My Inventions

My Inventions began as a series of articles published in 1919 in an American electrical magazine and only later became a book. Its author is Nikola Tesla, now over sixty, famous, in debt, and aware that the press treats him as an eccentric. He decides to tell, in his own way, how he got there.

This isn't a conventional autobiography filled with dates and gossip. It's the story of a mind: how ideas emerged, how he tested them without putting them on paper, and what he felt while doing it. The tone is solemn, sometimes vain, and full of conviction that an inventor's job is to transform the world through the power of disciplined imagination.

Since Tesla died in 1943, the text is in the public domain in Brazil, which makes it easy to find there. Still, here's a summary in our own words, organizing the story around the different stages of his life.

Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, a village in the Lika region, then part of the Austrian Empire and now in Croatia. He came from a Serbian family. His father, Milutin, was an Orthodox priest who enjoyed writing and reciting poetry. His mother, Đuka, could barely read, but invented household tools and had a remarkable memory, a trait her son says he inherited.

His father insisted on mental exercises for the children, such as guessing thoughts and correcting their own errors in reasoning. Tesla believed this trained his memory and critical thinking, qualities he would later use to design machines in his head.

One event left a deep mark on this period: his older brother's death in a horse accident. His family considered that son the more brilliant one, and Tesla describes feeling that he could never measure up to his brother's ghost. Much of his drive to prove his worth came from that loss.

From childhood, Tesla says he suffered from flashes of light before his eyes, followed by vivid images that disturbed him. They appeared in connection with words or ideas and seemed real. With effort, he learned to control the flow and replace unwanted scenes with others.

Out of this inner struggle came an ability he considered crucial: visualizing a device in such rich detail that he could turn it on, watch it work, and find flaws without touching anything. He said he would let an imaginary machine run for weeks, then check its parts for wear.

Whatever the explanation, the method is interesting for anyone who works on projects. Thinking through the details before spending money on construction is a cheap way to make mistakes, something we learn the hard way when we start a renovation without a plan.