Tesla’s lifelong distaste for corporate involvement was twofold: most other engineers drove him mad with impatience, and he resented any form of control. If he had to deal with a corporate person, he preferred it to be the president or chairman of the board.
The movers and shakers he observed at the Waldorf after the Stock Exchange had closed for the day were limited conversationalists. Their interests were largely in rates and tariffs, their fears riveted on financial panics and labor riots. Partisan politics scarcely interested them, only the buying of blocs of votes as necessary to protect the rates and tariffs. Bernard Baruch once told of a crude German trader named Jacob Field, known as Jake, who was being wined and dined by some grateful friends. When two lovely women on either side of him were stumped to know what to talk to him about, one of them finally asked whether he liked Balzac. Jake tugged on his mustaches. “I never deal in dem outside stocks,” he said.1
Journalists and bluestockings were much more to Tesla’s natural taste. As for the gentlemen of the press, they were so enthralled by his charismatic presence that they could scarcely remember after meeting him whether he had bushy black hair or wavy brown, or what was the color of his eyes or the length of his thumbs—the latter being, curiously, a matter of intense interest.
Male writers of the period often affected a florid prose style of which Julian Hawthorne, the novelist and only son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a leading exponent. Smitten by his first meeting with Tesla, he described something like a vision seen in an opium den:
“I saw a tall, slender young man with long arms and fingers, whose rather languid movements veiled extraordinary muscular power. His face was oval, broad at the temples, and strong at the lips and chin; with long eyes whose lids were seldom fully lifted, as if he were in a waking dream, seeing visions which were not revealed to the generality. He had a slow smile, as if awakening to actualities, and finding a humorous quality in them. Withal he manifested a courtesy and amiability which were almost feminine, and beneath all were the simplicity and integrity of a child. . . . He has abundant wavy brown hair, blue eyes and a fair skin. . . . To be with Tesla is to enter a domain of freedom even freer than solitude, because the horizon enlarges so….”2
On the other hand, one of the inventor’s secretaries, as if reciting “Peter Piper,” wrote that he had bushy black hair brushed back briskly.
Yet everyone seemed agreed as to the power of Tesla’s personality. Franklin Chester in the Citizen (August 22, 1897) wrote that no one could look upon him without feeling his force. Chester described him as well over six feet tall (actually he was a towering six feet six inches), with large hands and abnormally long thumbs, “a sign of great intelligence.” As to the inventor’s controversial hair, Chester said it was straight, a deep and shining black, brushed sharply from over his ears to make a ridge with serrated edges. His cheekbones were high and Slavic, his eyes blue and deeply set, burning like balls of fire.
“Those weird flashes of light he makes with his instruments,” Chester continued, “seemed almost to shoot from them. His head is wedge shaped. His chin is almost a point. . . . When he talks you listen. You do not know what he is saying, but it enthralls you. . . . He speaks the perfect English of a highly educated foreigner, without accent and with precision…. He speaks eight languages equally well….”
Hearst’s flamboyant editor Arthur Brisbane found the inventor’s eyes “rather light,” as a result of straining his mind so much. (Tesla claimed this was true.) Brisbane shared the prevailing view that long thumbs meant a powerful intellect, referring his readers to the very small thumbs of apes. Tesla’s mouth, however, he thought too small and his chin, although not weak, not strong enough. He guessed his height at more than six feet and his weight at less than 140 pounds, and reported that he tended to stoop. Tesla’s voice he described as being somewhat shrill, probably from psychic tension.
“He has that supply of self-love and self-confidence that usually goes with success.”3
John J. O’Neill, the Pulitzer Prize–winning science editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who was to become Tesla’s first biographer and devoted friend of many years, described his eyes as gray-blue, which he felt to be a matter of genetic inheritance rather than mental strain. To him Tesla was a god whose ethereal brilliance “created the modern era.”4
From the romantic point of view, O’Neill noted, he was too tall and slender to pose as the physical Adonis, but his other qualifications more than compensated.
“He was handsome of face, had a magnetic personality, but was quiet, almost shy; he was soft spoken, well educated and wore clothes well.”
As to Tesla’s own view of such matters, he fancied himself as being the very best-dressed man on Fifth Avenue. Moreover, as he once told his secretary, he intended to remain so. His usual streetwear included a black Prince Albert coat and a derby hat, and these he wore in the laboratory too unless some important experiment demanded formal evening wear. His handkerchiefs were of white silk rather than linen, his neckties sober, and his collars stiff. He threw out all accessories, including gloves, after a very few wearings. Jewelry he never wore and felt strongly about as the result of his phobias.
Robert Underwood Johnson, shortly after meeting Tesla, arranged that he be given an honorary degree from his own alma mater, Yale University. And later when Columbia also conferred an honorary degree upon him, Johnson was called upon to describe the special virtues of the inventor’s character. Tesla, he said, had a personality of “distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force….”
Women were smitten as often as his male admirers.
Miss Dorothy F. Skerritt, his secretary of many years, attested that even in old age his presence and manner were impressive. “From under protruding eyebrows,” she wrote, “his deep-set, steel gray, soft, yet piercing eyes, seemed to read your innermost thoughts . . . his face glowed with almost ethereal radiance…. His genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul.”5
His friend Hawthorne was struck not only by Tesla’s physical attractiveness but by his richness of culture. Seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer, he noted, who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink. “[W]hen it was question of the vintage of a wine, or the condition and cooking of an ortolan, he knew that, too.” And when he spoke, Hawthorne claimed, one could read the future in his face, seeing “mankind… arise a Titan, and grasp the secrets of the skies. I saw a coming time when the race would no longer be forced to labor for the means of livelihood, when the terms rich and poor would no longer mean difference of material conditions, but of spiritual capacity and ambition; a time . . . even, when knowledge should be derived from sources now hardly imagined….”6
Tesla displayed occasional streaks of cruelty that seemed motivated by likes and dislikes of an almost compulsive sort. Fat people disgusted him, and he made little effort to conceal his feelings. One of his secretaries was in his opinion too fat. Once she awkwardly knocked something off a table and he fired her. She pleaded with him on plump knees to change his mind but he refused to do so. He had a favorite joke about two of his ancient aunts that centered on the fact that both were sublimely ugly.
He could be equally imperious about his subordinates’ clothes. A secretary might spend half a month’s earnings on a new dress, and he would criticize it, ordering her to go home and change it before delivering a message to one of his important banker friends.
His employees seemed never to question his assumed role as an arbiter of taste and in fact were singularly loyal to him. Other qualities compensated. His assistants Kolman Czito and George Scherff, his secretaries Muriel Arbus and Miss Skerritt, stayed with him through thick times and thin. When he grew old and rambling, journalists would protect him from his own utterances. The science writers Kenneth M. Swezey and O’Neill, mere teenagers when they met him, ca
me to worship him almost as a god. Hugo Gernsback, the famous science editor and a father of science fiction, would publish everything he could get of Tesla’s, considering him at least as important as Edison.
This strangely captivating figure was to be courted not only by writers, industrialists, and financiers, but by musicians, actors, kings, poets, university trustees, mystics, and crackpots. Honors would be showered upon him; foreign governments would seek his services. People were to call him a wizard, a visionary, a prophet, a prodigal genius, and the greatest scientist of all time. But that was not all.
Some called him a faker and a charlatan, just as at times they defamed Edison when he too “went public” with his inventions and bragged precipitously to the press. Fellow scientists in the universities would never forgive Tesla this sin. Edison’s fame outlived such charges, for he took the wise precaution of acquiring a fortune and power as well as a vast popular following. But Tesla’s dollars would slip away like sand, and he would have to stand alone, aloof and indifferent to public opinion.
One harsh critic, Waldemar Kaempffert, science editor of The New York Times, was to brand him “an intellectual boa constrictor” in whose coils such innocents as J. P. Morgan and Colonel Astor had been as helpless prey. Kaempffert would describe him as a “medieval practitioner of black arts… as vague as an oriental mystic,” and accuse him (mixing the historical metaphor) of being a hopelessly retrograde Victorian, unable to accept the new atomic science of the twentieth century. His fellow journalists, sniffed Kaempffert, “though they could not understand what [Tesla] was talking about, were enthralled with his proposals to communicate with Mars and to transmit power without wires over vast distances.”7 And he strongly intimated that among the duped journalists was his opposite number on the Herald Tribune. O’Neill gave Tesla far too much credit, Kaempffert said, as a result of adolescent hero worship. O’Neill had met Tesla while working as a page in the New York Public Library and allegedly wrote poems to him. Kaempffert’s attitude was perhaps explained by the following incident described by O’Neill:
In 1898 Tesla made a celebrated demonstration in Madison Square Garden of a remotely controlled robot boat and torpedoes. Kaempffert, then a student at City College, brashly engaged the famous scientist in conversation.
“I see how you could load an even larger boat with a cargo of dynamite,” he volunteered, “cause it to ride submerged, and explode the dynamite whenever you wished by pressing the key just as easily as you can cause the light on the bow to shine, and blow up from a distance by wireless even the largest of battleships.”
Tesla snapped back, “You do not see there a wireless torpedo. You see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.”8
Envious scientists and critical journalists were not to be the only sources of Tesla’s travail. Occultists seemed attracted to him, and odd men and women preoccupied with even stranger matters flocked to his banner, proclaiming him their very own Venusian. He had been born on Venus, they insisted, and arrived on Earth either by spaceship or on the wings of a large white dove.9
These unwelcome followers believed him to be a man of prophecy and great psychic power who “fell to Earth” to uplift ordinary mortals through the development of automation. Partly to discourage all who would attribute abnormal powers to him, Tesla went to great lengths to deny even the sensory gifts he actually possessed. In the same spirit, he went farther than that, expounding his mechanistic philosophy, proclaiming that human beings were without wills of their own, their every act the result of external events and circumstances.10 Despite all his disclaimers, however, the strange champions continued to follow him, sometimes linking his name with unfortunate publicity schemes. Who but a charlatan, it was asked, would attract such people?
One autumn evening Tesla’s hansom cab deposited him at the fashionable home of the Robert Underwood Johnsons’ at 327 Lexington Avenue. Arc lights sparkled in the frosty air as cabriolets, broughams, and other smart carriages delivered a careful assortment of guests. From the opened door drifted the strains of a Mozart piano concerto. The Johnsons were not wealthy, but they evenhandedly accumulated millionaires, supermillionaires, poor artists, and intellectuals. Neither Robert nor Katharine understood much about science but they both adored Tesla for his varied charms.
They were an attractive couple, he scholarly in appearance with a gift for languages, poetry, and repartee, Katharine petite and pretty, yet too intelligent and restless to be satisfied with her wife-and-mother role.
In addition to cultivating artists, they were genuinely interested in the arts. Johnson was the associate editor of Century magazine and later became its editor. Their home became a natural haven for the cultured Tesla, who missed the civilized rituals of Old World cities. Both he and Michael Pupin, although they came from the poorest backgrounds in Yugoslavia, had been appalled when they first confronted the vulgar clamor of America. At the Johnson home Tesla met prominent Continental artists, writers, and political figures as well as the cream of American society.
He was introduced to the Johnsons in 1893 by Thomas Commer-ford Martin, and liked them immediately. Soon the trio became fast friends. With Robert and Katharine, Tesla learned to relax his formal manners, to use first names, and even to relish the gossip of the times. Tesla’s relentless search for millionaires to finance his inventions became the subject of the trio’s favorite in-joke.
When they were not together, they exchanged notes—sometimes two or three times a day—by messenger. Over the years their correspondence amounted to thousands of letters between Robert and Nikola, but almost equally between Katharine and “Mr. Tesla,” as she unfailingly addressed him even when her notes made no effort to conceal the intensity of her feelings for him. It was not long until Tesla loosened up enough to give them nicknames, calling Johnson “Luka Filipov” after a legendary Serbian hero he admired, and Mrs. Johnson “Madame Filipov.” Johnson, in return, took up the study of Serbian.
The invitations from the Johnsons to Tesla convey an idea of the frenetic social life the inventor was leading at this time. “Do drop in if you can on your way to the Leggett’s from the Van Allen’s. . . .” “Come meet the Kiplings,” “Come see Paderewski,” “Come to meet Baron Kaneko. . . .” In his acceptances, Tesla sometimes signed his notes to the “Filipovs” with such frivolous names such as Nicholas I. or the initials “G.I.” (for Great Inventor). With few other friends did he feel able to be so playful.
Thanks to the Johnsons, Tesla was now also being given access to those special preserves of privilege where the Idle Rich played at the game of life with such single-minded ostentation and vulgarity. Robert described for him the banquets given at Delmonico’s by the fabulously wealthy. They were called Silver, Gold, and Diamond dinners, depending upon which kind of jewelry was to be tucked into the napkins to surprise the women guests. Sometimes, for a taste thrill, cigarettes made of hundred dollar bills were passed around and smoked.
And if he did not attend it, the inventor most certainly read in the society pages of the bizarre soiree called the Poverty Social. The event in question was given in the brownstone mansion of a western hides-and-tallow king. Guests were commanded to show up in dirty rags. They sat on a filthy floor, swilling beer from tin cans and eating scraps of food served to them by liveried footmen, on wooden plates. Sensitivity was not one of the hallmarks of the Gilded Age.
But questions of taste aside, wealth had its undeniable attractions. “The only way I shall ever have a cent,” said Tesla, “is when I have enough money to throw it out of the window in handfuls.”11
At this time he was living at the Gerlach, which declared itself on its letterhead to be a “strictly fireproof family hotel.” He chafed in these unglamorous surroundings and dreamed of the Waldorf on Fifth Avenue with its heavily gold-embossed stationery.
At the Johnson home, in addition to being introduced to Rudyard Kipling, whom he and Robert considered one of the gr
eat poets of the age, he met the writers John Muir and Helen Hunt Jackson, the composers Ignace Paderewski and Anton Dvořák, the prima donna Nellie Melba, and a parade of socialites and politicians, including Senator George Hearst.12 He also met an unknown but strikingly handsome southerner just graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, Richmond Pearson Hobson.
Tesla was already thirty-seven and a cosmopolitan, not easily impressed by new acquaintances. But he felt curiously attracted to the young officer whose boyish features were in such absurd contrast to the dark, swashing mustache he affected. Hobson was to come as close as any Serbian hero to Tesla’s ideal—the virile, romantic man of action who combined native intelligence with a cultured background.
Among the animadversions against Tesla were whispers that he was a homosexual. In another time or another country it might have made little difference to his career; but in Victorian America, in the sober company of engineers, such rumors were to become a virulent part of the arsenal of his enemies. Since he could never be bothered to repudiate gossip of any kind, at any time, the only explanation he ever cared to advance for his celibacy was the exclusive demands imposed by his work. This, however, was unacceptable to the society of the time, and the pressures upon him to marry were unrelenting.
On the face of it, Tesla’s phobias made him an unlikely candidate for intimate relationships. He did, however, at one period maintain an apartment at the luxurious Hotel Marguery on the west side of Park Avenue between 47th and 48th streets at the same time that his residence was at another hotel; and he once told Kenneth Swezey that he used it for meeting “special” friends and acquaintances. The statement, however, is open to many interpretations.
The Johnsons introduced him to a parade of women who were comely, talented, or rich, and sometimes all three. A fair number were said to be sexually attracted to him. He never responded in kind, but such attentions obviously gratified his ego.
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 12