Page 100 - Hard Goals

Animated 91

Thanks to Telsa’s animated thinking, we have AC current, the
hydroelectric dam, and the radio, to name just a very few of his
more than 100 patented and countless unpatented inventions. I
read recently that, in 1909, Tesla told Popular Mechanics, “It will
soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world
so simply that any individual can carry and operate his own appa-
ratus.” The apparatus, Tesla predicted, would be about the size of
a pocket watch. Tesla’s vision might sound a lot like an iPhone or
BlackBerry, and he came up with it at a time when the rotary phone
(for those who remember such) was still decades in the making.
Tesla is far from one of a kind. Many of the greatest minds
throughout history have visualized, imagined, envisioned, or, to
use the word that titles this chapter, animated their ideas and
goals. For instance, sculptor Henry Moore, who, Briggs tells us,
imagined his sculptures, no matter their size, as though he were
holding them in the palm of his hand. Briggs relays how Moore
mentally visualized a complex form, knowing what all sides looked
like, even realizing the sculpture’s volume by knowing the space
that the shape displaced in the air. Or the great anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, another of Briggs’s studies, who saw three-
dimensional schematic pictures in his mind when working through
ethnographic problems.
The great physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feyn-
man described his use of “visual animation” in his memoirs as
11
follows:

I had a scheme, which I still use today, when somebody is
explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep mak-
ing up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come
in with a terrifi c theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re
telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something