Supercharged

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 to a Serbian family of an orthodox priest and his uneducated wife in Smiljan, Croatia. From a young age he exhibited an eidetic memory, extraordinary talent in mathematics and poetry, and described very vivid mental imagery in approaching school work or his daydreams. Tesla is credited with developing the theory behind alternating current power grid that the world runs on today, and for the machinery that allowed it to be a revolution in efficiency at the time.

Tesla in his lab in Colorado, 1899

In 1876, a professor performed a demonstration of a motor/generator, which had a wire brush component on it called a commutator that would conduct charge from a moving axle, resulting in heavy sparking. Tesla argued with the professor, claiming that the inevitable sparking is terribly inefficient and that it was possible to design a motor without such sparking. The widely accepted view was that such a flaw was inherent to the machine, and his professor and classmates heavily resisted him. The professor went as far to dedicate a 1-hour lecture to discussing the failures of Tesla’s theory and how it contradicted the model accepted by the electrical engineering community.

Tesla never finished university after he developed an addiction to gambling and stopped attending lectures, but still mulled over the problem in his head. While on a walk with a friend he stopped abruptly, staring straight into the sky, and gestured at something unseen:

“See how smoothly it is running? Now I throw this switch — and I reverse it. See! It goes just as smoothly in the opposite direction. Watch! I stop it. I start it. There is no sparking. There is nothing on it to spark.”

He looked quite insane to his friend, but Tesla had conceived of an induction motor which defeated the assumption of his time and relied on a novel theory of electricity – alternating current. Instead of traveling in one direction, like direct current in a battery, alternating switched direction multiple times a second.

Tesla came to New York in 1884 and was employed by Thomas Edison and his international company, but this partnership quickly disintegrated since Edison was developing direct current machinery and power systems that Tesla believed were inferior to his own designs. The tension between Tesla and Edison rose once Tesla received funding from the Westinghouse electrical company, allowing him to develop myriad transformers, generators, lights, and appliances for alternating current. This precipitated into a massive struggle between Edison’s widely accepted direct current system and Tesla’s new alternating current system cities began to build electrical power grids. Edison, having already established a reliable electrical company, sought to smear Tesla by claiming his system was too dangerous for consumers and ineffective.  On top of this, Tesla faced several instants of bankruptcy and the destruction of his laboratory, but through public demonstrations, like displaying his functioning motors and passing alternating current through his own body, he convinced the public and private enterprise to accept his vision. In the end alternating won out and Tesla’s alternating current system became the standard across the US and Europe, besting the more widely respected direct current systems.

 When sitting down to draft this post I wondered how my laptop charged and, through a Wikipedia rabbit hole regarding the power grid and additional research, I found myself awestruck by Tesla and his creativity in such a rigid science as electrical engineering.  He was wildly intelligent and could view in his mind’s eye every detail of an imaginary device and watch it function – disassembling and editing it without ever grabbing a pen. Beyond the unique cognitive process of Tesla was the duel intelligent and naïve personality he possessed, as discussed by Csikszentmihalyi in The Creative Personality. Tesla’s naivete manifested in his firm position against university staff that their fundamental understanding of power generation was flawed, even after he dropped out. Again, his naivete surfaced in contradicting the world’s largest electrical entrepreneur to completely revolutionize how people accessed power. Naivete isn’t stupidity; Tesla succeeded in challenging his contemporaries because he was highly gifted. Naivete is believe that you know or see something different from everyone else before you and embraces thinking that diverges from what you ought to accept. Not only did Tesla diverge from previous notions of how generator’s work and how electricity must behave, but – more importantly- his ideas then became accepted by his field and transformed the domain. He gave lectures at major universities once he succeeded over Edison, and now you can’t crack a physics text book without seeing alternating current mentioned. Such a characteristic of a creative personality, where immense cognitive ability intersect with naïve confidence, is responsible for Tesla not only challenging the facts of his time but rewriting them all together.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikola-Tesla
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/patents
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/timeline/1856-birth-nikola-tesla