25 Weird Facts You Didn’t Know About Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla could speak eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and even Latin.

2. Nikola Tesla was voluntarily chaste, despite numerous women "vying for his affections... some even madly in love with him", because he believed sex inhibited his abilities to think in a scientific manner.

3. Nikola Tesla planned to secretly experiment on children, lining the walls of schoolrooms with high-voltage lines, believing that exposing them to the energy would make them healthier and smarter, and he believed every home in the future would soon do likewise.

4. Nikola Tesla became interested in electricity after his cat gave him an electric shock.

5. Nikola Tesla once caused an earthquake in Manhattan by creating an artificial earthquake machine. The machine achieved this by reaching the resonant frequency of his building through a simple piston suspended in a cylinder.

Nikola Tesla drank whiskey every day because he thought it would make him live to 150.

7. Nikola Tesla was an advocate of sterilizing criminals, people with mental problems, and believed that by 2100 people who aren't "desirable parents" shouldn't be able to breed.

8. In 1891, Tesla made a risky demonstration to discredit Edison Company’s claims on the safety of AC. During the demo, for a moment, 250,000 volts raced across the surface of his body, causing him to be surrounded by what one newspaper called “the Effulgent Glory of Myriad Tongues of Electric Flame.”

9. Nikola Tesla disagreed with the theory of atoms being composed of smaller subatomic particles, stating there was no such thing as an electron creating an electric charge.

10. Nikola Tesla never slept for more than 2 hours, however, he did admit to "dozing" from time to time "to recharge his batteries."

Tesla refused to talk to any woman who wore pearls.

12. Nikola Tesla used Sanskrit words in his descriptions of natural phenomena. After meeting Swami Vivekananda, Tesla began using the words 'Akasha', 'Prana', and the concept of a luminiferous ether to describe the source, existence, and construction of matter.

13. When Nikola Tesla met with Thomas Edison for a job interview, he handed him his letter of recommendation which simply stated "My Dear Edison: I know two great men and you are one of them. The other is this young man!" He was immediately hired.

14. Nikolas Tesla had crippling OCD. He would clean his plates with exactly 18 napkins before meals, had an extreme phobia of germs, and claimed he was receiving radio transmissions from inhabitants of Venus or Mars.

15. In 1940, Nikola Tesla offered to build the American military a "teleforce" death ray that could "melt airplane motors 250 miles away". All he wanted was $2 million and three months of time.

In 1905, Nikola Tesla served as Best Man at the wedding of Lt. Richmond Hobson of Alabama, who would later become the first Southern Congressman to support a woman's right to vote.

17. Nikola Tesla was heavily influenced by Goethe's Faust, his favorite poem, and had actually memorized the entire text. It was while reciting a certain verse that he was struck with the epiphany that would lead to the idea of the rotating magnetic field and ultimately, AC current.

18. Nikola Tesla "squished his toes" one hundred times for each foot every night, saying that it "stimulated his brain cells."

19. Nikola Tesla shunned physical contact with other people, with a special aversion to touching hair. To avoid shaking hands with people he met, he lied that he had injured his hands in a laboratory accident.

20. Nikola Tesla held an interview in 1899 claiming everything is the light and that light preceded matter in the cosmic timeline.

Tesla invented the Tesla coil, a device essential to sending and receiving radio waves. But in 1895, a fire destroyed Tesla's lab as he prepared to send a radio signal approximately 50 miles (80 km) to West Point, New York. Marconi relied on Tesla’s work and won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909.

22. Nikola Tesla said Edison "had no hobby, cared for no amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene."

23. Nikola Tesla's words were the only negative ones in the special edition of the New York Times on Edison's life, published the day after he died.

24. He had a peculiar love of the number 3 and all numbers that could be divided by 3. His maids would deliver him 18 towels and he chose to stay in hotel room 207, both of which can be divided by 3.

25. After Nikola Tesla lost control of Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing, one of his many jobs included working as a ditch digger for $2/day.