Great Scott! Was Doc Brown Inspired, in part, by Nikola Tesla?

My two favourite movies are six: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Back to the Future trilogy. I cherish each for very different reasons, and I have seen all six films multitudinous times. My passion for almost all things LOTR-related is worthy of its own essay, and while it may seem to anyone who has crossed paths with me that I prefer LOTR (if only evidenced by the tattoo in Elvish on my left wrist, which I got in 2018 in New Zealand), this is untrue: I love both trilogies equally for what they are.

Now, back to the very important point of this post: I discovered something to do with BTTF’s beloved, eccentric Doctor Emmett Brown, the aghast shouter of “1.21 gigawatts!”, the owner of wild, wiry hair, the faster-talker, and the inventor of the coolest time machine ever conceived. Doc is the reason my cat’s name is Emmett, and my love for the films is the reason that I entered a “remake a movie in 60 seconds” contest, wherein I filmed myself playing every character and edited it together. I didn’t even make the semifinals, despite fully nerding out and committing to the project by recording my town hall clock’s hand moving from 10:03 p.m. to 10:04 p.m., but hey. Also, I still aim to own a DeLorean. Anyway, I would like confirmation about my theory, which is as follows:

Doc was modelled, in part, after a certain Nikola Tesla, and the character paid subtle homage to the inventor and engineer who died penniless and alone.

Listen, I was very giddy when I made this potential discovery. Anyone with connections to Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, please pass this post onto them and then let me know if I have uncovered a film secret, or if this is merely a coincidence that will be of mild interest only to film dorks.

How did I make this discovery? Well, while working on different piece for Vocal and researching Edgar Allan Poe, I clicked different links here and there and before I knew it, I was reading about Nikola Tesla. What struck me was a certain paragraph in his Wikipedia page: “He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light appeared before his eyes, often accompanied by visions.[238] Often, the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; at other times they provided the solution to a particular problem he had encountered. Just by hearing the name of an item, he could envision it in realistic detail.[238] Tesla visualized an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage, a technique sometimes known as picture thinking.”

Now, who does this remind you of? Doc Brown, perhaps, in the Twins Pine Mall parking lot at 1:22 a.m., sharing a memory with Marty?! Here is what Doc said after mentioning November 5, 1955, describing that date as a “Red letter day in the history of science”: “That was the day I invented time travel. I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet, hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink, and when I came to, I had a revelation—a vision—a picture in my head! A picture of this! This is what makes time travel possible: The Flux Capacitor. It’s taken me almost thirty years and my entire family fortune to realize the vision of that day. My God, has it been that long?” I hear you on that last point, Doc. I have no clue where the last 15 years of my life went. Double it and I’ll be as wide-eyed and nostalgic as you, although probably not while wearing a hazmat suit, explaining how I invented time travel. But, never say never.

So, what do we have now? Well, both inventors used visions to propel them forward in their discoveries and inventions; and in fact, the images they saw were so clear that each man was able to draw precise illustrations and subsequently construct the visions in real life. The fact that Doc saw the Flux Capacitor in a vision was what initially made me start to believe that his character was modeled subtly on Tesla, the name society now mostly associates with potentially self-driving cars and a certain man from South Africa. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized there are several parallels between Doc and Tesla.

For instance, both personalities struggled socially, with Marty portrayed as Doc’s only friend (other than his dog, Einstein, of course) and Tesla, unfortunately, dying alone in a hotel, befriending, it seems, pigeons in a nearby park that he frequented daily. We hope Doc did not die alone. Of course, he didn’t! What am I saying? He surely lived out his days happily with Clara, Jules, and Verne (I have always cringed at the cheesiness of those names and of that moment onscreen. Although I did name my cat “Emmett”, so. Anyway, the third installment is not my favourite of the three—and don’t get me started on the flying train).

Furthermore: both inventors worked with energy and electricity. Doc, of course, had to quickly sort out how to build his “weather experiment” to capture the energy from the lightning bolt and funnel it into the DeLorean to allow Marty to return to 1985 from 1955. For his part, Tesla was obsessed with the idea of transmitting electricity wirelessly through the air, among multiple other theories, inventions, patents, and accomplishments (perhaps, I don’t know, fine-tuning alternating current?). Both Doc and Tesla’s live repeatedly revolved around electricity and therefore, I say, this is another quiet homage in Doc’s character to Tesla. It is, I say!

They also both eventually struggled financially, with Tesla, as per his Wikipedia page, “having spent most of his money” towards the end of his life, living in various hotels without paying the bills until his death in January 1943. Doc would have struggled financially, as he mentioned using nearly his entire family fortune to develop time travel, but one might assume that his access to any point in history with the DeLorean allowed him to sneakily manipulate events to pad his finances, despite his condemnation of Marty for skipping about greedily (and carelessly—that was really the root problem, I think) with the Grays Sports Almanac in 2015 (where are the highways and cars in the sky, by the way? We’re seven years overdue, now).

P.S. I resent that today’s hoverboards are thusly named. Are they hovering? No. Are they therefore worthy of being named after a board that hovers? No. Anyway, the following link between the two inventors added fuel to my film nerd hypothesis fire:

As from Tesla’s Wikipedia page: “Tesla’s work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. [11]” Flux. Flux! Flux!! Yes, yes, I know that “flux” is a word that is used every day in many circumstances and this one-step-removed connection may be looking a bit too hard to back up my theory, but on the other hand…perhaps Zemeckis and Gale knew of this unit being named after Tesla, and so incorporated the design and word in Doc’s Flux Capacitor. Only Zemeckis and Gale know (and soon I will also know, if you do my bidding and pass this piece of writing onto them).

I tried to read about tesla the unit, and might as well have been reading Latin, but that’s because I did not inherit any of the scientific or mathematical brains that exist in my family heritage. Instead, I got the ability to dissect and expound upon minutiae in movies, so far quite a lucrative pastime for me; I could provide the financial backing for Doc’s next invention, no doubt (or those of Jules or Verne, if they followed in their inventor father’s footsteps, which luckily we will never know, as Zemeckis and Gale mercifully continue to not allow any BTTF remakes or sequels).

In summary, if I may: Tesla and Doc were both highly intelligent; they each experienced detailed, precise visions and used those visions to illustrate and build inventions; they were both thinkers and inventors; they were both eventually scoffed at and struggled socially, each becoming reclusive later in life; they faced financial hardship (presumably with Doc); and they are associated with the word “flux”. Whether it is already known among cinema aficionados that Doc was modelled in part after, or was at least meant to pay quiet homage to, Tesla (and I somehow missed it and have shamed myself as a self-proclaimed BTTF fan), or whether this is all coincidental and I have devoted an afternoon to connecting dots that do not exist does not really matter.

Then again—how many of these similarities are perhaps just simply a natural part of the “mad scientist” trope? Well……anyway, let’s just not dive into that—instead, thank you for reading my dissertation, and I have decided to believe the homages to Tesla were intentional, and if they were not, these links will still be enjoyable for me to imagine the next time I treat myself to a trip through time, in the passenger seat next to Marty as he prepares to race down the street towards the clocktower, Doc desperately reconnecting the extension cord, while Marty feverishly checks that the Flux Capacitor is, indeed, “fluxing”.

Please get back to me soon with confirmation or denial from Misters Zemeckis and Gale. Thank you.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(unit) https://theconversation.com/nikola-tesla-5g-network-could-realise-his-dream-of-wireless-electricity-a-century-after-experiments-failed-158665