The Obsession

Nikola Tesla was not like other inventors. He did not tinker his way to discoveries. He visualized complete machines in his mind, ran them mentally until he found flaws, then built finished designs. His brain worked differently.

He also had obsessions that others found strange.

Tesla walked around buildings three times before entering. He required eighteen napkins at dinner, a number divisible by three. He stayed in hotel rooms whose numbers were divisible by three. He counted his steps, his chews, his repetitions of daily activities.

These behaviors have been attributed to obsessive compulsive disorder. Perhaps correctly. But Tesla himself offered a different explanation. He believed he had discovered something fundamental about the universe. Something hidden in the numbers 3, 6, and 9.

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6, and 9, he reportedly said, then you would have the key to the universe.

Tesla never published a systematic explanation of what he meant. His papers contain fragments. His interviews offer hints. But the complete theory, if he had one, died with him in 1943.

What survives is a pattern of behavior and scattered statements suggesting that Tesla saw mathematical relationships others missed. He believed the universe operated according to principles that mainstream science had overlooked. Numbers were not just quantities. They were keys.

Tesla's career supports taking his intuitions seriously. He invented alternating current, the technology that powers modern civilization. He developed radio technology before Marconi. He demonstrated wireless energy transmission a century before it became commercially viable. He imagined smartphones, the internet, and renewable energy when such ideas seemed like fantasy.

This was not a man prone to delusion. His strange ideas often proved correct.

So when Tesla spoke of 3, 6, and 9 as keys to the universe, the question is not whether he was eccentric. He clearly was. The question is whether his eccentricity concealed insight.

What did he see that we do not.