Nikola Tesla: Lesser-Known Details from His Private Life Page 2

• Why the great scientist showed the greatest sympathy for the beautiful pianist Marguerite Merington
• The meeting between the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt and the celebrated scientist Nikola Tesla in Paris — and the role played by one small lace handkerchief

If Tesla truly idealized women and thus kept his distance from them, as some scholars claim, what can we say about the scientist’s idealization of his mother, whom he considered a genius, and his three own sisters? That relationship is explained by the recently published correspondence.

Lexington Avenue 327 in New York was the gathering place of the rich and educated world, where the main tone was set by Mrs. Kate Johnson, a lady who loved the famous scientist for more than two decades.

This proposal would not have seemed at all strange had not, at about the same time, the American “yellow press” and journalists from serious technical magazines — such as the London Electrical Review, American Electrician, or Electrical Journal — launched a whole campaign, apparently wanting, much like Laza Kostić, to help the great scientist decide more easily on the chosen one of his heart.

“Many people at that time were genuinely worried why no good and beautiful woman could be seen standing beside Tesla,” wrote his biographer Margaret Cheney. “It was not strange,” she adds, “because great men were expected to have offspring for the benefit of the country.”

I Want to Marry You Off

Unlike the noisy and immoderate matchmakers from the New World, the poet Laza Kostić believed he knew our people’s nature better. That is why, in a letter dated 12 June 1895, he offers his friend Tesla the girl he had chosen for him:

“Dear friend, today is, roughly, the third anniversary since we met in Pest and spent those few beautiful days together. I decided to celebrate that day. What do you think — how? You would never guess if I didn’t tell you:

I want to marry you off!

… I know what you will say, I know what you will think, I know everything, and yet! The girl I have chosen for you is capable of overcoming every woman-hater. I think she could revive even a dead man — not only a dead Don Juan, but even a dead saint. Truly:

The other day I saw her in the monastery kissing some relics, the dry hand of some saint, and in the ecstasy of that incense and that beauty I was almost surprised that the dead hand did not rise to embrace her.

• Which saint is that? I asked the monk beside me.
• That is not a saint.