The Man Who Loved a Pigeon

Nikola Tesla held roughly three hundred patents. He invented the alternating current motor, designed the power system that electrified the modern world, and demonstrated wireless communication before Marconi got the credit. He could visualize an entire machine in his head, rotate it, test it, and build it — often without a single revision to the original design. He was, by most accounts, one of the most gifted minds of the nineteenth or twentieth century.

He also required exactly eighteen napkins at every meal.

Tesla's life was governed by the number three. He would walk around a block three times before entering a building. He calculated the cubic volume of his food before eating it. His hotel rooms had to have numbers divisible by three. He could not touch round objects, could not be near pearls, and could not shake hands without afterwards counting something to restore order.

He slept two hours a night. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1905. He gave away his fortune. By the end of his life, he was living alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, feeding pigeons at the park every day and bringing the injured ones back to his room.

One pigeon in particular — a white one — he loved above all others. "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman," he said. "And she loved me."

When she died, Tesla said he knew his life's work was finished.

He was right.