Nikola Tesla said he built his inventions in his imagination first. In My Inventions, published in 1919, he wrote that he would change a design, improve it and run the device in his mind, and build it only once he could find no fault. That's his own account of how he worked, and he traced the habit to his boyhood.
A dynamo had arrived from Paris at the Polytechnic School in Graz, where Tesla was in his second year. When his physics professor ran it as a motor, its brushes sparked badly. Tesla remarked that it might be possible to run a motor without them.
The professor gave a whole lecture on why that couldn't be done. He ended it with words Tesla put in print decades later: "Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things, but he certainly never will do this."
"For a time I wavered," Tesla admits. He soon felt sure he was right, and took on the task, in his words, "with all the fire and boundless confidence of youth." He began in his head: "I started by first picturing in my mind a direct-current machine, running it and following the changing flow of the currents in the armature." After that came an alternator, then whole systems of motors and generators, each one run in his head.
None of it solved the problem. The rest of his term there, he writes, "was passed in intense but fruitless efforts of this kind".
What did Tesla mean by visualization?
He meant building and testing an invention entirely in thought before making any part of it. By his account, he was about seventeen when he found he could do this with ease: "I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind."
He set the method out plainly. "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 immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance." Only when he could see no fault anywhere did he build the thing. He adds that it then worked as planned, and that "In twenty years there has not been a single exception." That's his claim about his own work, and I'm passing it on as his.
It showed at school, too. Of doing sums, he says: "Up to a certain degree of complexity it was absolutely the same to me whether I wrote the symbols on the board or conjured them before my mental vision."
The Who Am I? masterclass sets the labels and roles aside and looks at what's left, and the code GIFT26 brings its price to nothing. If things have ever seemed unreal or far away to you, or you're being treated for that, get your doctor's go-ahead first or skip its guided session, and anyone may stop it at any point. Receive the Masterclass. Or read on.
Where did Tesla say the habit came from?
From something that troubled him as a boy. He describes "a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action." The images were of things he'd really seen, and at times he couldn't tell whether what he saw was solid or not.
For temporary relief, he would call up other pictures he'd seen. He soon ran through them, having seen little beyond his home, and the remedy lost its force. So he began making what he calls "excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge". The new scenes were blurred at first, then sharper, until every night, and sometimes by day, he was travelling in his mind, seeing new cities and making friends there.
He wrote that "None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomena." I won't guess either. If you ever see things you can't tell from real, or pictures that stay however hard you try to send them off, please see a doctor; that belongs with a professional, not with an article. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Were the machines in his head ever wrong?
Yes, in his younger years, and he says so himself.
As a schoolboy he invented a cylinder he believed a vacuum would keep turning for ever. He built a wooden model, saw what looked like a tendency to turn, and was soon flying, in his imagination, in a machine it powered. "It took years before I understood that the atmospheric pressure acted at right angles to the surface of the cylinder and that the slight rotary effort I observed was due to a leak."
During a year in the mountains after school, he planned more inventions. Looking back, he was blunt: "The vision was clear enough but the knowledge of principles was very limited."
The answer arrived a few years later, in Budapest. He was walking in the City Park at sunset with a friend, reciting German poetry he knew by heart, when, in his words, "the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed." He drew the diagrams in the sand with a stick. The images, he says, "had the solidity of metal and stone", and he told his friend: "See my motor here; watch me reverse it."
By his own account, then, a picture could be vivid and still be wrong. The principles under it had to be right before a real machine would work.
What did Tesla say he had suppressed?
Near the start of My Inventions, Tesla stops to say something about the boy he'd been. "Our first endeavors are purely instinctive, promptings of an imagination vivid and undisciplined." Those early impulses, he writes, "may shape our very destinies." Then: "Indeed, I feel now that had I understood and cultivated instead of suppressing them, I would have added substantial value to my bequest to the world. But not until I had attained manhood did I realize that I was an inventor."
One reason he gives is a plan made for him. "I was intended from my very birth for the clerical profession and this thought constantly opprest me. I longed to be an engineer but my father was inflexible." Years later his father relented, and promised him "the best technical institution in the world".
Those are an inventor's words about invention, and anything I add is interpretation. I recognise the shape: a pull that arrives before anyone has room for it, a role chosen in advance, and a long wait before the pull gets its name. I've written about that kind of longing in how to find your calling.
Roles are often handed out in a few words. Someone calls you the practical one, or says you're no good at languages, and says it often enough that you start saying it too. A description like that goes ahead of you into new rooms, and it's rarely held up against what you actually do there.
So I'll ask you something. Who were you before the world told you who to be? I've written separately about how to remember who you are.
What does your own mind's eye leave out?
This page isn't therapy, and it isn't medical care. If you're seeing a doctor or therapist, keep seeing them, and put what they tell you ahead of anything here. Treatment and medication stay as your doctor set them, and any recovery programme carries on, along with the people who support it. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Picturing doesn't suit everyone. If unchosen images appear, or a picture starts to feel more real than the room, open your eyes, set aside whatever's in your hands and leave the exercise there. If that happens often, tell your doctor.
I put this two-minute exercise together for this page. It isn't Tesla's method, and it has nothing to do with the images he describes from his boyhood. You'll need something you can hold: a cup, a key, a shoe.
- Look at it closely for a minute. Turn it over. Find a scratch, a seam, the place where the light sits on it.
- Put it out of sight, and build it again in your mind. Eyes open or closed, whichever you prefer. Turn the picture round slowly and notice which parts stay sharp.
- Bring the object back. Find one detail your picture dropped, and one it added.
- Put it back where it lives. Both details can stay as they are.
What might help you look at your own picture?
In 1919 Tesla wrote that understanding and cultivating his early impulses, rather than suppressing them, would have added to what he left the world. My own question sits elsewhere, with you: who you are under the descriptions you've been handed. The Who Am I? masterclass gives that question its full attention. Like this page, it isn't therapy or medical care. I'd send you there only when all of these hold.
- If who you are is the question you want to sit with. The whole masterclass stays with it.
- If you already ask questions like that. In its page's words, it was made for someone who asks "questions most people around you don't".
- If you're happy starting on your own. There's no call and no group: you read, you watch, and then I guide you through the last part, in your own time.
One caution covers the guided session at the end, about twenty minutes long. If the world around you, or your own body, has ever seemed distant or not quite real, or you're under a doctor's care for something like that, get your doctor's go-ahead before the session, or read and watch the rest and give the session a miss. Anyone can end it at any point: open your eyes, plant both feet and feel their weight on the ground, then talk to someone you trust, on the phone or in person.
Poetry and engineering get along better than their reputations suggest.
From Safae, a reader of my book, on Amazon.com: "This is a different way of seeing life, of seeing ourselves and of living."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. If an evening this week has room for one long look inward, the Who Am I? masterclass is free with the code GIFT26. Receive the Masterclass