
Belief in a luminiferous ether (that fills all of space) is consistent with the idea that EM waves can travel through space (after all, we can see light coming from the Sun, etc.) and that radio waves could be used.
But Tesla seems to have argued that working "radio" technology was really electrical currents traveling through the ground (or through the ocean in the case of radio on ships), which then somehow induced "reception" in the radio equipment located above the currents.
It is sad because this is where Tesla went off the rails. If he had kept working on radio, he would have likely shared 1909 Nobel Prize for radio. Tesla wasn’t a good business man but could have revived his career.
I think he is talking about Tesla’s wireless power transmission. If I’m reading Wikipedia right, he ignored Hertz’s work that described inverse-square and straight line propagation because didn’t fit his idea of long-distance wireless power. But Wardenclyffe was a failure and we now know could never work.
So I am open-minded and optimistic about Wardenclyffe, due to the fact that a wire hanging in the open air will conduct voltage from upper atmosphere to lower atmosphere. So there is a natural gradient that could be leveraged, somehow.
Ultimately, I think we will never know because funding for the project was pulled and the building demolished. Besides, Tesla made significant nonintuitive advances in his fields which does not make it easy to dismiss his ideas.
That part of the article ("The Magnifying Transmitter") is just gibberish. Tesla's mental health must already have been in steep decline by 1919. Or he was intentionally trying to bullshit people.
* February 1919 (The My Inventions series begins with Part 1, My Early Life, on page 696): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimente...
* March 1919 (Part 2, My First Efforts in Invention, begins on page 776): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimente...
* April 1919 (Part 3, My Later Endeavors, begins on page 864): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimente...
* May 1919 (Part 4, The Discovery of the Tesla Coil and Transformer, begins on page 16): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimente...
* June 1919 (Part 5, The Magnifying Transmitter, begins on page 112): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimente...
* October 1919 (Part 6, The Art of Telautomatics, begins on page 506): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimente...