The Book of the Dead

would send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.

Inevitably, the media dubbed this Tesla’s “death ray,” and it confirmed his passage in the public mind from revered genius to mad scientist.

He died in 1943, aged eighty-six, heavily in debt, alone in his hotel room. In 1944 the U.S. courts finally found in his favor and confirmed that it was Tesla and not Marconi who was the inventor of radio. Much has been done since to restore his reputation, but Edison and Marconi are still the names everyone remembers. Tesla, like Dee and Parsons and even poor Emma Hamilton, was too absorbed in his own passions to be bothered with mere accountancy. He lived with the burden and the joy of having glimpsed a much deeper reality than most people ever see, and that sense of his special destiny never deserted him. Marriage was not for him, not because he was homosexual or afraid of women, but because nothing could be allowed to interfere with his mission: “I have planned to devote my whole life to my work and for that reason I am denied the love and companionship of a good woman; and more, too.”

Weeks before his death, he had a final feminine visitation. He had befriended a pigeon that came every day to his windowsill in room 3327. She had become his favorite, “a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings.” He had always loved birds, but this one “he loved as a man loves a woman…. She understood me and I understood her.”

Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her. As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me—she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes—powerful beams of light. It was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.

When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life’s work was finished.

Two years after Tesla’s world-changing vision of the revolutionary alternating current motor in a park in Budapest, the revolutionary political philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83) died penniless in London. Marx would have had no truck with Tesla’s mysticism, but history was to unite the life’s work of both men in 1920, when the Marxist regime of the Soviet Union took the momentous decision to transform their vast country by electrification. Lenin believed the success of the revolution was entirely dependent on the rapid rollout of new technology; his favorite slogan was “Communism is socialism plus electrification of the whole country.” In 1948, when George Orwell wanted to personify the evil of the Soviet system in Animal Farm, he had the animals build an electrified windmill.

Marx’s journey to penury was less tortured than Tesla’s: As an asylum-seeker and infrequently employed freelance journalist, he never had much money to lose. He wasn’t a “worker” in the way it is usually meant in Marxist mythology. A friend once teased him that she couldn’t imagine his living happily in a communist state as it might mean getting his hands dirty. “Neither can I,” he agreed. “These times will come, but we must be away by then.” Even his adoring mother complained: “I wish you would make some capital instead of just writing about it.” Luckily for him, he found a benefactor (and true friend) in Friedrich Engels—fox-hunting mill owner by day, radical socialist by night—who looked after him, as a recent biographer puts it, “like a substitute mother, sending him pocket money, fussing over his health and reminding him to study.” Marx may not have been a manganese miner or a tractor driver, but he certainly worked hard: His collected writings come to more than a hundred volumes and would spawn a political ideology that, at its height, controlled half the world’s population.

Karl Marx was born into a German Jewish family, the scion of one of the most famous lines of rabbis in all of European history, but his father, Heinrich, was a successful lawyer, the first non-religious Marx in generations. When Prussia banned Jews from practicing law, he cheerfully converted to Protestantism, holding it to be the most progressive of all religions. Young Karl was baptized a Christian at six years old. He had a happy childhood and was a precocious student. He was also a hothead, known for picking fights in taverns. While studying law at the University of Bonn, he lived student life to the full, running up huge debts and taking part in a duel. His father rapidly transferred him to the more academic environment of Berlin, where Karl switched to philosophy and history, graduating with a thesis comparing Epicurus and Democritus, whose antireligious materialism he found attractive. His first job was as editor of the radical Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, but after the paper was suppressed, he went to Paris, the nineteenth-century’s drop-in center for European revolutionaries. Here, in 1844, he met Engels, with whom he at once formed a close personal and professional bond. Engels was already calling himself a communist and it was his recently published The Condition of the Working Class in England that first drew Marx’s attention to the plight of the industrial workforce and convinced him, too, to embrace communism. He began writing for Vorwarts, the most radical newspaper in Europe, run by a secret society called the League of the Just. When, in 1845, the paper heartily praised an assassination attempt on the king of Prussia, the French authorities ordered Marx, along with many others, to leave Paris. He went to Brussels and renounced his Prussian citizenship. From then on, he was officially classed as stateless.

In 1849 Marx moved to London, where he lived in various degrees of acute poverty for the rest of his days. He came with his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, a Prussian baron’s daughter (Marx was rather proud of having married a beautiful society girl). She called him her “little wild boar” after the bristly hair that sprouted all over his body, as well as by his family nickname, “the Moor,” from the huge mane and beard framing his face and his swarthy complexion. Marx’s health was a source of continual anguish. He suffered from liver trouble, rheumatism, shingles, ulcers, insomnia, bronchitis, laryngitis, pleurisy, and above all, gigantic boils on his backside, which meant that he had to pen most of Das Kapital, his colossal masterpiece, standing up. Engels always said he could tell the passages that had been written under the worst pain. Marx responded, “At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember the carbuncles until their dying day. What a swine they are!” Like another stateless emigre, Sigmund Freud, he was addicted to cigars. In the later years of poverty, though, he was constantly pawning his clothes and furniture to feed his family. He adored his six children, of whom only three made it through childhood. The brutish, bullying intellectual, prone to getting into fights in the pub, was an absolute pussycat at home, with his offspring riding on his back, pulling his hair, and being indulged with endless pets—three dogs, two cats, and two birds. At bedtime he would read to them from his favorite novel, Don Quixote by Cervantes.

The Marxes were always delighted when Engels knocked on the door of their house in Kentish Town, not least because they lived in constant fear of the bailiffs. The family affectionately called him General or General Staff. As well as bringing money, he loved to entertain the household with ribald songs. Sometimes “Staff” and “the Moor” did duets, each singing one song’s lyrics to another’s tune. In 1868 they played a parlor game where Marx’s daughter Jenny got both men to fill in her “confessions” album. The contrast between them is revealing. Under “Your favorite maxim,” Marx put “nihil humani a me alienum puto” (“I think nothing human is alien to me”), while Engels put “not to have any”; under “Your favorite motto” Marx had “de omnibus dubitandum” (“doubt everything”), while Engels preferred the splendid “Take it easy.”

Marx spent thirty-four years in the Reading Room of the British Museum. After hours, he addressed small political meetings (where his lisp and heavy accent made him a rather underwhelming speaker) and then got drunk on beer at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath, the highest pub in London. Out on the town, he would sign his name in hotel registers as “Mr. Charles Marx, private gentleman of London.” On one occasion, he and his fellow socialists Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht set out to drink a beer in every pub from Oxford Street to the Hampstead Road. There were eighteen pubs on that route; by the end, they were so inebriated that they decided to throw paving stones at gaslights, narrowly escaping arrest. Unsurprisingly, Marx was never granted British citizenship. A police report of 1874 declared that “he is the notorious German agitator, the head of the International