Mothers of Men - The Mother of Tesla

The mother of Tesla made churns and looms, and so exercised her brains mechanically, while her husband preached and served the church as a priest. Behold the result. I am profoundly convinced that we have suffered a loss beyond imagination to conceive or language express by keeping woman in the narrow routine of housework. She is mother. She is maker. She it is who stamps the babe with prenatal bias. She touches the souls she bears with fire of genius or the tameness of platitudinous routine. Tesla's mother was a maker, a schemer, an inventor. She was fortunate in that her husband was the slave of tameness. The consequence is a boy that has burst the bounds of Slavic speculation and idealism and has even come to the front of Saxon inventors and discoverers. A Slavic orator reproached his people that they had never been able to invent so much a mousetrap. But Tesla is the leader of the age of electricity. He has even surpassed for brilliant originality our Edison. I am convinced that this illustration is of very wide application. Our mothers are cooks and washerwomen and housekeepers. It tells on the babes, We must first see to the fountain, then to the stream — the stream of humanity. What wonderful care should be taken of the motherhood! All civilization should bend to the purpose to furnish the future generation with power giving mothers. Even the father is of less importance — much less.