Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

Tesla in Love

There is a moving story of the love of Tesla's life in the book, Tesla: AProdigal Genius. Written by a man that knew the great inventor well,the book illustrates the often vast chasm between how a person mayappear to others and the complicated machinery of human emotions.It is perhaps an unfortunate fact that few people today are familiar with Nikola Tesla and his work. This was not the case about a hundredyears ago and his name was as familiar and celebrated as Einstein or Edison. The inventor of wireless communication before Marconi,Tesla was

"widely respected as one of the greatest electrical engineers who worked in America. Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States,Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in historyor popular culture but due to his eccentric personality and his seemingly unbelievable and sometimesbizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimatelyostracized and regarded as a mad scientist" (wikipedia)

In the last decades of his life, Tesla's reputation suffered. Many of his claims, such as a death rayweapon and invisible defensive energy shield, were mocked and ridiculed. His competitors had alsosuccessfully undermined his ability to locate sufficient funding for his projects by portraying him as aunstable type or, still worse, as a con-man. Today, most see him as a victim of being born too soon.During the last three decades of his life, it is probable that not one out of tens of thousands who saw him knew who he was. His fame had dieddown and the generation that knew him well had passed on. Even whenthe newspapers, once a year, would break out in headlines about Teslaand his latest predictions concerning scientific wonders to come, no oneassociated that name with the excessively tall, very lean man, wearingclothes of a bygone era, who almost daily appeared to feed his featheredfriends. He was just one of the strange individuals of whom it takes agreat many of varying types to make up a complete population of a greatmetropolis.By the mid-1920s, his situation became so precarious that he was unable to maintain offices or to paythe salaries of his secretaries. During this time, his behavior became more and more eccentric. He became inexplicably even to those who knew him well, unreasonably attached to street pigeons.It was hard for almost everyone to understand why Tesla, engaged inmomentous scientific developments, working twice as many hours as theaverage individual, could see his way clear to spend time scattering birdseed. The Herald Tribune, in an editorial, once stated: "He would leave hisexperiments for a time and feed the silly and inconsequential pigeons inHerald Square."Even his close associates were disturbed by his obsessive behavior and its effects were becoming more

and more a sign of the inventor's mental instability. He would wander alone down Fifth Avenue after midnight to deliver food for his pigeons. If he were ill or otherwise unable to make his pigeon feedingrounds, he would call a Western Union messenger boy and, for a fee plus a dollar tip, send him toscatter seed for the birds.In addition to feeding the birds in the streets, Tesla took care of pigeonsin his rooms in the various hotels in which he made his home. He usuallyhad basket nests for from one to four pigeons in his room and kept a cask of seed on hand to feed them. The window to the room in which he keptthese nests was never closed.A short time later he was forced to leave his apartment in the Hotel St.Regis. His bill had been unpaid for some time, but the immediate causewas associated with pigeons. He had been spending more time in his hotelroom, which also became his office, and devoted more time to feeding pigeons. Great flocks of them would come to his windows and into therooms, and their dirt on the outside of the building became a problem tothe management and on the inside to the maids. He sought to solve the problem by putting the birds in a hamper and having George Scherff takethem to his Westchester home. Three weeks later, when first given their freedom, they returned, one making the trip in half an hour. Tesla wasgiven his choice of ceasing to feed the pigeons or leaving the hotel. Heleft. He next made his home at the Hotel Pennsylvania. He remainedthere a few years and the same situation, both as to bills and pigeons,developed. He moved to the Hotel Governor Clinton--and in about a year went through the same experience. He next moved to the Hotel NewYorker, in 1933, where he spent the final ten years of his life.It was the love story of Tesla's life. In the story of his strange romance, Isaw instantly the reason for those unremitting daily journeys to feed the pigeons, and those midnight pilgrimages when he wished to be alone. Irecalled those occasions when I had happened to meet him on desertedFifth Avenue and, when I spoke to him, he replied, "You will now leaveme." He told his story simply, briefly and without embellishments, butthere was still a surging of emotion in his voice."Yes," he replied to an unasked question. "Yes, I loved that pigeon, Iloved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was ill Iknew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life. "Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark,solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window andstood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell mesomething important so I got up and went to her. "As I looked at her Iknew she wanted to tell me--she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes--powerful beams of light."Yes," he continued, again answering an unasked question, "it was a reallight, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I hadever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory. "When that