My Inventions (Chapter 2 Excerpt)

My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla by Nikola Tesla (1919)

Preface: A Mind That Worked Differently

Nikola Tesla published his autobiography in serial form in the electrical journal Electrical Experimenter in 1919, when he was sixty-two years old and largely forgotten by the scientific establishment that had once celebrated him. It is one of the most unusual scientific autobiographies ever written — less a narrative of external events than a document of a particular way of perceiving and thinking, full of extraordinary psychological revelations that its author seems unaware are extraordinary.

Part One: My Early Life

Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, a village in what is now Croatia, to a Serbian Orthodox priest and his wife. He credits his mother with his inventive gifts: she was illiterate but possessed a remarkable memory and spent her days constructing ingenious small machines and household devices. He credits his father with his discipline and language.

From childhood, Tesla experienced what he later called "flashes of light" — involuntary visual phenomena that accompanied his intense mental activity. These disturbed him as a child; as an adult, he came to understand them as a feature of his cognitive style. He was able to visualise three-dimensional mechanical objects with complete accuracy, to run them in his imagination, to observe the wear on their parts after years of imagined operation — and this visualisation was, he insists, completely reliable.

"I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In twenty years there has not been a single exception."

This is either the most extraordinary or the most unreliable claim in the history of science — or perhaps both.

Part Two: The Discovery of the Rotating Magnetic Field

Tesla's central contribution to electrical science was the alternating current (AC) motor, powered by the rotating magnetic field — a concept that came to him in a vision while walking in a park in Budapest in February 1882.

He writes of this moment with the specificity of a man who has replayed it thousands of times:

"I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe's Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of the glorious passage. As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers."

The rotating magnetic field — the principle that an alternating current could be used to create a motor without brushes or commutator — was the theoretical breakthrough that made modern electrical distribution possible. Without it, the electrical industry as it exists would not exist.

Part Three: Coming to America — Edison and Westinghouse

Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 with four cents, a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, some poems, and, as he later noted with characteristic dryness, "a knowledge of eleven languages."

He worked for Edison for approximately a year, redesigning Edison's direct current (DC) generators. Edison offered him fifty thousand dollars if he succeeded; when Tesla succeeded and asked for the money, Edison laughed and told him he didn't understand "American humour."

Tesla then sold his AC patents to George Westinghouse, who used them in the "War of Currents" against Edison. Edison fought back with a campaign designed to demonstrate that AC current was dangerous — most infamously by publicly electrocuting animals with alternating current and lobbying for AC to be used in the first electric chair, so that its name would be associated with death. Tesla's system won regardless, because it was objectively superior: AC can be transmitted over long distances; DC cannot.

Part Four: The Later Years — Vision and Isolation

By 1919, Tesla had made discoveries across radio, radar, X-rays, robotics, and wireless power transmission that his contemporaries had largely failed to appreciate. He died in 1943 in a New York hotel room, penniless, having given away his patents and lost most of his money in failed ventures.

But the autobiography shows none of the bitterness one might expect. It shows, instead, a man so completely absorbed in the interior life of invention that external failure and poverty seem almost irrelevant to him.

"I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one I loved above all others. Whenever I was in trouble it would come to me. This pigeon was the joy of my life."

This passage — in the middle of a technical autobiography — is one of the most touching in scientific literature. It reveals a man for whom the pigeons were not a displacement of human connection but its genuine substitute: a form of love available to someone whose cognitive style made ordinary human intimacy difficult.

Key Themes for Analysis:

Visualisation as invention: Tesla's method of complete mental prototyping before any physical construction is unusual but not unique — many inventors and mathematicians describe similar processes. What is unusual is Tesla's absolute confidence in it and his fifty-year record of apparently accurate mental testing.

The relationship between genius and ordinary social life: Tesla's autobiography reveals a man who struggled with social conventions, sensory sensitivities (he could not bear the sight of pearl earrings, the sound of certain frequencies, specific textures), and conventional career structures. His isolation in later life was partly financial and partly chosen.

Credit, recognition, and justice: Tesla's AC system powers virtually every home and device in the modern world, yet for decades he was far less recognised than Edison. The autobiography is not a complaint about this — Tesla never claims to have been wronged — but its existence as a document is itself an act of claiming his place in history.