“a man out of time”
Aug. 5th, 2009 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sergebroomFor years I had been coming across mentions of Nikola Tesla, without really knowing who he was or what his contribution to Science & Technology had been. A few years ago, the movie The Prestige came out, with David Bowie in the role of Tesla.
That got me intrigued and, recently, as I was preparing for my steampunk-movie presentation, I realized how important Tesla had been and decided to cure my ignorance. I asked for recommendations, and was guided toward Margaret Cheney’s biography, Man Out of Time. The book, released in 2001, had originally been published 20 years before. For all I know, there are inaccuracies in it that have since been corrected, but I was shown someone who, even not long after his birth in Serbia in 1856, appeared to be from another time. He did with electricity what the likes of Edison said could not be done, earning their enmity, but also gaining allies such as George Westinghouse and Mark Twain, when the likes of Marconi didn’t appropriate his discovery of radio communications. This tis the man who built a remote-controlled submersible torpedo boat for the Spanish-American war, but the Navy said thanks-but-no-thanks.
Cheney doesn’t paint the portrait of a saint. Tesla had phobias, among them an obsession about hygiene, and could be cruel or thoughtless, but his friends stuck by him his whole life. Still, his exploration of the mysteries of Nature was so important to him that he never let anyone too close into his life as it’d distract him from his quest, even though it meant loneliness made even more pronounced as the 20th Century unfurled. Inventors working alone had become a thing of the Past, in an age of specialization, but Tesla couldn’t change and died nearly penniless and without a laboratory. In one of her last letters to him, lifelong friend Katharine Johnson, trapped in her era’s expectations of married women, wrote(1) the following while she was in Maine for the summer without her husband and her now older children.
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(1) Page 273.
That got me intrigued and, recently, as I was preparing for my steampunk-movie presentation, I realized how important Tesla had been and decided to cure my ignorance. I asked for recommendations, and was guided toward Margaret Cheney’s biography, Man Out of Time. The book, released in 2001, had originally been published 20 years before. For all I know, there are inaccuracies in it that have since been corrected, but I was shown someone who, even not long after his birth in Serbia in 1856, appeared to be from another time. He did with electricity what the likes of Edison said could not be done, earning their enmity, but also gaining allies such as George Westinghouse and Mark Twain, when the likes of Marconi didn’t appropriate his discovery of radio communications. This tis the man who built a remote-controlled submersible torpedo boat for the Spanish-American war, but the Navy said thanks-but-no-thanks.
Cheney doesn’t paint the portrait of a saint. Tesla had phobias, among them an obsession about hygiene, and could be cruel or thoughtless, but his friends stuck by him his whole life. Still, his exploration of the mysteries of Nature was so important to him that he never let anyone too close into his life as it’d distract him from his quest, even though it meant loneliness made even more pronounced as the 20th Century unfurled. Inventors working alone had become a thing of the Past, in an age of specialization, but Tesla couldn’t change and died nearly penniless and without a laboratory. In one of her last letters to him, lifelong friend Katharine Johnson, trapped in her era’s expectations of married women, wrote(1) the following while she was in Maine for the summer without her husband and her now older children.
I came here a month ago, quite alone, to this hotel full, but empty for me, since it is a strange world. Here I am as detached as if nothing belonged to me but memory. At times I am filled with sadness and long for that which is not – just as intensely as I did when a young girl and I listened to the waves of the sea (…) I do not know why I feel so sad, but I feel as if everything in life had slipped from me. Perhaps I am too much alone and only need companionship. I think I would be happier if I knew something about you. You, who are unconscious of everything but your work and who have no human needs. This is not what I want to say and so I am faithfully yours. KJ.
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(1) Page 273.
