Nikola Tesla

Water claims four of his ten planets, air three, earth two and a single one fire, and six of the ten sit in cardinal signs. Water registers a thing and air works out what to say about it; the element that would charge at it is down to one planet. The record calls Tesla the engineer behind alternating current and much of modern electrical power, says he was born during a storm in Smiljan, and that he died alone in a New York hotel.

The Sun sits at eighteen degrees of Cancer with Venus at fifteen and Saturn at six, three planets across thirteen degrees of the sign that looks after what it belongs to and defends it sooner than the threat warrants. The Moon answers from Libra at twenty with Mars half a degree from it. Libra needs things settled and is genuinely destabilised by conflict, and having private feeling welded to drive there reads as emotion that acts at once, protectiveness, and a temper that arrives and leaves faster than anybody else adjusts to it. For an engineer the record has working alone, private feeling welded to drive in the sign that needs agreement is the hardest pairing here.

Saturn sits sixty degrees from Pluto eight hundredths of a degree from exact, the closest contact in the chart: durable strength, and authority that was actually earned rather than handed over. Jupiter sits in mild friction with Uranus at a third of a degree, growth arriving disruptively and opportunity that costs stability, which in an engineer's record is a sentence that writes itself. The Sun sits a fifth of the circle from Pluto at three quarters. Neptune alone was retrograde at his birth.

He died in New York on 7 January 1943, at eighty six. The Moon rules his Cancer Sun, and that day it was new and two per cent lit, the phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them. Mercury stood square his natal Pluto two hundredths of a degree from exact, the closest thing in that sky, while Jupiter stood in easy contact with his natal Neptune at a third of a degree and square his natal Moon at nine tenths. Pluto stood square its own natal place at just under a degree. Six planets in cardinal signs, in a record of one invention after another, is the fact to keep: this is a chart that starts things.