The Lifestyle of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was a very tall and skinny man, standing over six feet and weighing around one hundred and forty pounds. He had light blue-gray eyes, which was considered odd because he was of Serbian descent who were typically known to have darker eyes. Tesla, probably joking, said to a reporter that his eyes used to be dark, but using his mind so much had made them many shades lighter. The inventor was known to be very elegant, stylish, meticulous in his grooming, clothing, and regimented in his daily activities.

Tesla never married and remained a celibate and a bachelor his entire life. Tesla was solely committed to the principles of science above all else, and for this reason, he denied the love and companionship of a female counterpart. He chose to lead a solitary life, hoping only that this sacrifice to work would make his name live on through many centuries still to come.

One of his few hobbies other than work was feeding birds. Tesla’s respect for birds began when he was a child growing up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He and his local friends made a sport out of catching live birds, and when Tesla himself caught a couple of keepers, he and his friend found themselves getting attacked by a murder of crows. The revolt forced the boys to release the birds and take cover. In America, he made it a specialty of his to treat sick pigeons, which seems odd because he was quite the germaphobe. He would feed them every day on his daily walks and would also take in wounded pigeons and nurse them back to health at his hotel in New York. He seemed to have had a better connection with birds than with most people. In 1917, he was awarded the Edison Medal, and upon receiving the award, the inventor could not be found. He was later found feeding pigeons near a local library and was persuaded back to the ceremony to give his speech.

Tesla suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder, and because of this, he developed some very strange idiosyncrasies and phobias, such as having a strong dislike against earrings, pearls, peaches, and touching other people’s hair. He counted the steps in his walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups, and pieces of food. All repeated acts or operations he performed had to be divisible by three.

While living in New York, Tesla kept his laboratories absolutely clean and pure, refused to touch other people, would wear gloves while shaking hands, and insisted upon personally cleaning his own plates and silverware at restaurants with his requested 18 napkins. This cleanliness was all intentional because, as a child, he almost died from cholera, which raged in the region of his hometown Smiljan due to contaminated water. Many found Tesla’s actions strange, but to him, it was a very important measure to protect his health.

In another way to keep his body clean and pure, Tesla invented an electrical apparatus that could give the human body a dry bath by passing millions of volts of electricity through it (similar to his demonstrations in the early 1890s where he passed electricity through his own body). His oscillator was a small, drum-like object about two feet long by one foot wide and could apply half a million volts of electricity through his body. The large amount of electricity would affect the germs without destroying the cells of the tissues of the body. Though his oscillator seemed like a fountain of youth, Tesla maintained his conventional ideas of health. He bathed daily, believed in plenty of exercise, and would walk eight or ten miles every day. He said that he never would take a cab or other conveyance and relied on his leg power for transportation.

His diet was a crucial part of his daily routine to remain healthy and to prolong the length of his life. He was very fussy and particular about his food: he ate very little, but what he did eat had to be the very best. He wasn’t a complete vegetarian; he ate meat, just not very occasionally (perhaps once or twice a year). He did believe though that humankind should move towards a vegetarian diet, not just because eating meat the way we do is “barbarous,” as he said, but because he believed the vegetarian diet is more beneficial to the human body.

In his later years, he never smoked, drank tea, coffee, alcoholic beverages, or consumed any other stimulant. Since he saw life through the lens of his mechanistic theory of life, he took great care of his body as if it were a machine properly maintaining its best efficiency.

As for sleep, Tesla reported that he was a poor sleeper and had very unusual resting patterns. He claimed to only sleep a few hours each day and would oftentimes practice polyphasic sleep where he would take short naps for restoration instead of sleeping for a long period of time.

Unfortunately for Tesla and his clean and healthy lifestyle, in 1937, at the age of 81, he was hit by a taxicab during one of his regular walks. It is likely he was jaywalking because he admittedly was known to do so. He broke three ribs and seriously injured his back. Tesla would be bedridden for months while refusing to see a doctor, and on top of this would catch pneumonia, which would plague his health for the last 5 years of his life. I believe this accident and sickness would play a major role in the rapid decline of his health, both mentally and physically, and his goal of living past a century would never be realized.

Nikola Tesla had a unique and eccentric lifestyle and was known for his intense work habits, often spending long hours in his laboratory. So much so that his friends would seriously worry about his health. Financial difficulties were a recurring theme in his life, and he died in relative obscurity. Despite these challenges, Tesla’s legacy is marked by his groundbreaking contributions to the field of electrical engineering.