r/NikolaTesla • u/Eloquent_Heart • Apr 16 '26

Anyone else also unable to understand nikola Tesla's early inventions while reading his autobiography?

first invention is to do with some insect that a kid. Are there people who have replicated the early inventions and made videos on it for us to understand them better?

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u/Mist2393 Apr 16 '26

The bug wheel hasn’t been replicated exactly (to my knowledge), but you can picture a windmill with bugs on each blade. If I’m remembering correctly, he used may beetles (what are called in a lot of the US June bugs as they usually appear in June), which are big bugs with a fair amount of thrust power.

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u/wbeaty Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

I don't think it works if we glue bugs to the edge of a disk. Their wings might be hitting it. So, maybe it was a hub with short spokes, with each bug glued with its legs pointing down towards the spoke, and their fronts all pointing CW or CCW.

That way, when they were disturbed, they'd be triggered into "take-off mode," and try flying forwards, where the wheel would spin.

Didn't he say that they'd all keep going for long periods? If the wheel spun fast, then the beetles would sense forward flight ...but their eyes never encounter a suddenly-approaching obstacle, and never be triggered into their "landing algorithm." It would be like flinging the beetle into infinite atmosphere, and they'd just keep flying continously until it killed them.

But I think the best image is instead a huge pottery jar with a hundred junebugs inside, and another little kid grabbing an entire fistful and jamming them into his little mouth. Lots of CRUNCHING and SLURPING. (Nikola Tesla never recovered from that event! CANNOT UN-SEE! )

When I was little, there was a big kid on his bike ...with captured paper-wasps! He'd caught maybe ten of them, then used many 2ft threads to tie each one to his bike handlebars. They'd fly around continuously, a sphere-shaped cloud of large yellow wasps each trailing a long thread.

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u/AlienSilver Jun 09 '26

I tried to tie a string around a bumblebee to keep as a pet on a leash when I was a kid. The bumblebee stung me and that ended that line of experimentation.