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Lot Essay
Tesla's poem imagines himself listening on 'my cosmic phone' to the conversations of scientists on Olympus, as a 'newcomer' is shown around – it transpires that this is Lord Kelvin, being shown around by Sir Isaac Newton. In turn, Newton points out 'Archimedes with his lever' and 'Spinoza brooding there'. Kelvin then spots the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, famous for his long-unproven Last Theorem: '"What trouble has he got?" / "To remember that rule he forgot, / Some think it was a practical joke ..."'. After a mention of work on Earth on a 'cosmic gun' (an invention by Tesla himself), Kelvin sympathises with Newton at having been eclipsed by Einstein:
'Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a longhaired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teachings all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable'
Newton however disclaims any understanding of 'schemes so finely spun', and concludes by asking Kelvin 'When is your friend Tesla coming up?', to which Kelvin replies, 'Oh ... he is always late, / It would be useless to remonstrate'.
This is thought to be the only surviving poem by Tesla (according to Margaret Cheney in Tesla: Man Out of Time). At the press conference celebrating his 78th birthday earlier that year, Tesla had announced his invention of a superweapon which would end all war, though he revealed no further details in his lifetime. The disdainful reference to Einstein as a 'longhaired crank' is typical of Tesla's views, particularly of the theory of relativity: the following year he described Einstein in comments to the New York Times as 'like a beggar clothed in purple, whom ignorant people take for a king'. The recipient, the German-born poet and journalist George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962), was a close friend of Tesla's at this date; a US resident from childhood, Viereck was an enthusiastic supporter of the German cause in both world wars, receiving a four-year prison sentence as a Foreign Agent in 1942.
'Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a longhaired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teachings all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable'
Newton however disclaims any understanding of 'schemes so finely spun', and concludes by asking Kelvin 'When is your friend Tesla coming up?', to which Kelvin replies, 'Oh ... he is always late, / It would be useless to remonstrate'.
This is thought to be the only surviving poem by Tesla (according to Margaret Cheney in Tesla: Man Out of Time). At the press conference celebrating his 78th birthday earlier that year, Tesla had announced his invention of a superweapon which would end all war, though he revealed no further details in his lifetime. The disdainful reference to Einstein as a 'longhaired crank' is typical of Tesla's views, particularly of the theory of relativity: the following year he described Einstein in comments to the New York Times as 'like a beggar clothed in purple, whom ignorant people take for a king'. The recipient, the German-born poet and journalist George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962), was a close friend of Tesla's at this date; a US resident from childhood, Viereck was an enthusiastic supporter of the German cause in both world wars, receiving a four-year prison sentence as a Foreign Agent in 1942.