My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla

Product Information

Because of his pronouncements and the nature of his work over the years, Tesla gained a reputation in popular culture as the archetypal ‘mad scientist’. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he stayed from May 1899 until early 1900, Tesla made what he regarded as his most important discovery— terrestrial stationary waves. By this discovery he proved that Earth could be used as a conductor and made to resonate at a certain electrical frequency. He also lit 200 lamps without wires from a distance of 40 km (25 miles) and created man-made lightning, producing flashes measuring 41 metres (135 feet). At one time he was certain he had received signals from another planet in his Colorado laboratory, a claim that was met with derision in some scientific journals. Since My Inventions is an autobiography, it is unique in providing a glimpse into Tesla’s mind and his private thoughts. It tells about the man, his motivations and the values that he held. Njan poetry has so distinct a charm that Goethe is said to have learned the musical tongue in which it is written rather than lose any of its native beauty. History does not record, however, any similar instance in which the Servian language, though it be that of Boskovich, expounder of the atomic theory, has been studied for the sake of the scientific secrets that might lurk therein. The vivid imagination and ready fancy of the people have been literary in their manifestation and fruit. A great Slav orator has publicly reproached his one hundred and twenty million fellows in Eastern Europe with their utter inability to invent even a mouse-trap. They were all mere barren idealists. If this were true, to equalize matters, we might perhaps barter without loss some score of ordinary American patentees for a single singer of Illyrian love-songs. But racial conditions are hardly to be offset on any terms that do not leave genius its freedom, and once in a while Nature herself rights things by producing a man whose transcendent merit compensates his nation for the very defects to which it has long been sensitive. It does not follow that such a man shall remain in a confessedly unfavorable environment. Genius is its own passport, and has always been ready to change habitats until the natural one is found. Thus it is, perchance, that while some of our artists are impelled to set up their easels in Paris or Rome, many Europeans of mark in the fields of science and research are no less apt to adopt our nationality, of free choice. They are, indeed, Americans born in exile, and seek this country instinctively as their home, needing in reality no papers of naturalization. It was thus that we welcomed Agassiz, Ericsson, and Graham Bell. In like manner Nikola Tesla, the young Servian inventor with whose work a new age in electricity is beginning, now dwells among us in New York. Mr. Tesla’s career not only touches the two extremes of European civilization, east and west, in a very interesting way, but suggests an inquiry into the essential likeness between poet and inventor. He comes of an old Servian family whose members for centuries have kept watch and ward along the Turkish frontier, and whose blood was freely shed that our western vanguard might gain time for its advance upon these shores. Yet, remote as such people and conditions are to us, it is with apparatus based on ideas and principles originating among them that the energy from Niagara Falls is to be widely distributed by electricity, in the various forms of light, heat, and power. This, in itself, would seem enough to confer fame, but Mr. Tesla has done, and will do, much else. Could he be tamed to habits of moderation in work, it would be difficult to set limit to the solutions he might give us, through ripening years, of many deep problems; but when a man springs from a people who have a hundred words for knife and only one for bread, it is a little unreasonable to urge him to be careful even of his own life. Thirty-six years make a brief span, but when an inventor believes that creative fertility is restricted to the term of youth, it is no wonder that night and day witness his anxious activity, as of a relentless volcano, and that ideas well up like hot lava till the crater be suddenly exhausted and hushed. In 1919, Nikola Tesla wrote several articles for the magazine The Electrical Experimenter. These pieces have been gathered together here.

Welcome to Nikola Tesla's autobiography My Inventions. Tesla was 63 years old when this text was first published in the Electrical Experimenter magazine in 1919. Tesla'nın çok yönlü bir insan olduğunu bilirdim ancak şu satırları okuyunca kendisine hayranlığım katlandı; I was taking electronics engineering classes in college when I first learned about Nikola Tesla. I discovered that Tesla developed several of the most important technologies we use today. I thought it strange that Tesla had contributed so much to the world, yet he's virtually unknown to most people. He's a true unsung hero. I became so interested in Tesla that I eventually built my own Tesla coil, I wrote a Tesla coil design program called TeslaMap and created the Tesla Coil Design, Construction and Operation Guide. But enough about me...He is the most important and effective inventor of the 20th century. He was also new-fashioned in many ways as he was anti-racist, vegetarian and …

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.It seems his amnesia was not just limited to those months in bed. He had selective amnesia for what seems to be the remainder of his life. He loved his inventions, and the inventing process, so much that he magnified the positive aspects, feeling a swelling of involuntary love, while seeming to completely forget the absolute torment it caused him at times. I found this book a really good read, because Tesla is a character, and not a bad writer! He tells a lot of stories of his childhood, which were a very interesting glimpse into a great mind. In the book, he mostly talked about himself, his family and friends and generally more human topics than scientific ones. He manifested his early sparkles of innovation and described his incentives and aims. He also told us about some of his magnificent inventions in details. He had ideas about future, as well and predicted a good deal of occurrences meticulously. One part I liked was when Tesla was expounding on his personal philosophy of health, or 'focusing on himself'. He was frequently ill and overworked, and had to spend a lot of time working on his health. At one point he says of coffee and tea "These delicious beverages superexcite and gradually exhaust the fine fibers of the brain. They also interfere seriously with arterial circulation and should be enjoyed all the more sparingly as their deleterious effects are slow and imperceptible." He then goes on to say "The truth about this is that we need stimulants to do our best work under present living conditions, and that we must exercise moderation and control our appetites and inclinations in every direction." I think this is my new philosophy.