It is often recounted how Nickola Tesla,the Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electrical supply system, was a withdrawn man as his life came to a close. But I bet you did not know he once fell madly in love with a bird ? True story..

Having been burned by most everyone, including Thomas Edison, he felt cheated, and resigned to fixate his remaining attentions on a certain white pigeon he claimed to love as much as any man would love a woman.Not that Tesla had a love life.His love was the lab..and a cruel mistress it was…….

To get some insight into Tesla’s personality, we turn to an article from 1901:

New York Times – August 5, 1901

It goes without saying that the man of year-long calculations and many-mooned computations must possess patience of some pattern. That this would be exercised toward untoward interruptions is not so certain. Not long since a “special representative” of some mushroom association or other – for sending palm leaf fans to the Finlanders or pocket pincushions to the South Sea Islanders, or the like – braved the barn-like entrance and freight elevator of Nikola Tesla’s down-town workshop to petition a donation. The electrician of Houston street was making a right angle of himself over a huge



drawing board The “special representative” was fat, and scarcely five feet plus. As the wizard wearily raised his lank length to the perpendicular, her round and expressionless eyes were confronted by his waistcoat buttons. The tableau in profile was striking. The special representative began a voluble recitation of the virtues of her association. The wizard listened silently for a space of three minutes, and then, with dreamy, averted eyes and that characteristic “over-the-hills-and-far-away” voice, said gently:

“My dear madam, what would you take to go away just now and not come any more again while your – your association shall last?”

“I-I-Ten dollars.” Stammered the astonished representative.

“It is well.” said the tall man with the impressive face. “Tomorrow.” taking the card that had been trembling in the fat fingers, “tomorrow I will send you my check if you go and do not come again, and if you send me not one of those papers you speak of, or any of the advantages you mentioned. Good day, madam; I thank you!” And Tesla returned wearily to his many-mooned computations while the special representative found her way back to the freight elevator in an uncertain frame of mind.

Later years;

Near the end of his life, Tesla became fixated on pigeons, especially a specific white female, which he claimed to love almost as one would love a human being. Tesla liked making things, not making love as “Cracked reports

“Tesla renovated electronic technology, inventing things such as the electrical generator, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights and the “Tesla Coil” which is used in TV and radio transmissions. You may recognize a few things on that list as being directly responsible for everything that was awesome about life in the 20th Century.

Showing an uncommon commitment to the whole “mad scientist” thing, he was celibate, afraid of round things (that’s probably why he was celibate!) and hated human hair, jewelry and anything that wasn’t divisible by three. Also, he claimed to have built a “death ray” that could blow things up and some (nutty) people believe that he may have been responsible for the 1908 Tunguska Event, an explosion in Russia that was 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima”

One night, Tesla claimed the white pigeon visited him through an open window at his hotel, and he believed the bird had come to tell him she was dying. He saw “two powerful beans of light” in the bird’s eyes, he later said. “Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.” The pigeon died in his arms, and the inventor claimed that in that moment, he knew that he had finished his life’s work.

But Tesla’s luck did not change even in death it seems.

Tesla died of heart failure alone in the New Yorker Hotel, some time between the evening of January 5 and the morning of January 8, 1943, at the age of 86. Despite selling his AC electricity patents, Tesla was essentially destitute and died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla’s patent number U.S. Patent 645,576 in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio.



Immediately after Tesla’s death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government’s Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was composed of a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called “peace ray” constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisors, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case “most secret”, because of the nature of Tesla’s inventions and patents. One document states that “[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments […]”. Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several “missing” papers and property.

Tesla’s family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death due to the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually, his nephew, Sava Kosanoviċ, got possession of some of his personal effects which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Tesla’s funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His ashes were taken to Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum, where it resides to this day.

Tesla did not like to pose for portraits. He did it only once for princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy, but that portrait is lost. His wish was to have a sculpture made by his close friend Ivan Meštrović, who was at that time in United States, but he died before getting a chance to see it. Meštrović made a bronze bust (1952) that is held in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade and a statue (1955/56) placed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. This statue was moved to Nikola Tesla Street in Zagreb’s city centre on the 150th anniversary of Tesla’s birth, with the Ruđer Bošković Institute to receive a duplicate. In 1976, a bronze statue of Tesla was placed at Niagara Falls, New York. A similar statue was also erected in his hometown of Gospić in 1986.

The SI unit tesla (T) for measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field B\,) was named in Tesla’s honour at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris in 1960. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of which Tesla had been vice president also created an award in recognition of Nikola Tesla. Called the IEEE Nikola Tesla Award, it is given to individuals or a team that has made outstanding contributions to the generation or utilization of electric power, and is considered the most prestigious award in the area of electric power. The Tesla crater on the far side of the moon and the minor planet 2244 Tesla are also named after Tesla

Tesla has received many recognitions within Serbia. He is featured on the current 100 Serbian dinar note (see left). The largest power plant complex in Serbia, the TPP Nikola Tesla is named in his honour. On July 10, 2006 the biggest airport in Serbia (Belgrade) was renamed Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport in honor of Tesla’s 150th birthday

An electric car company, Tesla Motors, named their company in tribute to Nikola Tesla. Their website states: The namesake of our Tesla Roadster is the genius Nikola Tesla […] We‘re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our car and nod his head with both understanding and approval.[69]

The Croatian subsidiary of Ericsson is also named ‘Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d’. (‘Nikola Tesla’ was a phone hardware company in Zagreb before Ericsson bought it in the 1990s) in honour of Nikola Tesla’s pioneering work in wireless communication.

The year 2006 was celebrated by UNESCO as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla, scientist (1856-1943), as well as being proclaimed by the governments of Croatia and Serbia to be the Year of Tesla. On this anniversary, July 10, 2006, the renovated village of Smiljan (which had been demolished during the wars of the 1990s) was opened to the public along with Tesla’s house (as a memorial museum) and a new multimedia center dedicated to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The parochial church of St. Peter and Paul, where Tesla’s father had held services, was renovated as well. The museum and multimedia center are filled with replicas of Tesla’s work. The museum has collected almost all of the papers ever published by, and about, Nikola Tesla; most of these provided by Ljubo Vujovic from the Tesla Memorial Society in New York. Alongside Tesla’s house, a monument created by sculptor Mile Blazevic has been erected. In the nearby city of Gospić, on the same date as the reopening of the renovated village and museums, a higher education school named Nikola Tesla was opened, and a replica of the statue of Tesla made by Frano Krsinic (the original is in Belgrade) was presented. No statue of the flighty Miss Pigeon appears in the works as of this writing.