Childhood

Nikola Tesla

              ~ Childhood ~

Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan Croatia, at at midnight during a lightning storm, between July 9th and 10th 1856, his birthday being observed as being on the 10th. He was the son of the Reverend Milutin Tesla and Georgina Djuka Mandic. His mother was a uneducated, but brilliant person, having once built a automatic scrambler and other utensils to help her around the house (and such incidents contributed to Tesla’s intelligence later). His father was a Parish Priest, who had little income, but was as intelligent as his wife, and wrote poems and articles, and always signing them “Man of Justice.” He had a older brother named Dane who was 7 at the time of his birth, and was thought to be the “Family Genius,” and he had two older sister, Angelina born 1850, Milka 1852, and one younger sister named Marica in 1859. They had a small house, next to the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Nikola Tesla's Childhood Home (left)

All sisters, parents, brother, and himself had incredible memories, Tesla’s father said jokingly that if all the great classics were lost, he could restore them from memory. He had a “carefree” childhood getting into more small fights than normal, However, when Tesla was five years old in 1861, His brother Dane died in a horse riding accident at the age of twelve, and some accounts claim that Tesla caused the accident by “Spooking” the horse. This caused him to acquire a feeling of obligation towards his parents that would last his entire life. He felt guilty to an extent that Dane had died instead of him, he compensated for this by: “Driving himself to mental exhaustion to merit his parents’ love.” He wrote in his autobiography later:

“Anything that I did that was creditable, merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself.”

Psychologists today speculate that he had a excessive compulsion disorder, magnified by forms of eccentricity. His father had a large library, which Tesla would dive into for hours on end. It is best explained by his autobiography:

“He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn, when all others slept and my mother started on her arduous daily task.”

His mother Georgina never had a education, but memorized the musical Serbian poetry and told it to Nikola and his sisters. Watching his mother work consistently and constantly, as well as reciting poetry caused Tesla to reflect that his mother “would have achieved great things had she not been so remote from modern life and its multifold opportunities.” Tesla’s father provided him with training which he said benefited him later, he said himself:

“the training he gave me must have been helpful. It comprised all sorts of exercises—as, guessing one another’s
thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences or
performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and
reason and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.”

Another thing which benefited his later life were his three uncles: Uncle “Nikolai Mandic,” Uncle “Pajo,” and Uncle “Trifun.” All of whom would help him in his education, and later, in his crossing to America. From an early age he had wanted to be an engineer, but was “constantly oppressed” in that respect, because from birth, he had been intended for the “clerical profession” and the Army was also adamant that he join them. At this point, he was inventing (though he did not think of it as such) and had such adventures as, building little pop guns, he described it:

“The art consisted in selecting a tube of the proper taper from the hollow stalks.
I did very well with that gun but my activities interfered with the window panes in our house and
met with painful discouragement.”

He also went into a type of “motor,” which consisted of taking “June Bugs” and sticking them to a small stick connected to a plank, and June Bugs have no idea of when to stop, and thus, kept the stick rotating. However, his experiments were stopped in a sudden, humorous, and disgusting manner, when a boy that came to their house, and as Tesla said:

“That urchin ate May-bugs alive and enjoyed them as tho they were the finest
blue-point oysters. That disgusting sight terminated my endeavors in this promising field and I
have never since been able to touch a May-bug or any other insect for that matter.”

A businessman had started a firefighting station, and the engine consisted of a pump painted black and red in the middle of town. At the age of six, they were to test the new pump, and when turned on not a drop came out. The village elders (and firefighters) were puzzled. Tesla knew little of air-pressure, but instinctively jumped into the lake which the pipe went into, and straightened a collapsed hose cap, and with a result of water shooting out, and a few ruined Sunday suits. He was carried on the shoulders of the villagers, and hailed a little hero. This incident helped restore his fathers faith in him, as he had entrusted young Tesla with the job of ringing the church bell. The first day he did as he was supposed to, but ran down the stairs from the belfry and crashed into the mayor’s wife, and ripped her dress off with a noise “which sounded like a salvo of musketry fired by raw recruits.” As a youth, he began to have vivid flashes of images which were so real, that he had to pass his hand over his eyes to determine which objects were real, and which were in his mind, he never called it imagination, as he never saw anything in these flashes he had not seen before. For example, when something emotionally arousing happened (such as a funeral) he would have vivid visions of it in the night, which beat his every attempt at banishing them until he was twelve, when he could consciously lush away. He first thought of this ability as a curse, an affliction which flashed upon him at the wrong times, but would later prove to be extremely useful for inventing. He wrote a theory about it later, saying:

“The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations, for in other respects I was normal and composed.”

He attended public school for first in his hometown starting at the age of five, then his family moved to the nearby city of Gaspić, where he went to their school for four years, doing incredibly in math, doing problems in his head “faster than the teacher could write them on the board” and was suspected of cheating. After that he went for three years at the Real Gymnasium in Carlstadt, in Austria. While in Gaspić, he saw a engraved image of Niagara Falls and imagined giant turbines collecting energy from the falls, and said to his uncle Josif Tesla that he would one day collect energy just like he imagined. He graduated The Real Gymnasium in 1873 at the age of 17.

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“The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
A glorious dream! though now the glories fade.
Alas! the wings that lift the mind no aid
Of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.”

End notes:
His autobiography can be found here.
You may view more images at the Nikola Tesla image gallery here.
You can hear of a incident in which he nearly died here.