Ian Ruskin on Misunderstood Geniuses, Spirituality, and Scientific Legacy

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/28

Ian Ruskin is a British-born actor, writer, and independent scholar based in Los Angeles. Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he worked for 15 years in repertory theatre, the West End, television, and film before relocating to the United States. In 2000, he founded The Harry Bridges Project, beginning a series of one-person plays and documentaries about misunderstood figures, including labour leader Harry Bridges, revolutionary writer Thomas Paine, and inventor Nikola Tesla. His plays have toured internationally, and film versions of the Bridges and Paine works have aired nationwide on PBS, reaching millions of viewers.

In this conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Ian Ruskin about embodying Nikola Tesla on stage and why Ruskin is drawn to “misunderstood men” in history. Ruskin reflects on his classically British voice, his shift to independent one-person plays, and his mission to correct the record on figures like Tesla, Harry Bridges, and Thomas Paine. He discusses Tesla’s outsider status, obsessive working habits, spiritual motivations, and unfulfilled dream of wireless global power. Throughout, Ruskin emphasizes that Tesla saw invention as a moral project: using science and technology to improve life for humanity rather than merely to generate profit.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Ian Ruskin, who has a classically British acting voice. My first question is: Did you always have that voice?

Ian Ruskin: Yes, I think so. Until I was 13, I mainly lived in America, although I was born in England. When I went back to England and later started drama school, I remember being ruthless about getting rid of my American R’s and L’s and things like that. For many years, I have had this same voice and accent. I try to keep it. It is not easy to maintain an accent when you have lived a long time in another country, but I am hanging on to it as much as I can.

Jacobsen: Do you feel as though your voice has become a third culture unto itself between Britain and America?

Ruskin: I have never thought of it quite like that. I certainly believe there is a different emphasis, as an actor, on voice in England—more than there is here—perhaps because many actors here are looking to work in television and film, whereas the core of English acting is on stage, where you need to project. That makes a difference in how you are trained.

Jacobsen: You have transitioned over roughly the last 20 years into something that could be characterized as a creatively independent endeavour, using the lifetime of skills and reputation you have built. Is that a fair characterization?

Ruskin: Yes. Things often happen in life without your realizing where they are going. It was not a plan at the beginning. For about 20 years, I have been in charge of my own career, writing and performing one-person plays, which I never would have thought I would be doing 30 years ago. It happened, and I found it exciting and still do. That is what I do.

Jacobsen: You focus on characters who tend to be more obscure within mainstream consciousness. With Tesla, for example, people may recognize the name from the electric car company, but not in a biographical, scientific, technological, or historical sense.

Ruskin: Yes.

Jacobsen: Why choose obscure figures in history as your focus?

Ruskin: I have written three plays, and they are all about men whom I consider to have been misunderstood and not given the credit they deserved. That has always motivated me to set the record straight and give people a different perspective on these men. They are men who made significant contributions to humanity, yet they often seem to have disappeared from public awareness. I have made it my mission, if you like. It takes me to many different places and introduces me to many different people. These men are not unknown, but they are misunderstood. Each has a fan club that gives me support when I am doing research and writing.

Jacobsen: There are several forms of misunderstanding. Common notions about historical figures can be one form. Another involves outright fabrications—claims presented as factual that are not. Then there is a deeper level, where people who study the record carefully discover that some public conceptions are false, and they uncover truths that offer a more accurate, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, picture of the person. With those distinctions in mind, what are the historical distortions about Tesla? What are the fabrications? And what truths emerged from your research, with Tesla specifically?

Ruskin: With Tesla. The first thing to note is that America is full of elementary schools named after Edison. Edison schools are everywhere. There are very few Tesla schools. Yet in what became known as the War of the Currents, Tesla’s system ultimately prevailed. The alternating-current system he championed powers most of the world. The electricity he supported is the basis of modern power distribution.

Edison was not a particularly pleasant man. Tesla was Serbian. He had unusual habits. He did not mix easily with people. He did not play the social or political games people often play to get ahead. As a result, he was pushed aside and, for quite some time, written out of mainstream historical memory.

In the past 20 years, his name has re-emerged—helped, of course, by Tesla bringing it into popular culture. But he was always an outsider. He was never part of the “in crowd” of electrical engineers in New York. He worked at the edges of that community, and he thought in ways nobody else did. People often dislike that. They tend to push you out if your thinking is unfamiliar or challenging. He certainly was difficult.

Jacobsen: What were some of the unusual habits he had—whether in behaviour or in thought?

Ruskin: I do not like to dwell on them too much, but he was definitely on what we would now describe as a spectrum. He was highly obsessive. He had significant concerns about germs. He perceived the universe in ways most people did not. He attached importance to the number three and incorporated it into many of his routines. He took what we now call power naps and could work for 24 hours straight. He did not follow the usual social rhythms of life.

He spent a great deal of time alone. He could be charming, and he did attend dinner parties, but he primarily worked in solitude because he was trying to enter conceptual spaces no one else was exploring. He was, fundamentally, a loner. He would polish silverware before eating, among many other habits that struck people as unusual.

Jacobsen: How did this translate into the inventive side of him?

Ruskin: Into the inventive side of him?

Jacobsen: Yes—similar to Glenn Gould’s humming, which some see as part of his creative process.

Ruskin: Tesla often said that most major inventions were created by people who were intensely focused and largely alone. His habits reinforced that. He frequently disappeared for weeks because he was in his lab for 15 or 20 hours a day.

He spoke about the thrill of an inventor witnessing something that existed only in the mind becoming real. That thrill surpassed food, drink, friendship, or love. It happened to him repeatedly. He was immersed in wherever his mind took him.

He also had an extraordinary ability to invent in his mind. He could design machines in his head and run what amounted to internal simulations. He spent much of his time in that mental world, which led to remarkable insights and predictions. In many ways, he was a futurist—someone whose imagination was oriented toward what was coming.

His instinct for complete focus, for removing distractions and external stimulation, was central to his style as an inventor. It shaped everything about how he worked.

Jacobsen: What is considered one of his most important inventions? What do you think is one of his better inventions that is largely unknown?

Ruskin: The invention generally regarded as his most important is the induction motor. The induction motor transforms alternating current into motion by creating electromagnetic fields, and it does so with excellent efficiency. It became the primary way machines are powered. When you turn on an electric fan, it uses an induction motor based on Tesla’s design. Almost everything that moves in modern machinery relies on that principle. It was a transformative invention because it made electric power far more practical and efficient. His induction motor requires less maintenance, produces more torque, and is more reliable than earlier designs. It is his single most important contribution to technology.

He also developed or contributed to other technologies for which he received little credit for a long time. He created what he called “shadowgraphs,” which were essentially X-ray images, before Wilhelm Röntgen announced the discovery of X-rays. He was also eventually credited with foundational work in radio; Marconi’s radio system relied significantly on Tesla’s earlier patents. This pattern—Tesla developing something and others receiving the immediate credit—happened repeatedly in his life.

Another major part of Tesla’s legacy is his vision for what the world could become, even though he never fully realized it. He had two grand ambitions. One was to transmit electrical power wirelessly across long distances, either through the ionosphere or through the Earth. He demonstrated wireless transmission over short distances, but never achieved the long-range version he envisioned. Both of his major laboratories—Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe—were later demolished, ending the experiments.

If Tesla had succeeded, it would have eliminated the need for copper wiring, which was already a massive industry. Sending electricity without wires or poles would have radically altered the world and bankrupted entire sectors. Tesla also argued that wireless power would reduce or eliminate dependence on oil, coal, and gas—positions that threatened powerful interests in his era. Whether or not those interests actively undermined him, his ideas certainly challenged the economic foundations of major industries.

He also spoke about what he called “cosmic energy,” essentially the energy of the sun and the idea that space is full of usable energy. He tried to find ways to tap into that. Today, the closest analogue would be nuclear fusion research: a global, multibillion-dollar effort underway for decades to achieve clean, virtually unlimited energy by replicating the sun’s processes. Fusion is not yet commercially viable, but progress continues. Tesla anticipated the concept—the belief that the universe contains immense, accessible energy—and took early conceptual steps in that direction.

Jacobsen: These are significant issues. Many highly gifted figures in technology are socially selective—capable of charm or charisma in the right circumstances—yet they can also hold spiritual or metaphysical beliefs that, while not scientifically grounded, are part of who they are and how they see the world. What were Tesla’s views on such things, aside from numerical patterns?

Tesla’s views on things, not only his technological prowess. Many highly gifted people in science and engineering also hold spiritual or supernatural beliefs that may not be scientifically grounded but are part of who they are and how they see the world.

Ruskin: You are asking about his spirituality, yes? That is an important question that is often overlooked. He came from a deeply religious background. His father was a Serbian Orthodox priest. His mother’s two grandfathers and two brothers were Serbian Orthodox priests, and he was expected to become a priest himself. He never felt a connection to the church or the priesthood, but his entire life was driven by the desire to improve the world for all humankind. That was his spiritual path.

He had a meaningful relationship with Swami Vivekananda, the first primary Indian spiritual teacher to introduce Hindu philosophy to America. Tesla became interested in aspects of Hinduism. He saw his purpose in life as making the world better for all people, and he understood that mission as his way of serving God. That sense of purpose—moral, universal, and spiritual—was one of his strongest motivations, though it is rarely discussed.

Jacobsen: Were there any other numbers he had superstitions about?

Ruskin: His primary focus was on the numbers three, six, and nine. He said that three, six, and nine were the “keys to the universe.” I still need to do more research on that aspect of his thinking. The challenge with Tesla is that if you go on YouTube, you will find all kinds of claims about him that are not true—and occasionally some that might be true. There are videos about his supposed connections to the pyramids; I still need to investigate that.

There were many exaggerations even during his lifetime. Some people speculated he was a Martian because he detected signals from space and mentioned the possibility that they came from Mars. These kinds of stories grew because he was a partial recluse and a curious combination of traits.

He was very elegant and sharply dressed, quite handsome, and socially charming when he wished to be. He lived in hotels that he often could not afford, was evicted repeatedly, and moved to the next one. He loved performing demonstrations. I titled my play Magic and Lightning because he saw himself as a kind of magician. He delighted in surprising people and challenging their expectations. He had a wonderful sense of humour, which is often forgotten. He was not a hermit—but once he entered his lab, he could disappear for days or weeks at a time.

Jacobsen: What did he consider his biggest intellectual challenge?

Ruskin: Without question, the attempt to transmit power and light wirelessly around the world. He built a transmission tower on Long Island called Wardenclyffe. He believed that from this roughly 200-foot-tall tower, he could send electrical power across great distances.

He tended to take funding from wealthy patrons for one project and then redirect it to whatever he considered more important. He received funding from J. P. Morgan, who wanted him to develop wireless communication because it had clear commercial potential. Tesla instead used the money to pursue wireless power transmission. Eventually, Wardenclyffe was abandoned and later demolished.

Tesla considered wireless global power transmission his life’s most significant work—the goal above all others. He did achieve remarkable feats. He generated artificial lightning. He transmitted high-voltage discharges through the air for miles. He lit fields of light bulbs simply by placing them in the ground. He achieved things no one else had, but never at the global scale he envisioned. That unfulfilled vision was the defining challenge of his intellectual life.

Jacobsen: What were some true things that were genuinely tragic?

Ruskin: The loss of his laboratories was devastating. One of his New York labs burned down. In Colorado Springs, because he could not pay the electrical bill, the power company seized his experimental station and dismantled it. Then Wardenclyffe, his Long Island tower and laboratory, was eventually dynamited. These events broke his heart and sent him into a deep depression. When his New York lab burned down, he lost years of notes and equipment just as he was beginning experiments in radio. Shortly afterward, Marconi sent wireless messages using technology that drew on Tesla’s earlier patents. Variations of this pattern occurred throughout Tesla’s life.

The great tragedies of his life all stemmed from his work—people misunderstanding him, taking credit for his ideas, or physically destroying the spaces where he worked. During these periods of depression, he sometimes used his Tesla coil—his invention for generating extremely high voltages—to give himself electric shocks in an effort to lift his mood.

Jacobsen: It worked?

Ruskin: Yes, he said it did. They eventually jolted him back to life, and he would recover his drive and start again. In the last years of his life, though, he was alone, not well, and living in a New York hotel room, still trying to work on his final ideas, which never came to fruition. It was not a happy ending. There were moments earlier in his life when he had large amounts of money, but he spent it all developing new ideas. He could turn his back on money entirely when he thought something more important was at stake.

His life’s ending was poignant. His hotel room number was 3327—he loved threes—on the 33rd floor. He put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on his door, and three days later, he was found dead in his bed—a sad ending, though he had extraordinary moments along the way.

He lit the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair using his polyphase alternating-current system. He and Westinghouse illuminated 160,000 light bulbs and about 200 buildings simultaneously—at a time when most people in the world had never seen electric light at all. It was one of the most astonishing technological demonstrations of the century.

Jacobsen: What was the reaction?

Ruskin: People were astonished. Around 28 million visitors attended the World’s Fair, and most had never seen a light bulb, except perhaps in a small demonstration. Many still used gas lamps, candles, or had no artificial light at all. To stand in Chicago and see this enormous landscape lit electrically must have been breathtaking. It defied belief. And Tesla loved that. It played into his image of being a magician; what he did felt like magic. He had those moments—spectacular, unforgettable highs—alongside the deep lows.

Jacobsen: What was his view of his own biggest mistake?

Ruskin: His biggest mistake? That is an excellent question. I think on some level he realized that if he had not torn up that royalty contract with Westinghouse, or if he had paid his electric bill in Colorado Springs, things might have turned out differently. He was very close to achieving breakthroughs there. The Colorado Springs power company sued him, took over the laboratory he had built, and dismantled it. That sort of thing happened more than once in his life.

I think part of him wished he could have done more—found a way to pay that bill, raised more money, or secured the resources he needed. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, but he often could not quite find a way to reach those goals. Those setbacks, I think, were what he regarded as his biggest mistakes—or at least his most significant losses.

Jacobsen: What is the overall takeaway, or set of takeaways, that you hope people gather from the lecture?

Ruskin: First, I hope people come away with a deeper understanding of Tesla as a human being. His spirituality—his sense of purpose—is rarely discussed, but it was central for him. He truly wanted to give humanity a magnificent, clean source of energy. That was what drove him.

I would love to perform the play for people in technology today—for those working on AI or any transformative field—to present the idea that the purpose of innovation should be to make the world a better place first, and only afterward to make money. There is nothing wrong with making money, but the intention behind the work matters.

Another takeaway is that the history we are taught is not always accurate. It often reflects the interests of those in power. Tesla was someone who constantly challenged the status quo, and figures like that are frequently written out or minimized. We need to know more about people like him—not just Tesla, but many others.

Primarily, though, I hope people understand that for Tesla, the whole point of being an inventor, a scientist, or a visionary was to improve the world. That idea deserves to be heard more often.

Jacobsen: What has been the feedback on your production so far?

Ruskin: The feedback has been remarkable. Many people had no idea what he accomplished or the scope of his ideas. In 1920, he essentially described a device similar to a modern cell phone. People also respond strongly to the mission he was on—his dream, if you like. Many find it inspiring. It has opened their eyes not only to Tesla but also to larger questions: Why do we invent things? What is the purpose of invention? What is the purpose of science? What constitutes real progress? Much of the feedback has touched on those themes, which I find very exciting.

Jacobsen: What is your favourite quote that you wrote—whether taken from Tesla’s real life or created within character?

Ruskin: A favourite quote. One I love is something he said: “We are held together like stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable.” That was his understanding of humankind’s optimistic nature.

Jacobsen: In an ideal scenario, who would you have portray Tesla?

Ruskin: Apart from me?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Ruskin: The person I would have chosen is no longer with us. David Bowie performed Tesla once—in The Prestige. I thought he was terrific. Bowie also had a spiritual dimension, and I believe he would have deeply understood that side of my play. But that is not going to happen, unfortunately. So it has to be me.

Jacobsen: What do you think was the overarching triumph of Tesla’s life and legacy?

Ruskin: His triumph was lighting up the world. His work with alternating current electricity illuminated the world—and still does. That is a considerable achievement.

Jacobsen: By many metrics, you could consider that the hallmark of the modern world.

Ruskin: Absolutely. One of the cues in the play shows images taken from space. The cameras pass over continents, and you can identify them by the patterns of light. That is Tesla. That is all, Tesla. If we are nearing the end, I invite people to visit my website. It is RuskinProductions.com. It includes more about Tesla and my other two characters. It may interest them.

Jacobsen: Is this your last play, or are you hoping to do more?

Ruskin: I honestly do not know. For the last two or three years, when people asked me that, I used to say, “Maybe—if Tesla does not kill me first.” I am feeling a little more optimistic now. He is not going to be the end of me. So maybe. But I do not have anyone else in mind at the moment. We will see.

Jacobsen: Ian, thank you very much for your time today. If you have any final thoughts, you have the floor, and then we can part ways.

Ruskin: It was good talking with you.

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