QI The Book of the Dead

nuclear physics. He invented the Tesla Coil, which gave us radio, X-ray tubes and fluorescent light. Some of his ideas were so advanced that science has still not caught up with them and his almost ‘extraterrestrial’ gifts as a scientist were matched by a strange and otherworldly personality. If John Dee and Jack Parsons fall into the category of madly brilliant eccentrics, Nikola Tesla is in a class of his own.
    Were he born today he would be diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, with a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But those labels weren’t available in the mid-nineteenth century. Mental illness was put down to ‘nerves’ or ‘hysteria’, and real oddities were either tolerated or committed to the asylum. Tesla’s peculiarities meant that the scientific community would never truly come to accept him, nor did he receive either the acclaim or the financial rewards his work should have commanded.
    He was born into a Serbian family in Smiljan, then part of Austro-Hungary, now in Croatia: it was his proud boast to be both Serbian and Croatian. The fourth of five children, he recalled his early years as exceptionally happy, growing up in the country surrounded by farm animals. Later in life he would tell how it was witnessing the sparks generated by stroking the family cat that made him want to understand what electricity was. ‘Eighty years have gone by since,’ he wrote, ‘and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.’ The Teslas were a clever family, blessed with exceptional memories, and Tesla’s father, Milutin, a Serbian Orthodox priest and poet, devised mental exercises to keep his children’s minds supple and alert. He had an impressive library of books but said it wouldn’t matter if he lost them because he had memorised the classics by heart. Tesla’s mother Ðuka was barely able to read, but could recite thousandsof verses of Serb sagas and long passages from the Bible. Her needlework was famously intricate – using only her fingers, Tesla claimed, she could tie three knots in an eyelash. She also improvised ingenious labour-saving devices, even constructing her own mechanical eggbeater. ‘I must trace to my mother’s influence’, Tesla wrote, ‘whatever inventiveness I possess.’
    The great tragedy of Tesla’s youth was the death of his older brother, Dane, in a riding accident. Nikola was only five, but he had vivid nightmares about it for the rest of his childhood. A conscientious, sensitive boy, he felt his parents’ grief keenly and, no matter how hard he worked, was conscious that he could never make up for the loss of his brilliant sibling. Dane and Nikola shared at least one outstanding talent: the ability to visualise things in precise, three-dimensional detail. Vivid images of memorable or traumatic events would return to Tesla at any time of night or day, often accompanied by flashes of light, and refuse to disappear. ‘Sometimes they would remain fixed in space even though I pushed my hand through them,’ he recalled. Though distressing for a child, this pictorial clarity would be very useful to him as an inventor.
    Young Nikola was hopelessly accident-prone and had several brushes with death. He fell headlong into a kettle of boiling milk, nearly drowned after swimming under a raft, was almost swept over a waterfall at one of the nearby dams, and suffered serious bouts of both malaria and cholera. These shocks provoked a general sense that the world was out to get him, and worsened the long list of obsessions he suffered from:
    I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of my soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food, otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again even if it took hours .
     
    At nineteen Tesla went to study electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz. He was an astonishing student, able to solve mathematical problems almost before his teachers had finished writing the formulae on the blackboard. In his spare time, he taught himself five languages, committed large chunks of Goethe and Shakespeare to memory and ploughed his way through the complete