Wizard

they were the only members of a relatively limited extended family to emigrate to America;

I get all the nourishment I require from my laboratory,” Tesla retorted. “I know I am completely worn out, and yet I cannot stop my work. These experiments of mine are so important, so beautiful, so fascinating, that I can hardly tear myself away from them to eat, and when I try to sleep I think about them constantly. I expect I shall go on until I break down altogether.

“You are overworked, Mr. Tesla, and you should take a holiday,”

He had come to see the human body in its essence as a machine, one that could be efficiently regulated by the stern application of willpower, and so Tesla exerted his will to reduce his sleeping to a minimum and his eating to the bare necessities. Although over six feet tall, he kept his weight to a scant and unvarying 142 pounds.19

Every hour, every moment, that was not spent working on inventions was time away from his purpose. Even the intervals spent eating and sleeping delayed progress.

“Mr. Tesla is such a hard worker that he has little time for social pleasures, if indeed he has any taste in that direction. He is a bachelor, tall, very spare of build, has dark, deep-set eyes, jet black hair and an expression that suggests at once the deep thinker. Though polite and even friendly to newspaper men, he has no desire to exploit himself in print.”

. Summoning his prodigious powers of self-denial, depriving himself of sleep, and exerting the full potential of his will, Tesla unfurled his creations as fast as he could

eyes that recall all the stories one has read of keenness of vision and phenomenal ability to see through things. He is an omnivorous reader, who never forgets; and he possesses the peculiar facility in languages that enables the educated native of eastern Europe to talk and write in at least half a dozen tongues.

had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries…and felt that most of my life had been squandered.”5

In his spare time, and as was his custom, Tesla wrote out the specifications and mathematics of his AC invention in a notebook1