The Electrical Neurheographiton
Documented by Minister Y. Faust, D.Phil
Constructed: March 14, 1914 (patent still pending)
Invented by: Nikola Tesla (Serbian subject of the Austrian Empire, later an American citizen, born July 10, 1856; “died” January 7, 1943)
History: Stolen from the “robotorium” (barn) of farmer-tinkerer Rhett Greene in St. John’s, Dominion of Newfoundland, 1947, by Yugoslavian agents. Held in the Sub-Basement 6 of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito Museum of Yugoslavian Civilisation, until sold to Thackery T. Lambshead in 1997 and subsequently lent by his estate to the Slovenian National Museum of Electrical Engineering; L2010.01
Biographical Sketch
Few intellects in the history of Man achieved such Daedalian heights as those conquered by Serbian inventor, mechanical engineer, psychemetrician, and electrodynamist Nikola Tesla. Men as grand of conjecture and achievement as Tesla attract, along with their many accolades, such a volume of obloquy as to produce an aneurysm among all but the most robustly confident of souls. And while Mr. Tesla was confident indeed, even “galactically arrogant,” as one detractor called him, he was also terrified of the charge that many of his foes in the scientific and journalistic establishments had hurled at him,
Indeed, as the twentieth century of our Lord unfolded, Tesla served for many cinematistes as the very archetype of the deranged natural physicist or “mad scientist.” So it was that, in 1913, Tesla returned from his adopted America to the land of his birth to devote himself to constructing a mechanism that would ensure he never be chained in Bedlam’s urine-spattered halls: the electrical neurheographiton (nyu-REY-o-GRAPH-i-ton,
Function of the Electrical Neurheographiton
Mr. Tesla’s electrical neurheographiton (1914) was the forerunner of the electro-encephalogram and the electro-convulsive malady-eraser, and the estranged nephew of the intravenous mercury phrenological brain engine (known popularly as the “liquid silver guillotine”).
Tesla “ionically enthralled” by his electrical neurheographiton.
A massive mechanical device consisting of a generator and the most sophisticated magnetic-electrical scanner in the world at that time, the neurheographiton beamed electrical energy into a patient’s cranium via a “healing helmet.” The “electrical balm” demonstrably and immediately undercut the mania, enthusiasm, apostasy, anarchism, and other emotional morbidities of Tesla’s numerous test subjects, apparently via relieving them of the burden of painful and traumatic memories (such as the recollection of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and dotage), priming the patient’s brain for emotional “rewriting” with whatever “biographical” data the therapist deemed appropriate. Following a single usage on himself, Tesla declared to his assistant, Mr. Igor Hynchbeck, that, “I’m cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured, cured of all my obsessive impulsions! Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely free of all of them!”
Electrophantasmic Discharges
A type of energetic pollution arising from the neurheographiton’s manifold and highly charged internal mechanisms were what Mr. Tesla described in his
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
