Nikola Tesla Articles
Because of all that, even today little is known about how devoted Tesla was, for example, to his mother Đuka and how, from America, he took care of her until the end of her life. It is also insufficiently known that he constantly financially helped his three own sisters — Angelina Trbojević, Milka Glumičić, and Marica Kosanović — and their families, even when he himself was in considerable hardship.
Tesla also had four Mandić uncles: Petar, Paja, Trifun, and Toma, and from the correspondence with them it is clear how interested he was in his entire kin, in their lives and their needs, and often even in ordinary family news from his native Lika.
According to the book Nikola Tesla, Correspondence with Relatives, expertly prepared by Dubravka Smiljanić and Zorica Civrić, a completely unknown Tesla is revealed. From that extensive correspondence it is not difficult to see with how much love and respect he was addressed by, for example, his aunts, or his sisters and cousins, his nephews and nieces, and finally even the grandchildren of his sisters.
The Gentleman from the Waldorf Astoria
It is not so unusual that he answered many letters, but that he almost never forgot anyone and that he more often solved their problems with checks or money — school fees and books for some, winter coats and shoes for others, sometimes money for treatment or recovery in a spa.
Such a Tesla, from his then patriarchal Lika, we could hardly even imagine, let alone get to know. To tell the truth, in those times from his homeland there was no other way to escape poverty than to dedicate oneself to a military or priestly vocation. A dozen of his closest relatives were priests. His uncle Petar, in monasticism named Nikolaj, was Metropolitan of Dabar-Bosnia, while his nephew from his eldest sister Angelina, Petronije Trbojević, was our first doctor of theology and abbot of the Šišatovac monastery on Fruška Gora.
Excerpt — Nikola Tesla’s baptismal certificate: faith “Eastern Orthodox,” tax 2 × 25 kroner.
In such a milieu, beside a priest father, then grandfathers who wore priestly robes or monastic habits, with an uncle who later became metropolitan, Tesla early discovered the world of spirituality and books, the world of dedication and renunciation. Many years later in America he was amazed, as he wrote, that in that world it was difficult to find a man in whom at the same time one could find knowledge, justice, and selflessness.
From the other side of the ocean another face of Tesla is revealed to us. And for that face to be seen in full splendor in the last decade of the last century, one had to be exactly at eight o’clock in the “Palm Room” of the Waldorf Astoria hotel.
Precisely at that time a striking gentleman six feet tall (one meter ninety-nine centimeters) would appear in the dining room. He wore the usual “Prince Albert” coat, with a bowler hat on his head. His handkerchiefs were of white silk, his ties serious, also silk, the collar white and stiff. He discarded all his accessories, including gloves, after only a few uses.
