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In 1898 at Colorado Spring,
Tesla is able to tune up the so-called Magnifying Transformer:
the idea, which he would realised fully later, was to build a
transmitter of waves that he called stationary. These waves were
able to transmit signals through the earth and reach the other
extremity of the globe. That it to say that it was possible to
transmit wireless electric power.
Tesla moved to Colorado Springs
and started working. Inexplicable things were taking place in
the neighbourhood…strange electric discharges: if one walked around
the area, sparks would shoot out of the earth and go through the
soles of one’s shoes to come up one’s feet. One day there was
a boy who took a screwdriver and put it near a fire extinguisher
and a four-inch spark came out from the pump.!* Sometimes
the grass near the laboratory was so electrical to provoke a corona
effect: they call it “St Elmo's fires”*! But people did not know
that it was only a child's play! The man of the laboratory was
simply tuning up his instrument in order to prepare himself to
make one of the strongest experiment of all time of that experiment.
Thanks to that very idea he was able to break the world record
for the longest flash of lightning never produced by a man: 42-meter
long, (130 feet) . . . yet, it was of no importance!
The theatre usually first phagocytes
and then discharges to adventure on new creations. But Nikola
Tesla told us: “stop”, and we stopped, or rather we kept on deepening
and defining what emerged forcefully from him. An almost childish
desire for the waiting and for the suspension that fill us when
we are in front of the “wonderful” thing, of thaumatos
"magnificent, a wonderful
vision, an awful display, glorious, so wonderful that somebody
could fear to speak . . .".
His inventions caused a sense
of estrangement; he fought against identification: “Then I observed
to my delight that I could visualise with the greatest facility.
I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them
all as real in my mind. The moment one constructs a device to
carry into practice a crude idea, he finds himself unavoidably
engrossed with the details of the apparatus. As he goes on improving
and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and
he loses sight of the great underlying principle. My method is
different. 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 the same to me whether I run my turbine in thought
or test it in my shop. There is no difference whatever; the results
are the same. In twenty years there has not been a single exception.”
His astonishment had nothing
to do with the enchantment, on the contrary it transformed
the ordinary into something extraordinary. His astonishment had
never been just bare stupor because it was always an answer. To
us the exceptionality of this figure is that Tesla always preferred
the ethic to the invention and to the technological achievement.
In this world subjected to the logic of trade and to the return
of the investment, Nikola Tesla, right from the top of his 1000
patents, is one of the few figures, probably the only one, that
chose to act, in a strictly technological field, toward a direction
that would have made him realise only apparatus bound to improve
the living conditions of man.
Nikola Tesla’s story begins
in 1856, when, on the stroke of midnight between the 9th and the
10th of July, in a little Croatian village of Smiljan at the Rev.
Milutin and his wife Djouka’s house a son was born. And it ends
on the 7th of January, in 1943, in New York. In a room
of an hotel. Alone.
The day after the FBI affixed
the seals Top Secret. Nothing would have changed for the following
40 years.
Tesla used to tell to his assistants:
- A new idea must not be judged from its direct results. -he light of our
current knowledge we would have liked to meet him a long time
ago. Actually it was a casual meeting. For w
In 1999 we were preparing our
work “Eva Futura” (Future Eve) based on the novel of the same
title by the French writer August Villier de l’Isle Adam. The
main character of this novel is Edison. It is very well-known
in the United States, and in Europe the fame of the magician Menlo
Park was connected mainly with Edison’s incandescent lamp. In
Villier’s novel Edison is the inventor of an android, a kind of
electromechanical clone of the beautiful Alicia. Again our approach
to the novel was not due to mere scientific technical interests,
in fact, Villiers uses the metaphor of the clone, which will replace
the true Alicia, to take the reflection on the honesty of human
relations to extremes. According to our custom we brought our
examination of the novel to a parallel and deep study. On the
one hand we studied the scientific aspect of interpersonal relations,
by examining the figure of the hysteria; on the other hand we
investigated the main figure of the novel: Edison.
Tesla came out of these researches.
Almost from nothing. Why? |
