An article exploring Tesla’s struggle with bureaucracy, frustration with finances, and society’s vindication coming too late for most innovators.

“This letter will never get to you, Mother. I don’t know why I write it to you when you cannot read it…rest in peace Mother and please forgive me for choosing paths that had led me away from you. I cannot even be there for your funeral. I read the telegram that informed me of your death and despise people who weren’t ready to understand two years ago that electricity can be transferred without wires. Now, they have seen it but they won’t use it for centuries to come because someone burned my downtown laboratory to the ground, with all of my formulas and writings in it.”

-Fragment of Tesla’s Last Letter to His Mother

Were it not for the title of this article, could you have guessed that this grieving son writing to his then-deceased mother, was the man behind revolutionary ideas like Alternating Current, Radio, Microwaves, Radar, Computing, Robotics and scores more? It’s easy to think of ‘eccentric geniuses’ as people absorbed in their work to a fault, and there’s ample evidence that Tesla was both – eccentric and genius. His notable eccentricities included – “obsessive compulsive disorder, only inhabiting a hotel room that was divisible by the number three, pigeons, and an aversion to women wearing earrings”. Nevertheless, it’s important not to let the odd traits be the sole markers of his identity. So here’s an attempt to humanize Nikola Tesla. Read More

An article exploring Kepler, the person – sci-fi novelist, dedicated son, and astute scientist.

Do you remember Johannes Kepler? For those of you who had Physics in Class XI, this scientific bad boy made a cameo in the chapter on Gravitation, mentioned a page after the one which carried his three laws of planetary motion. Do you remember the laws? (Hint : Law of Orbits, Law of Areas, Law of Periods). Do you know anything else about his life? If you know next to nothing, don’t fret. I didn’t know squat either. Truth be told, I didn’t even remember the laws. But I read about him in Maria Popova’s Figuring, and she gave this visionary a backstory, a personality, a rich, vivid life, enough to make me wonder why my textbook didn’t carry any vestige of the same, and how many fascinating people and events never made it to those pages; forever hidden behind the sole accomplishment that was ascribed to their identity. So here’s an attempt to deconstruct the earthly man behind the planetary laws.

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