Nikola Tesla Articles
The British press, understandably, wrote about Tesla with the greatest enthusiasm. That is why they awaited him even more impatiently in Paris. His biographer John O’Neill wrote about it:
“His extraordinary discoveries were the main subject of conversation at the time, and he was the center of attention wherever he went. This pleased Tesla very much. Less than ten years earlier, the management of the Continental Edison Company in that same city had not only rejected his alternating-current system that he had offered them, but had also withheld the justly deserved reward from him. Now he had come back to that city, having gained recognition and wealth in the United States and fame throughout the world. He came to Paris as a returning hero, and the world lay at his feet.”
Sarah Bernhardt’s Handkerchief
Only one person in Paris at that time could stand shoulder to shoulder with Nikola Tesla in popularity. It was a woman. “A graceful and supple woman, a woman full of electricity and unreal, once again conquered Paris…” The divine Sarah Bernhardt.
“Heaven endowed Madame Sarah Bernhardt with special gifts; it made her extraordinary, surprisingly slim and supple, and spread over her thin face a disturbing charm of a gypsy, a gipsy, an Asian woman, something that made one think of Salome, of Salammbô, of the Queen of Sheba! And Madame Sarah Bernhardt knows how to use that appearance of a princess from a fairy tale of an unreal and distant being wonderfully… And above all she has a voice that she knows how to use with the happiest boldness — a voice that is a caress and that touches you as if with fingers…” wrote Jules Lemaître about her.
Finding himself in Paris, Tesla was sitting with a friend in the garden of a restaurant. Suddenly a lovely, beautifully dressed young woman with fashionably styled red hair passed by, in whom Tesla immediately recognized Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress. Probably she too, curious to meet the famous scientist everyone in Paris was talking about, passed quite close to his table, discreetly glancing at that face. When she had gone a step or two, she very deliberately dropped a small lace handkerchief.
“Tesla jumped up in a flash,” O’Neill wrote about it. He picked up the handkerchief and, holding his hat in the other hand, bowed deeply while handing the handkerchief to the beautiful actress, saying:
“Mademoiselle, your handkerchief!”
Without looking at her lovely smiling face for another moment he returned to his seat and continued the conversation about his experiments, about the world system of wireless power transmission.
The gesture of the famous French actress was refinedly provocative. She, like all of Paris, knew very well who Nikola Tesla was. She wanted to meet him and draw his attention to herself. In
