The leaf reproduced below is the earliest extant document in the subject's hand. It was, on the date of seizure, pasted to the inside back cover of the Aperture Notebook with a small piece of dried fish-glue, and had been there, by the subject's own annotation, since 1916.
The drawing is, as the title suggests, a diagram of an electric — or, more accurately, an animate-mechanical — motor whose rotor is a paper pinwheel and whose driving force is sixteen Lika june-bugs (Polyphylla fullo, the European Pine Chafer) glued at the wing-cases to the pinwheel's vanes. The bugs, attempting to fly, propelled the wheel.
The subject built the device, by his later account in the Electrical Experimenter autobiography of 1919, in the boys' room of the Smiljan parsonage, in the winter of his fifth year, after his older brother Dane had remarked, over a bowl of beans, that "it would be interesting to see a motor made of insects." The device worked. It produced, by the subject's later estimate, sufficient torque to lift a small biscuit on a paper platform.
Eight months later, in August of 1861, Dane Tesla was dead. The drawing was kept in Đuka Tesla's hope-chest from 1861 until 1916, when the subject — having returned to Lika for the first time in fifty-two years — recovered it and pasted it into the back of his life's notebook.
The June-Bug Motor is the subject's first recorded inventive act. The 1919 Electrical Experimenter autobiography refers to it once, in passing, in a single sentence in which the subject — by then sixty-three — attributes its creation to a "boyhood eccentricity" without naming the brother for whom it was made. The omission is, in the editorial judgment of this office, characteristic.
The drawing is mentioned again in the third-to-last entry of the Aperture Notebook (Artifact 002), where the subject writes, on the afternoon of his death: "The first motor was a motor I made for Dane. The last motor I have built is the tower at Wardenclyffe. I have, between, built nothing of consequence. Both motors were built for the same person."
For the parish record of Dane Tesla's death, see Artifact 015.