QI The Book of the Dead

visitation. He had befriended a pigeon that came every day to his windowsill in room 3327. She had become his favourite, ‘a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings’. He had always loved birds, but this one ‘he loved as a man loves a woman … She understood me and I understood her.’
    Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her. As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me – she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes – powerful beams of light. It was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory .
When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life’s work was finished .
     

     
    Two years after Tesla’s world-changing vision of the revolutionary alternating current motor in a park in Budapest, therevolutionary political philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83) died penniless in London. Marx would have had no truck with Tesla’s mysticism, but history was to unite the life’s work of both men in 1920, when the Marxist regime of the Soviet Union took the momentous decision to transform their vast country by electrification. Lenin believed the success of the revolution was entirely dependent on the rapid roll-out of new technology; his favourite slogan was ‘Communism is socialism plus electrification of the whole country.’ In 1948, when George Orwell wanted to personify the evil of the Soviet system in Animal Farm , he had the animals build an electrified windmill.
    Marx’s journey to penury was less tortured than Tesla’s: as an asylum-seeker and infrequently employed freelance journalist, he never had much money to lose. He wasn’t a ‘worker’ in the way it is usually meant in Marxist mythology. A friend once teased him that she couldn’t imagine him living happily in a communist state as it might mean getting his hands dirty. ‘Neither can I,’ he agreed. ‘These times will come, but we must be away by then.’ Even his adoring mother complained: ‘I wish you would make some capital instead of just writing about it.’ Luckily for him, he found a benefactor (and true friend) in Friedrich Engels – fox-hunting mill-owner by day, radical socialist by night – who looked after him, as a recent biographer puts it, ‘like a substitute mother, sending him pocket money, fussing over his health and reminding him to study’. Marx may not have been a manganese miner or a tractor driver, but he certainly worked hard: his collected writings come to over a hundred volumes and would spawn a political ideology that, at its height, controlled half the world’s population.
    Karl Marx was born into a German Jewish family, the scion of one of the most famous lines of rabbis in all of European history,but his father, Heinrich, was a successful lawyer, the first nonreligious Marx in generations. When Prussia banned Jews from practising law, he cheerfully converted to Protestantism, holding it to be the most progressive of all religions. Young Karl was baptised a Christian at six years old. He had a happy childhood and was a precocious student. He was also a hothead, known for picking fights in taverns. While reading law at the University of Bonn, he lived student life to the full, running up huge debts and taking part in a duel. His father rapidly transferred him to the more academic environment of Berlin, where Karl switched to philosophy and history, graduating with a thesis comparing Epicurus and Democritus, whose anti-religious materialism he found attractive. His first job was as editor of the radical Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne but, after the paper was suppressed, he went to Paris, the nineteenth-century’s drop-in centre for European revolutionaries. Here, in 1844, he met Engels, with whom he at once formed a close personal and professional bond. Engels was already calling himself a ‘communist’ and it was his recently published The Condition of the Working Class in England that first drew Marx’s attention to the plight of the industrial workforce and convinced him, too, to embrace