Nikola Tesla was my father’s uncle, and as such he was treated by our family much as any uncle might have been who lived at a considerable distance and was advanced in years. But there were stronger bonds between my father and Tesla than might otherwise have been the case. They came from identical social backgrounds, sons of Serbian Orthodox priests, born and raised a few miles apart in the Austro-Hungarian military frontier district county of Lika in the Province of Croatia (my grandmother was Tesla’s sister Angelina); they were the only members of a relatively limited extended family to emigrate to America; and they were the only members to undertake science and technology as their life’s work.
My father, Nicholas J. (John) Terbo (Nikola Jovo Trbojevich), was thirty years younger than his uncle, came to America thirty years after him, and died thirty years after Tesla. Tesla was already famous as my father was growing up, and he became a model for my father’s technical career. Father held about 175 U.S. and foreign patents, the most important of which was his 1923 basic patent on the Hypoid gear, used on the vast majority of the world’s cars since 1930. The Hypoid gear introduced advanced mathematics to the art of gear design, much as Tesla’s work united electrical theory and electrical engineering. Tesla henceforth proudly referred to my father as “my nephew, the mathematician.” (That these patents brought considerable financial as well as professional recognition to my father was also not lost on the often cash-poor Tesla.)
Because the ethnic and professional similarities between Nikola Tesla and my father were so striking, I feel that I have been granted a special privilege through this comparison in understanding Tesla’s private personality, including his well-developed sense of humor and his often cavalier disregard for money. Once, when Tesla was visiting us in the early 1930s, my father took him to lunch at the Book Cadillac Hotel, then the finest in Detroit. They arrived late, only a few minutes before a cover charge of $2 or $3 would end. (This was equivalent to $20 or $30 by today’s standards.) My father suggested waiting, but Tesla would hear none of it. They sat down amid a flurry of waiters and Tesla ordered a chafing dish, bread, and milk and proceeded to prepare his own lunch to his own specifications (to my father’s amusement and the unease of the maître d’).
I had not yet reached thirteen when Tesla died in January 1943, and I did not have the sense of the ending of an epoch marked by his passing, both for our family and for an era of individualism in scientific discovery.
I may have reflected with some uneasiness that I had had the opportunity to meet Tesla some three or four years earlier and that no further meetings would ever happen again. I remembered my reluctance to be dragged to the meeting in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker when my mother and I were spending a few days in New York before returning to Detroit after our summer vacation at the Jersey shore. (I would have preferred spending more time at Radio City Music Hall or at the docks, watching the ocean liners.)
I was shy (rather, overwhelmed) and spoke hardly a word to this very tall, very gaunt old man. I would have been repelled—as any young “all-American boy” should have been—to be hugged and kissed by this stranger if my father hadn’t often done the same. (This is the way my mother’s women friends often acted, but my American mother’s brother would have only given me a firm handshake.) Little did I realize that Tesla’s hugging, kissing, and patting my head would belie his famous idiosyncrasy of an overriding phobia of germs. Surely, a young boy would have been teeming with “germs”! One could therefore speculate that this “idiosyncrasy” was possibly an affectation designed to preserve his “space.”
While Tesla lived, some considerable degree of his fame endured—in no small measure because of his ability to stimulate the media. However, after his death the nation and the world were occupied with other more pressing matters—war and reconstruction, international political realignments, an unmatched explosion of new technology, a new consumer society—and Tesla’s fame and recognition nearly evaporated. Only a few in the U.S. and international scientific communities and the abiding respect and admiration of Serbs and all Yugoslavs worldwide kept his name alive.
My awareness of a resurgence of interest in the life and works of Nikola Tesla began in the early 1970s, when I moved from Los Angeles (where it seemed no one had ever heard of Tesla) to Washington, D.C., where at least the name was recognized. In February 1975 my mother phoned to tell me that she had read in the Los Angeles Times that Uncle Nikola was to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and that I should look into it. I chanced to notice on a local TV news program that evening a short segment monitoring the Hall of Fame and an interview with a girl of ten or twelve who had invented a new can opener or some such. I dismissed the Hall as a commercial promotion and went on to something else.
Only later did I read a newspaper account about the induction of Tesla (along with Orville and Wilbur Wright, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Tesla’s nemesis, Guglielmo Marconi) and citing the Hall’s sponsorship by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Patent and Trademark Office. The closest living relative of each honoree was to receive the induction diploma at an elaborate ceremony. Lacking any “Tesla” (or even any “Trbojevich”) to represent the family, an officer of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) accepted the Tesla diploma. (The IEEE considers Tesla one of the twelve “apostles” of electrical science and continues to offer an annual prize in the field of Power Engineering in his name.) When I presented myself at the Patent Office a few weeks later, they were delighted and made arrangements to make a second presentation to me at the 1976 awards ceremony held that year at Congress Hall in Philadelphia as part of the U.S. Bicentennial Year celebration.
Since then, there has been an earnest revival of interest in the technological accomplishments of Nikola Tesla and in his personality, philosophy, and culture as well. Part of the drama of his life is that he was a man who not only revolutionized the generation and distribution of electrical energy and made basic contributions to many other facets of modern technology but that he did so without the specific aim of amassing great wealth. This altruism, which is often criticized as “poor business sense,” imposed a monetary limitation on future experimentation to test his new innovations. Who knows what advances might have been possible if he had been able to validate them through rigorous experimentation. New science is an expensive endeavor, and finding financial support is a frustrating task for even those as focused as Tesla.
Among the associations that have supported the Tesla renaissance are: the Tesla Memorial Society, which I helped found in 1979, and of which I am pleased to be its Honorary Chairman and Chairman of its Executive Board, and the International Tesla Society, founded in 1983, and of which I am a Life Member. It was while speaking at the first ITS biannual Tesla Symposium in 1984 that I first met a fellow speaker, Dr. Marc J. Seifer, in person. His paper “The Lost Wizard” was the seed from which his new Tesla biography has sprung. I have been impressed with Dr. Seifer’s dedication and scholarship in developing his early theories into a well-rounded examination of the mystery of Tesla’s great genius.
One of the things that has most intrigued me about a new work on this topic is how much new information keeps surfacing. Dr. Seifer has researched minor characters in Tesla’s life as well as the many major ones. This has given him additional insight into Tesla’s life and allowed the development of new and different interpretations of many important events, such as the failure of the Wardenclyffe tower project.
Dr. Seifer provides a new look at Tesla’s college years, the time when many of his epochal ideas were forming. He has uncovered new information on Tesla’s relationship with a number of key individuals, such as his editor, Thomas Commerford Martin, and financial backers John Jacob Astor and John Hays Hammond. A great strength of Wizard is its adherence, chapter by chapter, to a rather strict chronology, which makes it easy to follow the breadth and scope of Tesla’s life and achievements in an orderly fashion.
I congratulate Dr. Seifer on a decade’s journey with Nikola Tesla and am pleased to introduce to you Wizard.
William H. Terbo
Honorary Chairman Tesla Memorial Society