An exceptional presentation of his personality, completely to the taste of the 90s, can be found in the article published by Franklin Chester on August 22 1887 in Citizen. He described this inventor with the following words:

As for his appearance alone, nobody can look at him without feeling his power. He is over 1.80 tall, and very slim. And still he possesses great physical strength. His hands are very big; his thumbs are unusually long, and it all indicates very high intelligence. All of his straight black hair, one can almost not imagine darker and more shining hair ? is combed to the back, what emphasizes the edges of his face. His cheekbones are high and expressed, what is characteristic for Slavs. His skin has a marble shade, which after many years takes the first nuance of yellow color. His deep-set eyes are blue and they burn like fire. It seems that the same peculiar sparks that spurt from his instruments, flicker in his eyes too. His vigorous head narrows down to the chin; the chin looks almost like a dot. Never any other person (nobody ever) worked so persistently, so seriously and so unselfishly for the welfare of the whole human race. Money means nothing to him. If he decided to do what Edison did, today he would probably be the richest man in this world, and he is only 40.

What sticks out the most about him is his seriousness. Tesla is undoubtedly the most serious man in New York. And still he has a sharp sense of humor and he's also a well-mannered person. Nobody can exceed him in his genuine modesty. He doesn't know jealousy. He never considered other people's achievements too small; he was never stingy on commendations. When he speaks, one can only listen. Even people who don't know what he's talking about, listen to him with enthusiasm. Even the one, who doesn't understand how far his words reach, must sense their meaning. He speaks English like a highly educated foreigner; without the accent without any mistakes. Besides that, he speaks eight other languages. Since the day that man came to New York, almost nothing has changed in his every-day life.

He lives at the Gerlach, a smaller, very quiet hotel on the 27th street, between Broadway and the 6th Avenue. He comes to his laboratory every morning at nine o'clock, and there he spends the whole day in his unusual, mysterious world searching for new cognition and energies. He cannot stand any observers, while he's working. Nobody knows anything about his assistants. From time to time, he organizes a public performance of his experiments, and many people would sacrifice everything in the world to be able to be present at one of these occasions. He usually works until six o'clock; but it can happen that he stays in his laboratory even longer. Darkness presents no obstacle for him. He produces his own daylight. At eight o'clock sharp, he comes to Waldorf in the immaculate evening wardrobe. During the winter, he wears a tailcoat instead of an evening jacket. He gets up from the table exactly at ten o'clock and he goes either back to his hotel, where he devotes himself to his studies, or he goes back to his laboratory to spend the whole night working.

The American Magazine published in its edition from April 1921 an interview called "Allow the power of perception to work to your own advantage", where Tesla answered to the questions of the journalist M. K. Wiseheart about his unusual ability. It said: "During my childhood I had a very unusual sickness, which manifested itself in the way that I would see pictures followed by intense lightning. As soon as one would say a word, I would see the defined object so clearly that I could not distinguish whether it was real or not. ( . . . ) Even when I stretched my hand and tried to reach for the picture, it stayed complete and would not move from its place. In attempt to get rid of these unpleasant phenomena, I tried to concentrate my thoughts on peaceful, calming memories. That, in fact, brought momentary relief, but after I did it a couple of times, my healing device lost all of its power. Instead of that, I would go for strolls that would in my spirit lead me out of the narrow boundaries, which were set to my knowledge. I've spent days and nights going on the journeys only with the help of the strength of my cognition, which led me to the unknown places, unknown cities and countries, and I tried to keep their characteristics in my spirit as intensified as possible. I imagined that I would live in the countries I have not seen before, and in my perception I found friends there, which seemed very real, and which were off immeasurable value to me. I occupied myself with these kinds of journeys until I was 17; and then I focused my thoughts to a wide field of inventions.

To my great joy, I realized that I could easily visualize different things. I needed no models, designs, or experiments - all of it was in front of me in my spirit. I obtained the visualizing ability in my childhood attempts to get rid of the unpleasant pictures; I believe that in this way I've developed a new way of giving material form to the creative ideas and plans. This method should be of use to all the people who are gifted with the strength of perception, no matter if they are inventors, business people, or artists. When one has to, for instance, design a machine or carry out an assignment, people usually start with the work without the adequate preparation. Because of that they get lost in a great number of details, instead of following the central idea; their efforts can also have results, but then these results are mostly of low quality. Now I would shortly like to present my own procedure: when I feel a wish to develop a certain thing, I often carry this idea with me in my spirit for months or even years. Then, when I feel like it, I start travelling through my world of perception and think about that problem without consciously straining myself. That is, so to speak, the time of hatching the ideas. This phase is followed by the period of immediate engagement in this problem during which I take into consideration different possibilities of solving the problem; during the analysis, I concentrate my spirit on the limited research area. Then when I consciously devote myself to that problem and all its details, very often in that phase I have a feeling that I am on the way to the solution. Moreover, the most beautiful thing about that feeling is that when it comes over me, I exactly know that I have essentially solved the problem and that I will reach my goal. That feeling is so convincing for me, as if I've really solved my problem. I concluded that the solution already has to be present in my subconsciousness in that moment, although it may take a while before I can comprehend it in my consciousness. Before I make a design on the paper, I have already developed that idea in my spirit. In my spirit, I can make changes on a machine, improve it or even put it into operation. I can give my associates the exact measurements of every part, without making any construction designs, and when those parts are put together, they integrate so well, as if you took their measurements of a design. It doesn't matter to me whether I'll test a machine in my spirit or in my laboratory. The inventions I created this way functioned perfectly; there were no exceptions during thirty years. My first electric motor, wireless vacuum fluorescent tube, my turbine and many other machines were created that way."

by John O`Neill - Tesla - ISBN 3-86150-193-7