Tesla and Friends

 

It is with great joy that I hear you are celebrating your 75th birthday, and that you have, as a successful pioneer in the field of high frequency energy, experienced the miraculous development of this area of technology. Congratulations on the great success of your life’s work.

Albert Einstein

During his lifetime, Tesla did not have a family, and he had few real, close friends. Did it happen because he was a loner and selfish by nature? No, you couldn't say that, because despite the fact that Tesla was by nature introverted and devoted to science, he wasn't like that at all. On the contrary, he loved people and their company, but he still failed to gain a wider circle of friends. Why?

First of all, the old-fashioned and backward-minded scientists hated him because he reduced their reputation and even took away the material benefits they received from their, now obsolete, inventions. These people not only despised Tesla, but did everything to make his work and life difficult in general. Some believe that they, on purpose, caused the fire in Tesla’s laboratory. Many projects were burned, which slowed down Tesla’s work altogether.

Tesla was avoiding young scientists because after his bad experience with Marconi he realized that they had been socializing with him just to get his ideas which they would later use for themselves.

As far as ordinary people were concerned, for them Tesla, oriented only towards science, was a boring and even inconceivable interlocutor, the kind of person nobody wanted in his presence for understandable reasons.

Then who were those lucky ones who can say for themselves that they were his friends? They were artists, such as the pianist Paderewski or the famous writer Mark Twain, who was so close to Tesla that he himself participated in his experiments.

Why did Tesla associate with artists? First of all, because he loved art, especially literature and poetry, and also because artists approached him with open hearts, without ulterior motives and beheld him as an artist who equaled them, which he actually was. Well, those were the few, but sincere and true friends of Tesla.