The Books
My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla
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The Serbian-American inventor who gave the world alternating current, the radio, and dozens of foundational technologies — and who died broke and alone in a New York hotel room, his work having made others rich.
The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.Nikola Tesla — as attributed
Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, a village in what is now Croatia, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest. He was a prodigious student — he could perform integral calculus in his head and memorize entire books — but his education was repeatedly interrupted by illness and financial difficulty. He studied engineering at the Graz Polytechnic and the University of Prague, but left both without completing his degrees. He worked for the Central Telephone Exchange in Budapest and then for Edison's Continental Edison Company in Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1884 with four cents in his pocket, a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, and a head full of ideas for improvements to electrical systems.
His relationship with Edison lasted a few months and ended in acrimony — Tesla later claimed Edison had promised him $50,000 for certain improvements and then denied having done so. Tesla quit, dug ditches for a year, and then found backers who enabled him to develop the alternating current induction motor that he had been refining in his mind for years. George Westinghouse licensed his patents, and Tesla's AC system won the War of Currents against Edison's DC system, providing the technical foundation for the electrification of the world.
He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915 — and then declined it, apparently because he refused to share the prize with Edison. He died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker in January 1943, having spent his final years in poverty, his patents expired, his money gone. His work had made the modern world; his personal circumstances were catastrophic.
Tesla's relevance to this library is not primarily philosophical but existential — he is one of the most complete examples in modern history of the relationship between vision, sacrifice, and outcome. He possessed definiteness of purpose in a degree that bordered on obsession: he saw the system of alternating current in his mind as a complete working system before he had built it, and spent the rest of his life trying to realize a vision that grew ever more ambitious as his resources grew ever more depleted.
His life raises the questions that achievement philosophy often does not fully address: What is success? Is the person who transforms civilization but dies broke a failure? Is the person who dies wealthy having changed nothing a success? Tesla himself was clear about his own answer: the present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. He valued the work and the contribution more than the personal outcome.
He was also an example of the limits of genius without the social intelligence that Napoleon Hill identified as essential. His inability to form lasting alliances, to manage the mastermind relationships that Carnegie exemplified, to translate his extraordinary technical gifts into sustainable institutional support, contributed directly to his impoverishment. Genius alone is not enough. The library is not an argument against genius but it is an argument for the full range of qualities required to sustain and apply it.
If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.Nikola Tesla — as attributed
Originally published as articles in Electrical Experimenter magazine. His own account of how his imagination worked and how his inventions developed. Fascinating and strange.
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