Re: [TCML] Tesla and Mercury poisoning

[William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2008, Harold Weiss wrote:
> I've thought about that as well.  He did handle large amounts with his
> mecury gaps and during his lighting experiments.  His particle beam
> experiments also used mecury vapor as the bullets.

Eccentric in later years?  How about from birth!  Read his autobiography
description of his discovering the induction motor while walking in a
park.  Tesla describes his lifelong visual hallucinations as starting in
childhood, when he had to learn the difference between real people and the
people who nobody else could see.  He describes nervous breakdowns and
being bedridden by bouts of perceptual hypersensitivity.  Apparently his
ability to visualize all details of complicated devices was not learned,
but was natural.  The stuff about the napkins and refusal to shake
hands... he almost died of cholera as a teenager.  In his later years his
oddities crossed the line into obsessions.  But right from the start, he
was very far from "normal."

Mental strangeness often goes hand in hand with extreme creativity.
Brainstorming to produce new ideas is an example, the stranger your
thinking, the more chance you have of creating something worthwhile.





> > Dr. Wall did not think older Tesla's oddities matched up with Mercury
> > poisoning.  But I believe you are a doctor too so a second opinion?  The
> > Tesla museum does have locks of Tesla's hair, but it would probably be a
> > major task to get it tested for toxicity.



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William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
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Seattle, WA  206-762-3138    unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
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