At the same time, however, he again offered Westinghouse the designs of his “commercially superior turbine,” which he assured them would save the firm millions of dollars. But he warned that there could be no strings. He could produce the turbines at once but would not consent to agree to “any experimenting whatever.”4 The response was tiresomely familiar. Board chairman Guy E. Tripp wrote that they could not enter such an agreement because their engineers were negative on the subject, “and of course we must be guided by the opinion of our Engineers.”5
Two special friends entered Tesla’s life in this period, a sculptor and a writer, whose respective talents would help to preserve his name and achievements from the obscurity that could befall even a famous person who had neither heirs nor a corporate identity to prod the public’s memory. The nineteen-year-old science writer, Kenneth M. Swezey, arrived on the scene to join the ranks of the inventor’s permanent coterie; and the Yugoslav sculptor, Ivan Meštrović, middle-aged and already famous in Europe, came to New York to introduce his work to America.
Tesla and the sculptor cherished common memories of their childhoods in the mountains of Yugoslavia. Both were poets at heart. They met often in New York, talking about anything and everything. Both worked late into the night and had a similar problem. Meštrović was forced to wrangle his hunks of marble from one hotel to another for lack of a studio; Tesla, to his great sadness, could no longer afford a laboratory. So they took long walks together, discussed Balkan affairs, their work, and shared their pleasure in reciting Serbian poetry. Along the way, Meštrović was introduced to the daily routine of feeding the pigeons of Manhattan.
Long after the sculptor had returned to Split, Tesla at the urging of Robert Johnson wrote and asked him to do a bust of himself. He could not go to Europe however, and Meštrović was unable to return to America. Nevertheless, the latter wrote back, saying that he remembered the inventor so well that, if Tesla would send a photograph, he would undertake the job.6 Tesla replied that he had no money; Meštrović answered that none was needed. Good as his word, he sculpted and cast in bronze a powerful and sensitive likeness (now to be seen at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade) that transcended the miles, the years, and mere realism to capture the brooding essence of genius.*
As for young Swezey, on meeting the inventor for the first time in 1929, he was surprised to discover (as he wrote) “a tall skinny man of upright posture” who might go about for hours in a daze of concentration, but who also had a side intensely human and “almost painfully sensitive with fellow-feeling for everything that lives.”7
Swezey himself, residing in a bleak apartment in Brooklyn, had few close ties to family or friends. He became both a journalistic champion of the scientist and a devoted admirer. The old man and the younger were often together. Although Tesla worked hard while others slept, he also knew how to refresh himself with long rambles through the city. Swezey often joined him on these nocturnal excursions.
He too was introduced to the pigeons. One evening as they were walking down Broadway, with Tesla discoursing intensely on his system for sending electrical power wirelessly to the ends of the Earth, the inventor suddenly lowered his voice. “However, what I am anxious about at this moment,” he said, “is a little sick bird I left up in my room. It worries me more than all my wireless problems put together.”
The pigeon, which he had picked up two days before in front of the library, had a crossed beak which had started a cancerous growth on its tongue so that it could not eat. Tesla had saved it from slow death and said that with patient treatment it would soon become strong and well.
But not all of the birds he saved could be fitted into his hotel room, where the servants already complained of dirt. “In a large cage in a bird shop,” wrote Swezey, “are several dozen more pigeons. . . . Some had wing diseases, others broken legs. At least one was cured of gangrene, which the bird specialist pronounced incurable. If a pigeon is afflicted with something that Tesla has not the facilities to treat, it is put under the care of a competent physician.”
He and Swezey, as they walked, talked of Einstein, diet, exercise, fashion, marriage. “Tesla’s only marriage has been to his work and to the world,” wrote the young man, “as was Newton’s and Michelangelo’s . . . to a peculiar universality of thought. He believes, as Sir Francis Bacon did, that the most enduring works of achievement have come from childless men….”8
The inventor confided to his young companion that mental anguish, fire, commercial opposition, and other trials had merely fanned his productiveness and that he still felt he could rise highest in the face of great resistance. He also said that he had earned in his lifetime over $2 million. Yet, for him to have earned this sum he probably would have to have received the legendary $1 million for his alternating-current patents from Westinghouse.*
Because so many strange interpretations have been made of Tesla’s devotion to pigeons, the following letter from Tesla to Pola Fotić, the young daughter of Konstantin Fotić, Yugoslavian ambassador to the United States, is cited for its simple portrayal of love for the creatures of his childhood. Entitled “A Story of Youth Told by Age,” he describes the winter isolation of the house where he was born, and of his special friend, “the magnificent Mačak, the finest of all cats in the world.”9
It was in connection with Mačak that his first intimation of electricity came to him one snowy evening when he was three years of age. “People walking in the snow left a luminous trail behind them,” he wrote, “and a snowball thrown against an obstacle gave a flare of light like a loaf of sugar hit with a knife. . . .” Even at that early age his vision was hyperreceptive to light. Footprints in the snow were not in muted shades of blue, purple, or black as they might seem to others.
“I felt impelled to stroke Mačak’s back. What I saw was a miracle which made me speechless…. Mačak’s back was a sheet of light, and my hand produced a shower of crackling sparks loud enough to be heard all over the place.”
His father told him this was caused by electricity. His mother said to stop playing with the cat lest he start a fire. But the child was thinking abstractly.
“Is nature a gigantic cat? If so who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded.”
Later, as darkness filled the room, Mačak shook his paws as though he were walking on wet ground, and the boy distinctly saw the furry body surrounded by a halo like the aura of saints. Day after day he asked himself what electricity could be, and found no answer. At the time of writing this letter, eighty years had gone by, and Tesla said that he still had no answer.
In contrast to the cat’s delightful company was the family gander— “a monstrous ugly brute, with a neck of an ostrich, mouth of a crocodile and a pair of cunning eyes radiating intelligence and understanding like the human.” In old age Tesla claimed to have a scar inflicted by the monstrous bird. But the other creatures on the farm he loved.
“I liked to feed our pigeons, chickens, and other fowl, take one or the other under my arm and hug and pet it.” And even the vicious gander, when it brought its flock home at night after “sporting like swans” in a meadow brook, “was a joy and inspiration to me.” Now, in New York, as he withdrew more and more from a frenzied age and from people with whom he felt little harmony, his fondness for pigeons took on a strange intensity.
He became alarmingly ill in his office on 40th Street one day in 1921 and, as usual, refused to see a doctor. When it became apparent that he might be unable to return to his apartment at the St. Regis Hotel, he whispered to his secretary to telephone the hotel, speak with the housekeeper on the fourteenth floor, and tell her to feed the pigeon in his room—“the white pigeon with touches of gray in her wings.”10 He insisted that the secretary repeat this urgent message after him. The housekeeper was to continue feeding the pigeon each day until further notice. She would find plenty of feed in the room.
Whenever in the past the inventor had been unable to visit Bryant Park with the feed, he had hired a Western Un
ion messenger to take care of the errand for him. The white pigeon, it was apparent, was special to him. From his attitude, his secretaries thought he might be delirious.
He recovered, and the matter was forgotten—until another day, when he telephoned his secretary to say the pigeon was very ill and that he could not leave the hotel. Miss Skerritt recalled that he spent several days at home. When the pigeon had recovered, he resumed his usual routine of working, walking, thinking, and feeding the birds.
About a year later, however, he arrived at his office looking shaken and distraught. In his arm he carried a tiny bundle. He summoned Julius Czito, who lived in the suburbs, and asked if he would bury the dead pigeon on his property, where the grave could be properly cared for. But scarcely had the machinist returned home on this curious mission than he received a phone call from Tesla, who had changed his mind.
“Bring her back, please,” he said, “I have made other arrangements.” How he finally disposed of her, his staff never knew.
Three years later Tesla was completely broke and his bill at the St. Regis Hotel had gone unpaid for a long time. One afternoon a deputy sheriff arrived at his office and began seizing his furnishings to satisfy a judgment against them. Tesla managed to persuade the officer to grant him an extension. When he had gone, there remained the matter of his secretaries, who had received no salaries in more than two weeks. All that was left in his Mother Hubbard’s cupboard of a safe was the gold Edison Medal, which he now removed. It was worth about one hundred dollars, he said to the embarrassed young women. He would have it cut in two and give half to each.
Dorothy Skerritt and Muriel Arbus declined in one voice. They offered instead to share with him the small sums of money in their own purses.11 When Tesla was able to pay them a few weeks later, he placed an additional two weeks’ salary in each envelope. Yet on the day when he had offered to divide up the Edison Medal, there had in fact been a little money in the office—$5 in petty cash. But this he claimed at once for his pigeons, saying he was out of bird seed. He had asked one of his secretaries to go out and buy a fresh supply.
With the help of Czito, to whom he also owed a substantial amount of money, he then moved all his office belongings into a new office building. The next blow fell shortly afterward when he was asked to vacate the St. Regis Hotel, in part because of his pigeon friends. At one point Tesla had put some of the birds into a hamper and sent them home with patient George Scherff, thinking that a spell in Connecticut might do them good. But alas, so fond were they of their old friend and of their risky old haunts that they were back on his window ledge in time for dinner.
Sadly he packed up his possessions of decades and moved to the Hotel Pennsylvania. The pigeons followed. After another few years, he and they would be forced to move on to the Hotel Governor Clinton. Nikola and his birds were to spend the final decade of his life in the Hotel New Yorker.
The strange tale of the white pigeon was told by the inventor to O’Neill and William L. Laurence, science writer for The New York Times, one day while the three sat in the Hotel New Yorker lobby. John O’Neill, a member of a psychic society, saw mystic symbolism in Tesla’s white pigeon. He and other psychics who have written about the inventor preferred to speak of the pigeon as a dove. Although pigeons are technically rock doves, only the most meticulous birdwatchers ever call them that and Tesla never called his pigeon anything but a pigeon. But what he told the two journalists in the hotel lobby, says his early biographer, was the dove love-story of his life.
“I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years,” he said. “Thousands of them, for who can tell—.
“But there was one pigeon, a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I would know that pigeon anywhere.
“No matter where I was that pigeon would find me; when I wanted her I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. She understood me and I understood her.
“I loved that pigeon.
“Yes, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.
“Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her.
“As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me—she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes—powerful beams of light.”
Tesla paused and then, as if in response to an unasked question from the science writers, continued.
“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.
“When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life’s work was finished.
“Yes, I have fed pigeons for years; I continue to feed them, thousands of them, for after all, who can tell—.”
The writers left him in silence and walked several blocks along Seventh Avenue without speaking.
O’Neill later concluded: “It is out of phenomena such as Tesla experienced when the dove flew out of the midnight darkness and into the blackness of his room and flooded it with blinding light, and the revelation that came to him out of the dazzling sun in the park at Budapest, that the mysteries of religion are built.” Had Tesla not rigorously suppressed his mystical inheritance, he wrote, “he would have understood the symbolism of the Dove.”12
Dr. Jule Eisenbud, in an article for the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, has examined the bird symbolism in the inventor’s life in conjunction with his neuroses and his childhood relationship with his mother, to the extent that the latter is known. The bird is an age-old universal symbol of the mother and her nourishing breast, says the psychologist. And it was significant that Tesla believed he could command his beautiful white pigeon to appear, wherever he was, with only his wish. “The meaning of this fantasy,” he asserts, “can be arrived at only when viewed in conjunction with the strong evidence from other biographical data that the unconscious need for, and for control of, the ‘disappearing’ mother had dominated Tesla throughout his life, accounting not only for many of his clinically peculiar habits, and much that was out of the ordinary in his relationship to people and things, but even for the private mythology in terms of which he seems unconsciously to have conceived the powerful all-pervading force he devoted his life to capturing and harnessing.”13
Nothing in Tesla’s writings indicates to the lay person that he felt deprived by a “disappearing” mother. But Dr. Eisenbud sees in his life many signs of an emotionally and physically deprived infantile nursing period. Tesla consciously idealized his mother, insists Eisenbud, yet he managed to stay clear of her, “and for most of his life was given to unfulfilled premonitions (all but the last unfulfilled, that is) of her death, her ultimate disappearance. This kind of ambivalence, the sort of thing seen frequently in persons who are known clinically as obsessional neurotics, which Tesla definitely was, marked all his relationships to and attitudes toward mother symbols and mother substitutes.”
Thus, says Eisenbud, he could not tolerate smooth round surfaces, and pearls on a woman made him physically sick. He speaks of an obsessional patient of his own who, on his mother’s testimony, had gone into a deathlike depression when abruptly taken off the smooth round breast at the age of two weeks and in later life could not stand even the word sphere.
Dr. Eisenbud believes the inventor’s attitude toward money was also indicative of a deep-lying fantasy of having virtual control of this universal mother symbo
l at the source:
“He gave away millions in gestures of great, if sometimes bizarre generosity, and was often broke as a result. He was, however, apparently dominated by the comforting belief that fundamentally he was not dependent on fate or other people for his sustenance, and that money itself, a trivial and incidental aspect of the tedious mechanics of living, he could make in sufficient amounts whenever he needed it. . . . The most extraordinary facet of Tesla’s never-ending game of control of the mother, however, was played out with food itself, where, unhappily, the negative side of his ambivalent attitude toward this most direct of all mother substitutes finally won out….”14
Hence, he says, the elaborate ceremony Tesla made of dining, arriving in evening clothes at the appointed hour, to be shown to his special table, the head waiter becoming an expensive mother surrogate “the symbolic control of whom is not infrequently striven for by those in the chips.”
He remarks on the fact that one of Tesla’s favorite dishes was squab: “In a beautiful clinical example of biting the breast that didn’t feed him (the other side of the coin of his compulsive feeding of pigeons) he would… eat only the meat on either side of the breastbone.”
As the wheel of his life came full circle, says Eisenbud, Tesla was reduced to living mostly on warm milk. Then it was that his beautiful white pigeon “gave forth her last dazzling, blinding beam of light—a symbol equated with the stream of milk from the breasts. . . .”15 Tesla’s lifetime of compensation and ersatz collapsed. Something went out of his life, and he knew that his work was finished.
Behavioral theorists will argue with such Freudian/Jungian conclusions, however, tending to believe that specific traumatic incidents in Tesla’s childhood, leading to emotional repression accounted for his obsessional neuroses.