RECONSTRUCTION OF
NIKOLA TESLA’S HANDWRITING
author: Olivera Stojadinović
If eyes are the mirrors of the soul, then handwriting is its trace on paper, its graphic expression. Reconstruction of a handwriting can be compared to painting a portrait, which, unlike a photograph that records images of individual moments, gives a more complete representation of the model, collecting a multitude of moments into one joint essence.
The idea was to make a typeface based on the samples of Nikola Tesla's handwriting from available documents, a digital font for computer use that would largely correspond to his handwriting, and at the same time be legible enough to be used.
Sources
We had three sources at our disposal: the notes from Colorado Springs from 1899, in ink, in English; a correspondence with Mr. Radosavljević from 1914 in Serbian, in ink and pencil, in the Cyrillic script; one telegram, also sent to Mr. Radosavljević, in pencil, in Serbian, in the Latin script; and a long letter written to Pola Fotić in 1939, where Tesla describes his childhood, in pencil, in English.
The Latin script was created primarily on the basis of documents from Colorado Springs. These are professional notes, written fast, in ink, so certain letters are almost illegible, but words can be understood as a whole. Small letters are relatively little, but energetic strokes of top and bottom extensions reach far out of the line. The initials are larger, especially the beginning of section, where they are in many cases calligraphically written, with curved, ornamental strokes. The letters are very slanted, interconnected and comfortably spaced. These notes contain almost all necessary letters, but also numerals, brackets and mathematical operators.
The letter to Pola from Tesla's later period served as a supplement; it was written much more carefully, since it was intended for a very young reader. The letters are more clearly differentiated by shape, although written in pencil, which is an aggravating circumstance for reconstruction due to thicker strokes with unclear edges. In it we found cleaner variants of letters u and n that were not dissimilar enough in the notes from Colorado Springs; we completed the punctuation and added other missing letters. Letters that were not found in the documents were Z and Q .
It is interesting that the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade has only one document in the Serbian language written in the Latin script. This is a telegram sent through the US Mail, so the use of the Latin script is logical. Diacritical marks were left out, but it is interesting that the letter z was written with long down ending, differently then in the documents written in English. The only letters with diacritical marks that we found were those from the letter to Pola, used for writing the name Mačak and the second name Bogić.
The documentation written in Cyrillic at our disposal was meager. Two letters written with a quill were very valuable, because the letters are clear and the initials very beautiful, almost calligraphic. Others are written in pencil, in a fast handwriting for a close friend who could decipher it. The letters originated back from the war years, and often dealt with opportunities to aid the imperiled Serbia. After close examination, all small letters except "џ" were found. As for capital letters, Л, Љ, Њ, Џ, Ћ, Ђ, Ц, Ф and Ш were missing.
The dilemma of whether to leave empty space in place of missing letters, or to fill them up, was resolved by using the strokes of existing letters and deducing the possible forms of letters in the same style. Some of the characters that belong to the standard code page and that were not found in the documentation were created in the same manner. Of course, the appearance of these letters and special charactersis is not authentic, and they are not part of the reconstruction, but only supplements for the font, in order to make it usable.
Typography and handwriting
The typographic script means that each letter has a defined shape and that the words are formed by taking necessary letters and placing them one after another. Each letter is located in its field, and the next letter is added to the previous one, with some space in between.
With handwriting, the next letter is adjusted to the previous one, both by shape and position. Connections between letters change their length and position as needed. The letter ? has a small hook on the upper side, so its connection to the next letter is different than when a letter has the ending at the bottom, like n . The same goes for spaces – they are adjusted depending on the shape of neighboring letters. Lengths and shapes of extensions also vary, and they make the handwriting rhythmical and interesting. In cases when two letters with the same type of extension are next to each other, handwriting provides the possibility of writing them in a different manner. This is what makes handwriting different from a typeface, and what makes it beautiful and remarkable.
One of the methods to preserve the characteristics of a handwriting in a typographic reconstruction is to adjust begin and end strokes to connect the letters smoothly. This is the part that requires a lot of time and concentration, since the appearance of all letter combinations used in words needs to be examined. The begin and end strokes are often left out in round letters, because they are difficult to adjust to other letters.
Authenticity is attained by adding ligatures and alternative forms. Ligatures are two or more connected letters in the same field, and alternative forms are graphic variations of certain letters. The more such forms there are, the more the reconstruction resembles the original handwriting. Still, numerous additional letterforms make the use more difficult, since choosing an alternative letter requires more time than typing from the basic set on the keyboard.
In the reconstruction of Tesla's handwriting, the letters of the main set were selected from the more legible variants, and adjusted so that the letters match each other in size, weight and slanting, as well as that they can connect to each other. The source documents were written with different pens and pencils, on various types of paper, and the handwriting was therefore smaller or larger, more or less slanted, which, along with usual variations in handwriting, additionally contributed to distinguishing the letters. By making it uniform, the script became legible, and variations of characteristic sets of connected letters were partially interpreted in numerous ligatures, which are also available.
From the idea to the font
The idea for a typographic reconstruction of Nikola Tesla's handwriting in the year of the 150 th anniversary of his birth, as a kind of homage, came from Rastko Ćirić, Professor at the Belgrade Faculty of Applied Arts.
Final-year student of graphic design Vladimir Popović took on the task and included it in his final graduate paper. He obtained the sources for reconstruction – the selected documents – from the Nikola Tesla Museum, in the form of high-resolution scans.
The primary idea was that Vladimir should create both Cyrillic and Latin forms, but it turned out that the task required a lot of time and that the one semester that he had at his disposal would not be enough to finish the task. He examined the documents, selected the letters and created a basic Latin font with several alternative letters.
I took upon myself the undertaking of supplementing the font with Cyrillic script and some other necessary characters, ligatures and alternatives, and of harmonizing these letters and setting them into the Unicode table. The format in which this font was created is Open Type, since all characters are contained in one font, in Unicode Character Code: Cyrillic, Latin, numerals, punctuation, alternative letters, ligatures... This format is furthermore used both by Windows and Mac OS X systems. In addition, applications supporting Unicode are indispensable, and there are more and more such programs today.
In Tesla's handwriting
When Tesla's font becomes a part of the operating system, Tesla's name will appear every time you open the font menu. (Some applications will also show several letters from it.) This is not a font that can be used for official correspondence, nor can books be set in type with it. It should be kept for the moments when you want to write down something special, to dress your words in Tesla's handwriting, and see how they sound like that.
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Font Tesla, Open Type, unicode
[Tesla OTF.zip, 64 KB]
Read also:
On personal fonts
Calligraphic typefaces