Nikola Tesla 18 x 24 inches Acrylic on Cradled panel
Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) was an electrical engineer and inventor who was one of world’s greatest geniuses. He was born of a Serbian family in what is now Croatia, but was then a part of the Austrian Empire. His father was an orthodox priest. His mother, though uneducated, had a photographic memory and a talent for invention, traits Nikola inherited. An elder brother was brilliant intellectually, but died in a riding accident when Nikola was still a small child.
It does not seem Nikola Tesla’s genius was fully recognized in his childhood. But in high school his teachers were puzzled by his incredible memory. Tesla claimed that he was able to memorize whole books and during childhood and, to some extent, later, was able to see before his eyes, as if real, objects when their name was spoken. He also professed to be endowed with phenomenal hearing and sight. Several times in his youth he narrowly escaped death in accidents and illness. For example, in 1873, returning home after finishing a four-year high school in three years, he contracted cholera and was at the point of death. His father, who had always insisted that Nikola become a priest, relented on his son’s sick bed and supported his aspiration to be an engineer. As if by a miracle, Nikola then quickly recovered.
In 1874 Nikola evaded being drafted into the Austrian army by removing himself to a remote mountain town. There he took up hiking and found communing with nature beneficial to both his mind and his body. He continued his program of voracious reading. His favorite author was Mark Twain, a man he would later meet and befriend. He believed Twain’s books had been instrumental in his recovery from cholera.
He enrolled on a scholarship at Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, Austria in 1875. In his first year he was the star pupil. He studied from 3 AM to 11 PM, working feverishly every day, never taking a day off and sleeping little. His professors were worried that he would kill himself with over work. In his second year he got into trouble for knowing more than his instructors. Losing his scholarship, he tried to acquire income through gambling. He spent his third year in college addicted to gambling, losing all the money his parents had sent him. After recouping his losses, he eventually conquered his passion for gambling. His addiction, though, had left him unprepared to take his examinations and he was forced to leave school without graduating. He left Graz in 1878 and hid out in the Slovenia town of Maribor, where he got a job as a draftsman. He was ashamed to tell his parents he had left school, but in March of 1879 his father found him and begged him to come home. The younger Tesla refused, but after suffering something like a nervous breakdown, he was escorted home by the police.
In 1879 Tesla’s father died. Nikola found employment as a teacher. His uncles, though, got enough money together to send him to complete his college education at the Charles- Ferdinand University in Prague. It seemed ill advised: Nikola knew no Czech or Greek, required studies. Although he attended lectures, he received no course credit.
The next year found him in Budapest, Hungary, where he was hired by the Budapest Telephone Exchange, which was not yet operative. Instead he began work at the telegraph office, but when the telephone exchange opened, he was made its chief electrician. Tesla had long been fascinated by electricity and it would be that his life would be devoted to its exploitation. He apparently got the exchange working, making many improvements in its equipment.
In 1882 a big break for Nikola Tesla was the securing of a job in Paris working for the Continental Edison Company, which was installing electric lights throughout the city. Tesla impressed his bosses with his ability to repair and even redesign the mechanisms and apparatuses connected with the generation and transmission of electricity. As a troubleshooter he was sent to Edison facilities all over France and Germany.
When Charles Batchelor, the Edison executive overseeing the electrification of Paris, was called back to America in June 1884, he brought Nikola Tesla with him. Tesla found himself working at the Edison Machine Shop in Manhattan with hundreds of others. He repaired dynamos and designed a system for arc lighting that could be used for street lights — which was not used. It is unclear why he left’s Edison’s employ after only six months. It is probably because his ideas were ignored and not because of an apocryphal story about his being denied promised bonuses. At any rate, Tesla, who must have met Thomas Edison at least a few times, did not hold his former boss in high regard. For one thing, Edison disparaged his rivals and any idea that was not his own. Tesla was always willing to learn from others and was quick to discard ideas that he found did not work. Tesla, who was always fastidious in his dress and grooming, found Edison’s slovenliness offensive and deplored the fact that the man, obsessed only with his inventions, had no outside interest or hobbies.
Tesla perfected and patented a system for arc lighting using an improved direct current (DC) generator. In 1885 two businessmen stepped forward to back Tesla and financed the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company in Rahway, New Jersey, where the system was to be installed. But Tesla was now developing new equipment using alternating rather than direct current. His backers, though, were not interested in new inventions. Consequently, they left Tesla in the lurch, took his patents and founded a new company without him. Nikola was left penniless and throughout most of 1886 he struggled to support himself, sometimes by working as a ditch digger for $2 a day.
But by the end of 1886 Nikola Tesla, now 30, met two men who were interested in his inventions, Alfred S. Brown, formerly of Western Union, and Charles F. Peck, an attorney. Together they formed the Tesla Electric Company in April of 1887. In his Manhattan laboratory Tesla developed a functioning induction motor (using a magnetic field). It ran on alternating current, which is safer than direct current and can be transmitted long distances, since its voltage can be stepped up and stepped down through the use of transformers. George Westinghouse, an inventor and businessman, was looking for such an AC motor for his business, The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, which was planning to implement AC, rather than DC in its electrification projects. Tesla’s partners negotiated a favorable licensing agreement with Westinghouse. Money, stock, and royalties were given for Tesla’s AC induction motor and transformer designs and Tesla was to work as a consultant to Westinghouse with a munificent salary approximating $600,000 per year (in todays’ money).
Working with Westinghouse’s engineers in Pittsburgh, Tesla’s first task was to figure out how to run Pittsburgh’s streetcars with alternating current. Problems arouse. Tesla’s AC motor could only run at a constant speed; streetcars required a motor that could run at various speeds. Therefore a DC traction motor had to be used instead. (Induction motors are used today in appliances, while traction motors are used in electrically powered vehicles). Indeed, Tesla’s vaunted induction motor had not been perfected and no real use had been found for it.
During this time there raged what is known as the “War of the Currents,” to resolve whether the direct current championed by Edison was better than the alternating current advocated by Westinghouse. It was an expensive, cut-throat propaganda war among the three top electric companies, Edison, Westinghouse, and Thomson-Houston. Westinghouse, who would eventually win the war with the near universal acceptance of alternating current, was in financial straits by the time of the financial panic of 1890. Not wanting to drive Westinghouse into bankruptcy, Tesla agreed to release Westinghouse from its royalty agreement. (He later sold the patent to his motor for a large lump sum, as part of a patent-sharing agreement between Westinghouse and General Electric, a new company that resulted from the merger of Edison and Thomson-Houston in 1892).
Nikola Tesla, as a result of his otherwise disappointing relationship with Westinghouse, had become independently wealthy and by 1889 was able to work on his own projects out a series of laboratories in Manhattan. At this time, he invented the famous Tesla coil, patented in 1891, the same year that Tesla became a naturalized US citizen. The Tesla coil, which produces lightning-like brush discharges, was a transformer capable of producing high voltage, low current electricity. It would have its major use in radio transmission. (Today it is used for entertainment purposes and was a standard feature laboratories in mad -doctor movies).
He also developed an electrical generator using steam power, but it ended up being impractical. It, however, was part of the World’s Columbia Exposition, held in 1893 in Chicago. The exposition was lighted by AC current, courtesy of Westinghouse, a triumph for the company and for the cause of AC. Representing Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla, a star performer, wowed audiences by demonstrating his wireless lighting system and the so-called Egg of Columbus. (A magnetic field produced by an induction motor, created a gyroscope effect that made a copper egg stand on end and spin — as well as other effects).
In 1895 a new company, The Nikola Tesla Company, was set up to market Tesla’s old and new patents, but the venture attracted few investors and the company was not very successful. In March 1895 a devastating blow was dealt to Tesla when the building in which his laboratory was housed burned down. His current projects, models and prototypes, as well as notes on former experiments were all lost. Tesla could only shrug his shoulders and start again in a new laboratory.
In 1894 Tesla seemed to have discovered X-rays before Wilhelm Röntgen, but it was the German scientist who announced his discovery first. In 1898 he demonstrated that a boat could be controlled by remote control, but his idea for a radio-controlled torpedo did not interest the US military. The concept would be developed decades later. Tesla developed much of the apparatus needed for wireless telegraphy, but it was the Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi who is credited with inventing radio. Tesla would sue the Marconi Company in 1915 for violation of his patents concerning wireless tuning, but lost. (Ironically, in 1943 the Supreme Court restored to Tesla and others patents that had been initially awarded to Marconi).
Nikola Tesla’s major project, the wireless transmission of electricity, was inspired by his belief that the atmosphere or the earth itself could be made to be a conductor of electricity. In 1899 he set up a laboratory in the high altitude of Colorado Springs. He persuaded John Jacob Astor to invest in his company, ostensibly to develop a system for wireless lighting. Tesla, though, used the money to experiment with global transmission of radio signals. He created monumental coils and used vast amounts of electricity (given to him free of charge by the El Paso Power Company). He succeeded in creating artificial lightning and thunder. That confirmed to him the erroneous belief that the atmosphere was a conductor. But there were no radio transmissions.
During his experiments, though, his receiver picked up radio signals that he surmised might have been transmitted from another planet. The press — and Tesla was always good press — sensationalized it and there were stories about messages from Mars. (These signals remain unexplained, although a tenuous explanation that they can be attributed to Marconi’s early experiments has been offered).
Back in New York and living at the Waldorf, Tesla was able to raise money (the equivalent of 4.5 million dollars) from J. P. Morgan to develop a system of wireless transmission. In Shoreham, New York on Long Island he build the 187- foot high Wardenclyffe Tower. His experiments seemed promising, but it was Marconi who in December 1901 made the the first transcontinental wireless transmission from London to Newfoundland. Tesla continued with his experiments, but Morgan lost interest and refused to fund him further.
Tesla kept going at Wardenclyffe until 1905, but to pay a debt to the Waldorf, which amounted to a staggering half a million dollars in today’s money, he was forced to mortgage the property. (In 1915 he lost it through foreclosure). He relentlessly importuning J.P. Morgan and, later, his son for money, but without success.
Following the failure at Wardenclyffe, Tesla opened a succession of offices in New York endeavoring to raise money by marketing his patents. Few of his inventions could be developed, although he did work with various companies on them. One, a blade-less turbine, had possibilities, but it usefulness was limited. Another idea, for a vertical take-off biplane, was deemed impractical. Among investors and with the press Tesla was gaining a reputation as an obsessive crank, even a fraud. More and more Tesla’s ideas were becoming merely theoretical — and fanciful, motors running on cosmic rays, electric waves that detect submarines, and a death ray that would end war. Early in his career, he was years, even decades ahead of his time. In old age his ideas seemed mere science fiction, while his science was behind the times; eg. he espoused eugenics, denied the existence of subatomic particles, and rejected Einstein’s theories of relativity even as they were being proved true.
Through the 1920s and ’30s Nikola Tesla lived in various New York hotels, running up huge bills and then being forced to leave to search for another residence. His means of income was vanishing and he was reduced to indigence. Happily, in 1934, as a gracious gesture, the Westinghouse Company agreed paid his rent for the rest of his life and granted him a $125 per month allowance.
In 1931 a 75th birthday party was arranged for him and a man almost forgotten was remembered, with birthday wishes from the greats in science and a Times magazine cover story. Tesla enjoyed it immensely and therefore celebrated his birthday every year by inviting friends and the press to visit him and hear him expound upon his past achievements and upon the new inventions he was supposedly developing. They would fed with food and drink and dishes of his own invention.
Nikola Tesla, tall, slender, elegant, was meticulous in his habits. He slept little, but walked for ten miles every day. For many years he dined regularly at Delmonico’s, always at the exact same time, at the same table, and served by the same waiter, except on the occasion when he had dinner guests. He was not religious, but admired Christianity and Buddhism. Introverted and reclusive, he nevertheless was very gracious in company, affable and charming. He moved in the highest circles when he chose to do so. While he may have seemed the prototype of the mad scientist, he was also the epitome of the cultured gentleman.
In later years Tesla was enamored with pigeons and claimed to have a deep love for a beautiful pigeon with a broken wing that he took a great deal of time and expense to heal. Nikola liked and admired women, thought they were of the superior sex and would one day be the dominant one. He, however, had no intimate or romantic relations, which he felt could only be a distraction from his work. He also felt that he could not be worthy of any woman. Deploring the mannishness of the ’20’s flapper, he yearned for the dignified women he had known before World War I. Later in life, he did have some regrets that he did not marry.
In 1937 when Nikola Tesla was making his customary post-midnight trip to the cathedral and the library to feed his beloved pigeons, he was hit by a cab. This resulted in an injured back and broken ribs, but the extent of his injuries can never known because he refused to have medical treatment. (It was never his habit to deal with doctors). It is thought he never quite recovered, and later photos of him show a frail, ghostly figure. On January 7, 1943 he was found dead in his room in the New Yorker Hotel. He was given a well attended funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy for him over on the radio.
With no relatives living in the country Nikola Tesla’s affects were seized by the government and examined to determine if there was anything that in wartime it might not wish to fall into enemy hands. A distinguished electrical engineer, Prof. John G. Trump (Uncle of President Donald Trump) concluded that his notes were only speculative and philosophical and contained no workable ideas of value. Eventually all the items from his estate were shipped to Tesla’s nephew in Belgrade. His ashes are also now there in the Nikola Tesla Museum.
It does not seem Nikola Tesla’s genius was fully recognized in his childhood. But in high school his teachers were puzzled by his incredible memory. Tesla claimed that he was able to memorize whole books and during childhood and, to some extent, later, was able to see before his eyes, as if real, objects when their name was spoken. He also professed to be endowed with phenomenal hearing and sight. Several times in his youth he narrowly escaped death in accidents and illness. For example, in 1873, returning home after finishing a four-year high school in three years, he contracted cholera and was at the point of death. His father, who had always insisted that Nikola become a priest, relented on his son’s sick bed and supported his aspiration to be an engineer. As if by a miracle, Nikola then quickly recovered.
In 1874 Nikola evaded being drafted into the Austrian army by removing himself to a remote mountain town. There he took up hiking and found communing with nature beneficial to both his mind and his body. He continued his program of voracious reading. His favorite author was Mark Twain, a man he would later meet and befriend. He believed Twain’s books had been instrumental in his recovery from cholera.
He enrolled on a scholarship at Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, Austria in 1875. In his first year he was the star pupil. He studied from 3 AM to 11 PM, working feverishly every day, never taking a day off and sleeping little. His professors were worried that he would kill himself with over work. In his second year he got into trouble for knowing more than his instructors. Losing his scholarship, he tried to acquire income through gambling. He spent his third year in college addicted to gambling, losing all the money his parents had sent him. After recouping his losses, he eventually conquered his passion for gambling. His addiction, though, had left him unprepared to take his examinations and he was forced to leave school without graduating. He left Graz in 1878 and hid out in the Slovenia town of Maribor, where he got a job as a draftsman. He was ashamed to tell his parents he had left school, but in March of 1879 his father found him and begged him to come home. The younger Tesla refused, but after suffering something like a nervous breakdown, he was escorted home by the police.
In 1879 Tesla’s father died. Nikola found employment as a teacher. His uncles, though, got enough money together to send him to complete his college education at the Charles- Ferdinand University in Prague. It seemed ill advised: Nikola knew no Czech or Greek, required studies. Although he attended lectures, he received no course credit.
The next year found him in Budapest, Hungary, where he was hired by the Budapest Telephone Exchange, which was not yet operative. Instead he began work at the telegraph office, but when the telephone exchange opened, he was made its chief electrician. Tesla had long been fascinated by electricity and it would be that his life would be devoted to its exploitation. He apparently got the exchange working, making many improvements in its equipment.
In 1882 a big break for Nikola Tesla was the securing of a job in Paris working for the Continental Edison Company, which was installing electric lights throughout the city. Tesla impressed his bosses with his ability to repair and even redesign the mechanisms and apparatuses connected with the generation and transmission of electricity. As a troubleshooter he was sent to Edison facilities all over France and Germany.
When Charles Batchelor, the Edison executive overseeing the electrification of Paris, was called back to America in June 1884, he brought Nikola Tesla with him. Tesla found himself working at the Edison Machine Shop in Manhattan with hundreds of others. He repaired dynamos and designed a system for arc lighting that could be used for street lights — which was not used. It is unclear why he left’s Edison’s employ after only six months. It is probably because his ideas were ignored and not because of an apocryphal story about his being denied promised bonuses. At any rate, Tesla, who must have met Thomas Edison at least a few times, did not hold his former boss in high regard. For one thing, Edison disparaged his rivals and any idea that was not his own. Tesla was always willing to learn from others and was quick to discard ideas that he found did not work. Tesla, who was always fastidious in his dress and grooming, found Edison’s slovenliness offensive and deplored the fact that the man, obsessed only with his inventions, had no outside interest or hobbies.
Tesla perfected and patented a system for arc lighting using an improved direct current (DC) generator. In 1885 two businessmen stepped forward to back Tesla and financed the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company in Rahway, New Jersey, where the system was to be installed. But Tesla was now developing new equipment using alternating rather than direct current. His backers, though, were not interested in new inventions. Consequently, they left Tesla in the lurch, took his patents and founded a new company without him. Nikola was left penniless and throughout most of 1886 he struggled to support himself, sometimes by working as a ditch digger for $2 a day.
But by the end of 1886 Nikola Tesla, now 30, met two men who were interested in his inventions, Alfred S. Brown, formerly of Western Union, and Charles F. Peck, an attorney. Together they formed the Tesla Electric Company in April of 1887. In his Manhattan laboratory Tesla developed a functioning induction motor (using a magnetic field). It ran on alternating current, which is safer than direct current and can be transmitted long distances, since its voltage can be stepped up and stepped down through the use of transformers. George Westinghouse, an inventor and businessman, was looking for such an AC motor for his business, The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, which was planning to implement AC, rather than DC in its electrification projects. Tesla’s partners negotiated a favorable licensing agreement with Westinghouse. Money, stock, and royalties were given for Tesla’s AC induction motor and transformer designs and Tesla was to work as a consultant to Westinghouse with a munificent salary approximating $600,000 per year (in todays’ money).
Working with Westinghouse’s engineers in Pittsburgh, Tesla’s first task was to figure out how to run Pittsburgh’s streetcars with alternating current. Problems arouse. Tesla’s AC motor could only run at a constant speed; streetcars required a motor that could run at various speeds. Therefore a DC traction motor had to be used instead. (Induction motors are used today in appliances, while traction motors are used in electrically powered vehicles). Indeed, Tesla’s vaunted induction motor had not been perfected and no real use had been found for it.
During this time there raged what is known as the “War of the Currents,” to resolve whether the direct current championed by Edison was better than the alternating current advocated by Westinghouse. It was an expensive, cut-throat propaganda war among the three top electric companies, Edison, Westinghouse, and Thomson-Houston. Westinghouse, who would eventually win the war with the near universal acceptance of alternating current, was in financial straits by the time of the financial panic of 1890. Not wanting to drive Westinghouse into bankruptcy, Tesla agreed to release Westinghouse from its royalty agreement. (He later sold the patent to his motor for a large lump sum, as part of a patent-sharing agreement between Westinghouse and General Electric, a new company that resulted from the merger of Edison and Thomson-Houston in 1892).
Nikola Tesla, as a result of his otherwise disappointing relationship with Westinghouse, had become independently wealthy and by 1889 was able to work on his own projects out a series of laboratories in Manhattan. At this time, he invented the famous Tesla coil, patented in 1891, the same year that Tesla became a naturalized US citizen. The Tesla coil, which produces lightning-like brush discharges, was a transformer capable of producing high voltage, low current electricity. It would have its major use in radio transmission. (Today it is used for entertainment purposes and was a standard feature laboratories in mad -doctor movies).
He also developed an electrical generator using steam power, but it ended up being impractical. It, however, was part of the World’s Columbia Exposition, held in 1893 in Chicago. The exposition was lighted by AC current, courtesy of Westinghouse, a triumph for the company and for the cause of AC. Representing Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla, a star performer, wowed audiences by demonstrating his wireless lighting system and the so-called Egg of Columbus. (A magnetic field produced by an induction motor, created a gyroscope effect that made a copper egg stand on end and spin — as well as other effects).
In 1895 a new company, The Nikola Tesla Company, was set up to market Tesla’s old and new patents, but the venture attracted few investors and the company was not very successful. In March 1895 a devastating blow was dealt to Tesla when the building in which his laboratory was housed burned down. His current projects, models and prototypes, as well as notes on former experiments were all lost. Tesla could only shrug his shoulders and start again in a new laboratory.
In 1894 Tesla seemed to have discovered X-rays before Wilhelm Röntgen, but it was the German scientist who announced his discovery first. In 1898 he demonstrated that a boat could be controlled by remote control, but his idea for a radio-controlled torpedo did not interest the US military. The concept would be developed decades later. Tesla developed much of the apparatus needed for wireless telegraphy, but it was the Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi who is credited with inventing radio. Tesla would sue the Marconi Company in 1915 for violation of his patents concerning wireless tuning, but lost. (Ironically, in 1943 the Supreme Court restored to Tesla and others patents that had been initially awarded to Marconi).
Nikola Tesla’s major project, the wireless transmission of electricity, was inspired by his belief that the atmosphere or the earth itself could be made to be a conductor of electricity. In 1899 he set up a laboratory in the high altitude of Colorado Springs. He persuaded John Jacob Astor to invest in his company, ostensibly to develop a system for wireless lighting. Tesla, though, used the money to experiment with global transmission of radio signals. He created monumental coils and used vast amounts of electricity (given to him free of charge by the El Paso Power Company). He succeeded in creating artificial lightning and thunder. That confirmed to him the erroneous belief that the atmosphere was a conductor. But there were no radio transmissions.
During his experiments, though, his receiver picked up radio signals that he surmised might have been transmitted from another planet. The press — and Tesla was always good press — sensationalized it and there were stories about messages from Mars. (These signals remain unexplained, although a tenuous explanation that they can be attributed to Marconi’s early experiments has been offered).
Back in New York and living at the Waldorf, Tesla was able to raise money (the equivalent of 4.5 million dollars) from J. P. Morgan to develop a system of wireless transmission. In Shoreham, New York on Long Island he build the 187- foot high Wardenclyffe Tower. His experiments seemed promising, but it was Marconi who in December 1901 made the the first transcontinental wireless transmission from London to Newfoundland. Tesla continued with his experiments, but Morgan lost interest and refused to fund him further.
Tesla kept going at Wardenclyffe until 1905, but to pay a debt to the Waldorf, which amounted to a staggering half a million dollars in today’s money, he was forced to mortgage the property. (In 1915 he lost it through foreclosure). He relentlessly importuning J.P. Morgan and, later, his son for money, but without success.
Following the failure at Wardenclyffe, Tesla opened a succession of offices in New York endeavoring to raise money by marketing his patents. Few of his inventions could be developed, although he did work with various companies on them. One, a blade-less turbine, had possibilities, but it usefulness was limited. Another idea, for a vertical take-off biplane, was deemed impractical. Among investors and with the press Tesla was gaining a reputation as an obsessive crank, even a fraud. More and more Tesla’s ideas were becoming merely theoretical — and fanciful, motors running on cosmic rays, electric waves that detect submarines, and a death ray that would end war. Early in his career, he was years, even decades ahead of his time. In old age his ideas seemed mere science fiction, while his science was behind the times; eg. he espoused eugenics, denied the existence of subatomic particles, and rejected Einstein’s theories of relativity even as they were being proved true.
Through the 1920s and ’30s Nikola Tesla lived in various New York hotels, running up huge bills and then being forced to leave to search for another residence. His means of income was vanishing and he was reduced to indigence. Happily, in 1934, as a gracious gesture, the Westinghouse Company agreed paid his rent for the rest of his life and granted him a $125 per month allowance.
In 1931 a 75th birthday party was arranged for him and a man almost forgotten was remembered, with birthday wishes from the greats in science and a Times magazine cover story. Tesla enjoyed it immensely and therefore celebrated his birthday every year by inviting friends and the press to visit him and hear him expound upon his past achievements and upon the new inventions he was supposedly developing. They would fed with food and drink and dishes of his own invention.
Nikola Tesla, tall, slender, elegant, was meticulous in his habits. He slept little, but walked for ten miles every day. For many years he dined regularly at Delmonico’s, always at the exact same time, at the same table, and served by the same waiter, except on the occasion when he had dinner guests. He was not religious, but admired Christianity and Buddhism. Introverted and reclusive, he nevertheless was very gracious in company, affable and charming. He moved in the highest circles when he chose to do so. While he may have seemed the prototype of the mad scientist, he was also the epitome of the cultured gentleman.
In later years Tesla was enamored with pigeons and claimed to have a deep love for a beautiful pigeon with a broken wing that he took a great deal of time and expense to heal. Nikola liked and admired women, thought they were of the superior sex and would one day be the dominant one. He, however, had no intimate or romantic relations, which he felt could only be a distraction from his work. He also felt that he could not be worthy of any woman. Deploring the mannishness of the ’20’s flapper, he yearned for the dignified women he had known before World War I. Later in life, he did have some regrets that he did not marry.
In 1937 when Nikola Tesla was making his customary post-midnight trip to the cathedral and the library to feed his beloved pigeons, he was hit by a cab. This resulted in an injured back and broken ribs, but the extent of his injuries can never known because he refused to have medical treatment. (It was never his habit to deal with doctors). It is thought he never quite recovered, and later photos of him show a frail, ghostly figure. On January 7, 1943 he was found dead in his room in the New Yorker Hotel. He was given a well attended funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a eulogy for him over on the radio.
With no relatives living in the country Nikola Tesla’s affects were seized by the government and examined to determine if there was anything that in wartime it might not wish to fall into enemy hands. A distinguished electrical engineer, Prof. John G. Trump (Uncle of President Donald Trump) concluded that his notes were only speculative and philosophical and contained no workable ideas of value. Eventually all the items from his estate were shipped to Tesla’s nephew in Belgrade. His ashes are also now there in the Nikola Tesla Museum.
No comments:
Post a Comment