Relationships

Relationships

Tesla with an unknown woman

Tesla never married; he said his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities.^[10]:33 However, toward the end of his life, he told a reporter, "Sometimes I feel that by not marrying, I made too great a sacrifice to my work ..."^[31] There have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him.^{[citation needed]} Tesla, though polite and soft-spoken, did not have any known relationships.

Tesla was asocial and prone to seclude himself with his work.^{[169][170][46][171]} However, when he did engage in a social life, many people spoke very positively and admiringly of Tesla. Robert Underwood Johnson described him as attaining a "distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity, and force."^[31] His loyal secretary, Dorothy Skerrit, wrote: "his genial smile and nobility of bearing always denoted the gentlemanly characteristics that were so ingrained in his soul."^[16] Tesla's friend, Julian Hawthorne, wrote, "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink."^{[citation needed]}

Mark Twain in Tesla's lab, 1894

Tesla was a good friend of Francis Marion Crawford, Robert Underwood Johnson,^[172] Stanford White,^[173] Fritz Lowenstein, George Scherff, and Kenneth Swezey's.^{[174][175][176]} In middle age, Tesla became a close friend of Mark Twain's; they spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere.^[172] Twain notably described Tesla's induction motor invention as "the most valuable patent since the telephone."^[177] In the late 1920s, Tesla also befriended George Sylvester Viereck, a poet, writer, mystic, and later, a Nazi propagandist. Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife.^[178][179]

Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight.^[10]:110 He was quick to criticize clothing; on several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress.^[10]:33

When Thomas Edison died in 1931, Tesla contributed the only negative opinion to the New York Times, buried in an extensive coverage of Edison's life:

He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene ... His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense.^[180]