Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century

by Sean Patrick

In every field of human endeavor, the more visionary the work, the less likely it is to be quickly understood and embraced by lesser minds. For one reason or another, many people just “don’t get it.”

He described this time as one of “terrible headaches and bitter tears,” a dark period so grim that he began to question the value of his education and knowledge.

His studies led him to discover what we now know as X-rays, and how to use them to produce radiographs. He didn’t make his discoveries widely known, however, which is why they would later be attributed to German physicist Willhelm Rontgen. X-rays were the first of several groundbreaking discoveries of Tesla’s that would wind up misattributed to others.

He was excited to see men like Rontgen pioneer new fields of understanding, and was happy that his work contributed to the rise of other great

men.

In time, these royalties would’ve made Tesla the world’s first billionaire. Instead, they enabled Westinghouse to save his company. Tesla’s selflessness was a testament not only to his generosity and goodwill, but his belief in his ability to continue to create his future.

This is the beauty of imagination. An unexpected dead end in one journey is merely an opportunity to set a new course for another. Losing what we have can only do us real harm

when we feel we can’t create it, or something equally valuable or compelling, again, and that ability resides squarely in our imagination.

He mistakenly caused an earthquake that engulfed the surrounding city blocks, breaking windows and shaking the plaster off of the walls. He announced that he had discovered how to turn the earth into a giant tuning fork, and that, in theory, the principles could shatter the Empire State Building or even possibly cause the earth to “split open like an apple.”

“It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive ... blind, faint-hearted doubting world.”

His malaise couldn’t snuff his imagination and love of his work, however.

Humiliated and defeated, Tesla began to spend more time visiting the New York City parks, rescuing injured pigeons and nursing them back to health in his hotel room at the Hotel New Yorker, where he lived.

He also criticized Einstein’s theory of relativity, calling it a “magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles, and makes people blind to the underlying errors.”

When his cousin, Sava Kosanovic, arrived at his room the next morning, Tesla’s body was

already gone as were his effects. Papers and notebooks were missing, including a treasured black notebook that contained hundreds of pages of technical research notes. Two days later, the U.S. Office of Alien Property seized all of Tesla’s possessions, and his papers were declared top secret by the War Department due to the nature of the inventions and patents.

Einstein said that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” because “knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and

all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Michelangelo said he saw angels in the marble and carved until he set them free.

When you start viewing creativity as a process of combination, and imagination as the

ability to connect, stretch, and merge things in new ways, creative brilliance becomes less mystifying. A creative genius is just better at connecting the dots than others are.

“A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe; so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature.”

It takes curiosity to find your call to adventure, it takes courage to venture into the unknown, and it takes imagination to create your path.

What ends will you work toward on your journey, and why? Where will you diverge from the trails laid by people before you, and where will you go instead? How will you tackle problems faced by your predecessors, and what will you do that they didn’t? When will your eureka moments strike?

A genius answers those questions audaciously and lavishly. She dares to imagine everything and anything as possible, and carries our culture to worlds that never were.