John F. Wasik - Lightning Strikes: Timeless Lessons in Creativity from the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla

It began with a lightning storm. The lightningbolts of pure energy like jagged, outstretched tendrils from the skytouched the earth with such force it could destroy or illuminate thousands of cities if it ever could be captured, bottled, and rechanneled. That was how Nikola Teslas life began, during a thunderstorm at the crack of midnight on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, a village in present-day Croatia, on the military frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Ive always felt connected to this celestial energy, observing the dramatic thunderstorms of the American Midwest for nearly six decades. At first, the events were terrifying, but early on my mother gently told me that the flash and rumble were just the angels bowling. With my mothers innocent alibi in my childs mind, from then on I was never afraid of the tempest, yet I always yearned for more details. How was it harnessed? How could it be our salvation and/or the source of our peril? How were the angels involved? Who was stacking the pins?

My father studied electronics in the navy in Washington toward the end of World War II in an attempt to thwart Hitlers V-2 program. When I was young, he put me in front of everything electronic and electromagnetic. I started with a crystal radio, then moved onto amplifiers, Van de Graaf generators, and Apple Inc.s first attempt at a portable computer: the Apple IIC.

My dads workshop was littered with Edison-style wax cylinder Dictaphones, which were still somewhat in use in the late 1950s and early 1960s for office dictation, even though they represented the height of the 1870s technology boom. They contained motors and pulleys that my dad, a poor child of the Great Depression, believed could be salvaged for other, future uses. Although they were extremely simple machines, they still worked.

My boyhood job, other than to build electronic devices from kits, was to sort capacitors, resistors, bolts, and magnets into jars and know where everything was in my fathers workshop, including every one of his hundreds of tools. Eventually I acquired my own soldering gun, which I bought with my own money. It was more precious than my bike or my baseball glove.

As I grew older, I started my own laboratory under the basement stairs. I was convinced that, during the space race, I could conceive of a great formula to reach the stars with my kids chemistry set and all the electronic junk lying in the basement. Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and John Glenn were my heroes at the time. Once, when I was pretending to be floating outside of my capsule during a spacewalk, a bar of wood came loose from my craft, and I fell backward, hitting and cracking a one-inch piece of marble with my head. I saw stars all right. No cosmological formula emerged, though.

I invented crude electronic devices, played with an electrostatic generator, and even designed and built a model of what I called a Firebug that would allow firefighters to go right into the heart of a forest fire to put it out. Since I was appalled at all the wildfires I saw ravaging the West, I sent my drawing to the National Forest Service. It was my Franklin stovea generous present to humanity. I didnt expect any royalties, but instead I received a kind letter back from the Forest Service, passing on my creation. My inventive urge then turned to biophysics: the relationship between the living world and the global energy that infuses all of us.

The intellectual thunderstorms that drew me ever closer to Teslas life and legacy included a desire to understand electromagnetism, global communication, physics, life energy, cosmic rays, and climate change. Although I became immersed in his story only relatively late in life, to me Tesla has become, in short order, a nexus between our current global maladies and our survival. While he didnt provide all the answers, he was certainly asking the right questions.

This book is about creative discovery seen through the lens of Teslas life and enduring legacy. His ideas and inventions are still shaping our present and future in profound ways. Theres no question that, around the globe, theres been fervent, renewed interest in the vision and work of the great inventor. In this book, I hope to illuminate his creative process and to present a pragmatic analysis that we can individually and collectively draw from as we grope for breakthroughs to problems large and small. As the creator of the operating system of the modern industrial age, Tesla deserves focused attention as an innovator and disruptor. Im hoping to guide you into the source and evolution of his ideas in a historiography that not only looks at how he arrived at his inventions, but suggests how you can tap the same source of creation within yourself.

I will introduce you to modern-day luminaries who are investing billions in expanding upon Teslas many powerful ideas. These intrepid souls are doers and makers, dreamers and artists. Like Tesla, they have a vision and are creating dynamic new systems for the future.

Ill revisit Teslas relationships with giants like Edison, J.P. Morgan, George Westinghouse, Einstein, Mark Twain, Orson Welles, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others. Ill also highlight his unique bond with Chicago utilities baron Samuel Insull, who, like Tesla, was a financial failure and yet remained Teslas friend and supporter for more than forty years. Its been a fascinating journey for me, finding traces of Tesla in Chicago, Philadelphia, the Rocky Mountains, New York City, and Belgrade, Serbia.