The First Casualty

16

Tesla liked to retell the story of how, as a young man, he was taken ill at school in Carlsbad and hospitalized. The physicians, according to Tesla, were unable to cure his mysterious ailment. One day, a nurse handed him several publications, including several articles by the American writer and humorist Mark Twain. Tesla so enjoyed them that he effected a miraculous recovery. From that day forward, Mark Twain became someone Tesla wanted to meet. The fact that, historically, Twain had written little of note and nothing worth translating at the time of Tesla’s supposed illness never dissuaded him of his claim the writer had saved his life.

In 1884, the scientist succeeded in meeting Twain through mutual acquaintances who were members of Manhattan’s Players Club. Though the two were never close friends, Twain was a frequent visitor to the lab at 48 East Houston Street, where the writer once observed, upon watching an experiment that involved twenty-foot electrical arcs and bolts of homemade lightning, “Thunder is impressive, but it’s lightning that does the work.”

Later, Twain was to praise Tesla’s AC polyphase system as “the most valuable patent since the telephone.”

Twain took great pleasure in standing on a platform above one of Tesla’s inventions, the mechanical oscillator, feeling it sway back and forth in response to electrical impulses. On the first such experience, Tesla suggested his guest had ridden long enough and he should come down. Twain declined, saying he found the motion “invigorating” and “healthful.”

Minutes later, he scrambled down, shouting, “Tesla, where is it?”

He meant the toilet, of course, having learned what Tesla’s lab assistants had already painfully experienced: Riding the machine too long had a definite effect on the bowels.

In 1896, Twain was traveling in Europe, keeping up a sporadic correspondence with the scientist. From Austria, he wrote a letter, which, in part, read, “Have you Austrian and English patents on that destructive terror you are inventing?” Twain had his own ideas as to peace and disarmament: “… invite the great inventors to construct something against which fleets and armies would be helpless and thus make war thenceforth impossible.”

Twain went on to offer his services in marketing the patents to European powers and rulers he had met in his travels, including Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, presumably on the theory that if all nations possessed such a weapon, war would be impossible. Exactly what the nature of this “destructive terror” was is not mentioned, nor is the method by which Twain learned of it.

A final and rather sad note to the relationship between scientist and writer: In 1942, shortly before his death, Tesla summoned a messenger, giving him a packet to be delivered to a Mr. Samuel Clemens at an address in Manhattan. When the messenger returned, unable to find either address or addressee (the street had changed names), Tesla flew into a rage.

“Mr. Clemens is a famous writer,” he howled. “He writes under the name Mark Twain. Someone will know where to find him!”

The frustrated messenger returned a second time, informing Tesla that Mr. Clemens had been dead some time.

“Impossible!” the scientist protested. “He was here last night.” He pointed. “He sat in that very chair! He is need of money, and I am sending it to him!”

The author relates the above anecdote as possible evidence Nikola Tesla was ever delusional, or, at his age in 1943, suffering dementia. He was dead weeks later.