13 Comments

Wow, this is such a cool story...

"Here I was, only three years old and already philosophising."

Evidence that Tesla was perhaps a cut above!

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I'm so pleased you shared this, isn't he a wonderful writer! I could see all of this as it unfolded, thank you. And still in his eighties he had the same excitement as he had when he was three, what an example.

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This is positively one of the most delightful Tesla anecdotes I have ever read. What a sweet thrill to think that his love for his dear cat might have played such an enormous role in the fascination that was to consume his adult life.

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Amen! The Magnificent Macak has peopled my dreams ever since my friend Albert lent me his biography of Tesla,... of whom I had never heard. This was almost 4 decades ago. Albert himself was something of a prodigy. He had had his own lab in the basement of his parents house on Madison Ave. and got himself in all sorts of trouble stacking tandems or whatever it was, Greek to me, but the habit resulted in sitting in handcuffs in the back of a cop car with his labrador retriever to think it over until they let him go. My biography was no less thrilling. Not only cats but pidgeons came under Tesla's special care. To the very end he continued to feed them. One favorite white pidgeon came to his window before she died and as he beheld her saw a ray of light come forth from her eye. He understood that she was saying goodbye. I attempted a very graphic quilt of this and named it Madame Tesla. Despite Eric Dollard's opinion of most biographies of Tesla I've never doubted,

based on my own experience, these animal stories. Furthermore Mr. Dollard's personal experience unraveling and replicating many of Tesla's experiments more than confirms the amazing windup to this amazing letter. Say it again Tesla.

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Please don't write that Tesla was born in Croatia. His family were Serbs and Smiljan was in the Austrian Empire at his birth, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after WWI. During WWII, Croatian fascists rather infamously burned to the ground Tesla's childhood home and his father's church (where he was a Serbian Orthodox priest). Tesla considered himself American once he moved there. Croatia became an independent country long after his death, in the 1990s.

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Tesla's brilliance comes from not taking the easy answers to his questions for granted. Electricity is a magical mystery. Is it a life force? Does it exist in all things? Is it separated from the magnetic force that permeates the universe as electromagnetic force? Is it ever destroyed or brought into existence, or has it always been? So many questions about this amazing element.

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Fascinating

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Such a fantastic imagination he had, and he shared his discoveries with us all.

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Thank you. This is wonderful.

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This warms my heart.

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This is so so so WONDERFUL. No wonder such a genius, his heart and mind open to everything.

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What a beautiful, inspiring story. Great way to start the day.

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