This belongs to a strange and productive period in Patras. I would disappear on long bicycle rides with an audiobook running, then keep riding while trying to reason through science, money, business and why some extraordinarily capable people still lose control of their lives.
Tesla was irresistible to me as a physicist. His visual imagination, the way he could construct and test machines in his head, and the scale of his electrical work sounded almost indecently gifted. He could see systems before the hardware existed.
Then came the end of the story. A man who helped shape the electrical world died alone in a hotel, deeply attached to a pigeon he described with astonishing tenderness. That detail sent me into a small frenzy. How does a life travel from there to there?
Scientific brilliance is one ability. Building an organization, negotiating capital, protecting ownership and keeping financial control are several others. Tesla made the separation painfully visible. A person can change the world and still be poorly equipped to keep a stable place inside it.
That question sent me straight to Edison. I wanted to understand the man who built laboratories, companies and commercial systems around invention. The bicycle rides continued.