Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor known for his discovery of AC (alternating current) electricity. But Tesla’s genius was wide-ranging, as is evidenced by the excerpt below. It is taken from one of the inventor’s so-called “lost diaries,” discovered this past January in a plastic milk carton, among a collection of old Jefferson Airplane lp’s, in the garage of a home in Akron, Ohio.
In the Spring of 1888 I undertook the creation of an invention the genesis of which had come to me in a dream. While in this reverie, I beheld a figure in a dark suit standing at a table within an ill-defined yet unmistakable context of food preparation. Before him he had a meat grinder and a joint of beef. Feeding the meat into the mechanism, he proceeded to transform its bulk mass into a quantity of what the French call “hache,” or chopped meat. As in the vision I watched in a dreamer’s characteristic stoicism, this gentleman shaped an appreciable handful of the chopped beef into a small pie, or disc. He then placed the disc onto the table, which had, via the inexplicably vexing illogic of all dreams, become a griddle. The patty of beef began to cook. As it did so, the man produced an orange square of what I somehow intuited was a kind of cheese. He inverted the cooking meat patty so as to grill its uncooked side and, simultaneous with this act, placed the slice of cheese atop the now-cooked surface of the food. At that dramatic moment I awakened.
I knew, of course, that what I had witnessed in the mysterious confines of my own somnolent psyche had been merely the creation of what all men today call “the cheeseburger.” This, in of itself, was hardly remarkable, although I will own that dreams of food preparation were, to me, an unusual occurrence. Perhaps this fact accounts for the sudden insight I was vouchsafed when I entered the phantasy in my journal. For it was then that I conceived, at once and in its entirety, a (to me) notable elaboration and advancement of the standard cheeseburger.
What, I asked myself, might be the result if one were to prepare, not a single cheeseburger at a time, as had hitherto been the familiar custom of mankind, but two? This experiment I made haste to undertake at once. It remains a source of quiet amusement to me, now years later, to recall that everyone to whom I spoke that day, while acquiring the materials for the project, expressed skepticism regarding the venture. “I have it in mind to create what I propose to call ‘the double-cheeseburger,’” I (perhaps rashly) confided to my grocer, my cheesemonger, and my baker.
To a man, they scoffed. “Such a thing is impossible,” they said. (I conflate their various responses here for the sake of concision.) “Both in its creation and in its potential appeal to the public. Even if you were to make practical a technique for the creation of such a thing, it strains credulity to suppose a man of ordinary appetite would find appealing so outsized and overwhelming a dish. Tesla, you are wasting your time and resources.”
Such discouragement might have daunted a lesser man but, as I had so often in the past, I knew better than to allow the doubts of others to impede my progress. On the contrary, I was quickly able, by the use of a frying pan commodious enough to accommodate two identical beef patties, to fry them both simultaneously, and at an expenditure of thermal energy scarcely greater than that required for the cooking of one. From this I absorbed an important lesson in heat waste, which became a useful and persuasive selling point when, later, I made to convince restaurants to adopt the method of the double-cheeseburger. Similarly, by means of assuring an exact uniformity of dimensions in the cheese slices, I demonstrated that two cheese-draped patties could be created and finished within a time-frame tolerance of less than fifteen seconds—a span I knew (and subsequently demonstrated) could be further diminished by more scrupulously assuring that the meat patties, prior to cooking, be of identical temperature and thickness.
(Differences in the area of the patties, in square centimeters, were trivial in their influences in cooking times. This fact would later prove attractive to establishments which, once double-cheeseburger technology had become ubiquitous, sought to distinguish themselves and increase their popularity by offering the so-called “jumbo-,” “biggie-,” and “gigunda-” sized versions of the dish.)
Having successfully established a technique for the creation of the two cheeseburgers, I confronted the dilemma of their serving. It was then that, as it had so often in the past, the principle of Occam’s Razor provided the decisive solution. That there was twice the normal quantity of cheeseburgers before me was indisputable; by what reasoning, however, must it follow that the number of buns be likewise doubled? Might it not be, not only desirable, but indeed preferable, that the two cheeseburgers be served on a single bun, if that were at all geometrically sensible, physically possible, and economically feasible?
From the conception of this strategy to its successful implementation was but the work of a moment, and as I beheld the final prototype, the double-cheeseburger presented securely and attractively on a single bun, I was thrilled by sensations akin to those I felt when I discovered the rotating magnetic field.
