Nikola Tesla Books
succeeds best; and what kind of examples should be presented as an educational role model? The best, the kind we want the younger ones to emulate. Aspiring to their role model, they too will become better. This is how primitive and most cultured peoples work.
Even among great people, not everyone shares the same educational values. Some have contributed extraordinary deeds to humanity, but they are the result of either fortunate circumstances or extraordinary inherited gifts. They deserve admiration, but they are not suitable as educational models. Instead, it is always better to highlight as an example those whose deeds are the result not only of strong spirit and intelligence but also of deliberate and persistent work. In other words, those who demonstrate a strong will, high morals (expressed in self-sacrificing work for ideals), and well-organized effort.
These days mark the eightieth anniversary of Nikola Tesla’s life, one of the greatest discoverers of natural phenomena and laws, and the greatest scientist in the history of natural sciences, an unsurpassed artist in finding the necessary methods and devices to exploit the discovered laws, through which he became the greatest benefactor of humanity of all time. Both here and in the rest of the world, there will be talk about the significance of Tesla’s work from the most authoritative places. A slightly more interested and a little more educated should take advantage of this opportunity and get to know Tesla’s enormous work as best as possible because that is the easiest way to understand the main roots from which this incomprehensible surge of modern material culture emerges. Let’s focus on the question: what kind of educational model is Nikola Tesla’s personality?
In his youth, Tesla was quite weak and often seriously ill; he even survived cholera. But already as a young man, he stopped getting sick, and not only did illnesses not bother him, but he gave the impression of a healthy and robust person. As a mature and older man, he managed to strengthen his health and increase his strength to the point that he was not only constantly healthy but also left the impression of a strong and agile person. According to Tesla, this is the result of his study of physiology and the persistent and correct application of the methods he developed.
In high school, Tesla did not stand out from his peers as much as he did later; he was in the middle between an average and an excellent student. But when his father managed to send him to the Technical University in Graz, he worked so much that professors wrote to his father about how excessive work could ruin his son. The work was enormous, but Tesla was up to the task. He had to master all the prescribed material at the faculty, in addition to that, study everything known about his favorite electricity; and besides that, in addition to the German, he had to master thoroughly the French and English language,
