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

by Sean Patrick

The cultural correlation is undeniable: we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that the higher the IQ, the more likely one is to succeed in life.

Studies of people with extraordinary abilities, like Ted Williams, have given rise to what Swedish psychologist Dr. K Anders Ericsson called the “10,000 hour” rule. The rule’s premise is that, regardless of whether one has an innate aptitude for an activity or not, mastery of it takes around ten thousand hours of focused, intentional practice.

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.

In 1891, in his New York City lab, Tesla proved that energy could be transmitted through the air by wirelessly lighting lamps. This discovery fascinated Tesla, sparking his lifelong obsession with wireless energy.

When Tesla tuned two coils to resonate at the same frequency, he found that he could send and receive signals. He had accidentally built the first radio transmitter and made the first transmissions, methods he would patent within two years.

Tesla replied with the following: “Mr. Westinghouse, you have been my friend, you believed in me when others had no faith; you were brave enough to go ahead when others lacked courage; you supported me when even your own engineers lacked vision. ... Here is your contract, and here is my contract. I will tear them both to pieces, and you will no longer have any troubles from my royalties.”

In time, these royalties would’ve made Tesla the world’s first billionaire. Instead, they enabled Westinghouse to save his company.

Once completed, his new lab’s most prominent feature was a wooden tower that stood over 80 feet tall and supported a 142-foot metal mast that was capped by a large copper ball. Inside the tower was the world’s largest Tesla Coil, which was to be used to send powerful electrical surges into the earth.

For the next nine months, Tesla conducted a wide variety of experiments at Colorado Springs. He wirelessly lit over 200 lamps from a distance of over 25 miles, proving that electricity could be transmitted great distances through the air.

he calculated that the resonant frequency of this area was approximately eight hertz—a discovery that was dismissed in his time but confirmed nearly 50 years later.

After Tesla left Colorado Springs in January 1900 to return to New York City, he wrote a sensational article for Century Magazine in which he eagerly described his plans for a future where we could tap the sun’s energy, control the weather with electricity, end war with machines that would make it an impossibility, wirelessly transmit power and radio signals around the entire globe, engage in interplanetary communications, and even construct robotic “automatons” that would conduct themselves independent of operators.

One would think that Tesla would balk at any offerings of Morgan’s as he clearly couldn’t be trusted—he was one of the driving forces behind the propaganda used against Tesla in the War of the Currents. And just three years earlier, Morgan maneuvered to steal Westinghouse’s company, costing Tesla his lucrative royalty agreement. Nevertheless, Tesla chose to partner with Morgan, a decision that would prove to be the biggest mistake of his life.

Morgan offered $150,000 instead and, in exchange, wanted 51% ownership in all of Tesla’s existing and future patents and inventions relating to both electric lighting and wireless telegraphy or telephony. Tesla accepted Morgan’s hard-fisted terms and went to work immediately.

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.”

One year later, nearly three decades after Tesla began the fight, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that Marconi’s radio patents indeed infringed on Tesla’s and therefore declared Tesla as the true “father of radio.”

The Earth has been thoroughly conquered. The once radical philosophies of equality, tolerance, and individualism are embraced by much of the civilized world.

Michelangelo said he saw angels in the marble and carved until he set them free. Most of us regard creativity in the same way we regard that statement—as a mysterious gift that can’t be explained or cultivated. But we’re wrong. Like genius itself, creativity is a process, not a providence.

Mark Twain said “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”

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.

When you think you sit calmly and try to reason through something in a structured, logical way. Creativity dances to a different tune. Once you flip that switch, things get a bit chaotic. Ideas start buzzing. Images start popping into your head. Fragments of all kinds of data find their way into orbit.

Tesla wrote. “As we grow older reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies.”

Henry Ford said. “They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time.”

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.