Nikola Tesla Articles
Underwood Johnson, who, with Tesla’s help, translated them into English, and they were published in the Century Magazine. Interestingly, that was the first translation of Zmaj’s poetry into English, created certainly largely thanks to Nikola Tesla.
Sister’s “Indecent Life”
If it is true that Tesla idealized women, including his three sisters, then it is undoubtedly also true the other way around — that Tesla’s three sisters were the first to begin cultivating an ideal cult of their famous brother. Of course, they did so nobly and out of love. Especially after their mother’s death, they treated their only brother almost maternally.
They transferred that love and devotion they felt toward their brother to their own children as well.
It seems that Tesla loved his youngest sister Marica Kosanović most tenderly, worried most about the middle sister Milka Glumičić, and had the deepest spiritual bond with the eldest sister Angelina Trbojević, whose death he sensed although he was thousands of miles away from her.
Angelina had three sons and two daughters, Marica four sons, and Milka one daughter. All the children of his sisters were educated at university, which they would not have been able to do with their parents’ modest priestly incomes had their uncle Nikola not selflessly helped them financially.
Although he himself never married, Tesla understood family relationships very deeply, and many of his views on the subject had something especially noble and patriarchal about them. Let us take as an example the fact that his sister Milka remained a widow without any income. Her brother unhesitatingly took responsibility for financially supporting both her and for educating her daughter, who was named Đuka after her grandmother.
But when Milka, as a widow, began an indecent life, such news reached across the ocean to her brother Nikola as well.
In a letter he sends from New York to one relative, Tesla turns with displeasure to his sister’s behavior: “I am even sorrier that Milka does not have enough character and spirit to behave decently at least for a short time. She could settle down and see better days yet, and I would help her…”
What tender love sister Marica Kosanović showed toward her brother Nikola is witnessed by this letter of hers:
“A few days ago I wrote to you, and now here I am again to wish you happy name-day,” she wrote from Plaški, as usual on St. Nicholas’ Day, to her famous inventor brother in New York.
“Everything is alive and well with us. I am worried because you say you work day and night. Of course you have more work now because of that exhibition. If you could only write us two or
