The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

A type of energetic pollution arising from the neurheographiton’s manifold and highly charged internal mechanisms were what Mr. Tesla described in his Apologia Electronika as “electrophantasmic discharges”—plasmic fields that “disgorged horizontal ejaculations of lightning of a most disturbing and slaughterous composition.” These discharges also warped light into phantasms that mimicked recognisable objects and people with resolute credibility. Such apparitions chiefly consisted of:

a. A Bosnian Coarse-Haired Hound eating a clown composed entirely of human kidneys.

b. A massive bust of influential English occultist Aleister Crowley that transmogrified into “a field of bunnies dancing with all the glee of becandied children.”

c. A politely dressed Central European man offering a 1907–24 issue Hotchkiss No. 4 Paper Fastener (i.e., a stapler) to an unseen coworker.

Controversy and a Continent Torn Asunder

That final apparition proved most unfortunate for Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb and subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On June 14, 1914, a hungry fifty-eight-year-old Tesla, desperate for a wealthy sponsor after so many investors had deserted him in favour of archrival American electro-tycoon Thomas Edison, sought to attract the royal patronage of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand.

An overly enthusiastic Mr. Tesla bade his assistants wheel his neurheographiton into the streets of Sarajevo near Tesla’s laboratory in search of the archduke’s motorcade. Mr. Tesla planned to project its “plasmic balm” directly through the air and into the crania of the manifold madmen and wild women who prowled the city at all hours of the day and night, so as to prove his device’s capacity to unleash a torrent of industrialism among the newly sane, for the betterment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Nikola Tesla ca. 1890, well before the majority of his troubles.

Tesla, a fine statistician in his own right, predicted the likelihood of the neurheographiton unleashing an electrophantasmic discharge as less than 1 per cent. Alas for Tesla, and even more for the archduke and the archduchess, that 1 per cent manifested as a crackle of electrons that bored directly through their bodies like any American accent through any English gathering. And, unfortunately for Gavrilo Princip, the electrophantasm happened to resemble him down to the last detail, with the apparitional stapler appearing to be, to all mortified onlookers, a Browning FN model 1910 pistol.

Princip’s absolute innocence—Princip’s whereabouts were verified by more than a dozen eyewitnesses at a local Bohemian “cheese shop” (opium den)—was of no defense, largely because, since age eleven, he’d told any Sarajevan who would listen to him that he longed for nothing more than the chance to execute “any Austrian royalist bastard I can get my grimies on.” Indeed, Princip had only a fortnight previously completed a tattoo across his back (employing, ironically, another of Mr. Tesla’s inventions, the electrographic somatic autodecorator), depicting himself decapitating Austrian emperor Franz Josef I with a cricket bat.

A Second Try in America

Fearing that it was only a matter of time before the authorities connected the archduke’s accidental death (and the subsequent Great War that engulfed all of Europe) to the neurheographiton and to him (or assumed that Princip had been Tesla’s human weapon aimed at the archduke), Mr. Tesla returned to the United States to resume developing his mentation engine.

But Tesla quickly found that his funding troubles were as dire as ever. While his protracted conflict with Edison yielded him nothing but grief, his failed lawsuit against Guglielmo Marconi over the patent for radio left him even further in debt.

Aleister Crowley, in mushroom cap, during the majority of his troubles.

The following decades were unkind to Mr. Tesla, consisting of quixotic struggles that included a rapid opposition to the League of Nations and increasingly violent claims that “secretive operatives ensconced inside black submarinal vessels patrolled the very oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers in order to spy upon us all with their telescoping looking-glasses!” Tesla developed impulsions, including the unquenchable urge to orbit buildings three times before he entered them, to have a stack of three folded napkins at every meal, and to produce neither less nor more than three bowel emissions at every 3 A.M. and 3 P.M. precisely. Finally, on March 3, 1933, Mr. Tesla’s maddened certainty that he would win himself a sponsor granted him dividends. Word of his achievements and theories won him patronage of a Mr. Allen Dulles and a Mr. J. E. Hoover. For them, he constructed the Electrical Neurheographiton, Mark 2, which Tesla promised could not only rewrite mental histories but read them, making his device a deception-detector and espionage-recognition motor.