During a recent book club meeting with a bunch of third through sixth graders, I asked the girls to write down the three most useful traits if you were attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a 45-foot sailboat alone.
The girls were immersed in Sharon Creech’s award winning book, The Wanderer, a story about an adopted girl who crosses the ocean with her cousins and uncles to visit her grandfather.
The girls leaned over their papers, thinking and finally writing down their answers. As we went around the room, I was struck by how many of the girls had listed imagination as a necessary trait for a difficult journey. I expected bravery, calmness, fortitude, and intelligence, but not quite so much imagination.
When I asked them why imagination would be useful, I expected them to say it would enable them to come up with creative fixes if something broke (yes, I am a practical mother). But Sarah, an astute fifth grader, spoke up to correct my wayward, unimaginative mind. Imagination, she said, would let her escape from anything bad, from the scary turns the trip might take, and from the exhaustion that would set in. The power of her imagination would take her somewhere else.
Indeed, experienced sailors have spoken of their own reliance on imagination to survive. Joshua Slocum set out to circumnavigate the world in 1895. During his adventure, he often talked to the Man in the Moon, turtles, and even insects. When he became terribly ill and unable to sail the ship, he believed a phantom captain took the helm as a storm (and no doubt a very high fever) raged, according to Kathryn Lasky’s beautifully written children’s book about Slocum, Born in the Breeze.
Nikola Tesla, the intense inventor who battled for technological superiority in 1880s New York, would have agreed with Sarah about the power of imagination. He once said, “Our first endeavors are purely instinctive, promptings of an imagination vivid and undisciplined.” As we age, according to Tesla, “Reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, tho[ugh] not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our destinies.”
Invention and imagination were interchangeable for Tesla, who designed both immensely practical devices—high-frequency, high-voltage transformers and electric generators—but also had a knack for futuristic designs like wireless communication, unmanned remote controlled torpedo boats, flying machines, orbital transportation, and Trans-Atlantic underwater mail systems.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this guardian of imagination has become something of a fixture in children’s literature of late. There’s Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith’s Nick and Tesla’s High Voltage Danger Lab, which carries the immensely tempting subtitle: A Mystery with Electromagnets, Burglar Alarms, and Other Gadgets You Can Build Yourself. Tesla also appears in Polly Shulman’s The Wells Bequest, a book that pays homage to invention by setting the story in a fictitious library where patrons can check out inventions from science fiction literature. Tesla’s Attic and Edison’s Alley, by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman, feature Tesla possessions with supernatural properties. And The Tesla Connection: A Cavalier Family Adventure, showcases more Tesla machines.
Tesla is, in a way, a perfect hero for an age that champions underdogs and nonconformists, visionaries with handicaps and raw brilliance curbed by human shortcomings. The Serbian immigrant was obsessed with the number three and steering clear of germs; he was an intense student who took double the course load of his college peers; a solitary thinker who devoted himself to celibacy to preserve his ability to focus on work; a technological wunderkind who took highflying risks that would not be out of place on a modern reality TV show (he once took 250,000 volt shocks through his body to demonstrate an experiment); a complicated personality who rode out a rags-to-riches-to-penniless-nervous-breakdown life story. He would have been ripe for the pages of People magazine.
Tesla also was a man who consumed books. While he recovered from cholera in 1873, the local public library sent Tesla all the volumes that had not been catalogued, W. Bernard Carlson writes in his towering biography of the inventor. Tesla read them and classified them for the library. Amid the piles of books were Mark Twain novels, which Tesla proceeded to devour. Tesla described Twain’s work as, “so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state.” Twain held a similar respect for inventors. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain marveled at the world greatest inventors calling them “creators of the world”—after God. Tesla and Twain eventually became good friends and shared a powerful tonic: creative imagination.
Often when a figure from the past becomes a trendy subject of children’s literature, something is lost in translation. The person becomes either a watered-down version of himself or herself or an overly heroic one. Tesla’s life serves as a reminder that the biography of a brilliant but flawed man is an excellent gateway for children curious about science, invention, and, most importantly, imagination. Whether the girls in my reading circle one day cross an ocean or sail the Mississippi River, develop alternative energy systems or devise brave new devices yet unknown, imagination will indeed be their most useful companion. Just as it was for Tesla.
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