Nikola Tesla as ENTP
By Guilherme Varela
At the first look, Nikola Tesla is INTJ for his high achievements, he not only had visions of the future but had the tenacity of precipitating it. He was also a pedantic aristocratic, anti-semitic and an intellectual hermit. A comparison to Sir Isaac Newton unavoidably pops up into the mind.
1. However, I found out that his trajectory had some splendid similarities with that of another genius: Albert Einstein.
1.1 When Tesla quit his work with Edison's lab, he became a construction worker and he doubted himself and his visions about Alternating Current. Einstein, after graduation was unable to find a job in the academy he thought himself as a failure he wrote to his father saying that perhaps it would have been better if he hadn't been born at all.
1.2 Both owe their breakthroughs to their mind experiments. And we are going to expand the point in the next subject.
1.3 Both had their most amazing discoveries discredited at their time only to be recognized years later. Tesla tele-automations and radio control. For Einstein it was relativity which did not earn him an Nobel. (The photo-eletric effect did.)
1.4 Both were revolutionaries that later became reactionaries. Tesla believed in the Ether and was skeptical about Einstein's relativity while Einstein was adamantly against quantum mechanics.
1.5 Both felt trapped by their strong functions in later life. Tesla became the mad inventor giving press speeches about his communications with the martians. Which I propose to be an effect of Ne dominance without a healthy Ti. Einstein became the Ivory Tower theorist, he became obsessed with adding math to his work. A lot of young physicists wasted their most productive years trying to work out Einstein's united theory (which basically is the theory of everything).
2. Tesla's Ne and inventions
An almost unknown fact is that Tesla suffered from something called Eidetic imagery. Which he learned how to harness instead of repress. In an interview in 1909 he declared that as a child he was assailed by REAL images of things he had experienced in other contexts. If for instance he had witnessed a funeral he could later see the people present in his living room. Those images were so sharp he could not discern them from physical objects. And Ne is about objective-subjective-objective again, right?
He is able to trace the discovery of the dual-phase induction motor to a mosaic in a Prague park.
He is able to back trace his revolutionary design of a jet turbine to that of water mill in his hometown.
The fact that he can describe his breakthroughs for me is the strongest of evidences of Ne, which tend to come from bizarre angle adoption and not from Aha moments.
3. Tesla's not Te behavior
There are at least four public facts about his life that contrast that of Te user:
3.1 He didn't care for Nobel Prizes or Edison Medals.
3.2 He messed up his speech at Niagara Falls, that was the moment that he was working so hard for. His coronation on his internal terms not only as business person but as a discoverer of new principles and industrialist. Instead of basking in the glory of his personality, what does he do? He apologizes! The microphone had to be shut down.
3.3 He borrowed money from JP Morgan to build radio into his boat. What does he do? He invests in his puppy project that according to him was going to change the world. That lab of free energy which he is unable to deliver.
3.4 His biographer asserts that he could have been the first billionare ever, if he had the financial compensations ONLY for his patents in the AC system. Although that invention was too radical to be monetized early on (since both Edison and Westinghouse had large sums invested into the DC system). There was a multiplicity of inventions, the fluorescent light bulb is an example, that, if marketed right - that is, building a consumer base, making incremental tweaks and defined logistical networks - would have made him hundred times millionaire by their time money. What does he do? Besides suing for patent violation? He just goes back to the workbench to the next invention. A typical INTJ would take the reigns of the business side of things for this was an aspect of Tesla's vision of what it meant to be "the best inventor in the world."