New York, 1900

TESLA, Nikola (1856-1943). Typed letter signed ("N. Tesla") to Robert Underwood Johnson, New York, 6 March 1900.

Two pages, 265 x 203mm (small marginal tears, soiled spot on second page not affecting text).

Tesla writes to his close friend, writer and editor of The Century Magazine, Robert Johnson. Tesla became friendly with Johnson (1853-1937) and his wife Katharine in the mid-1890s and spent many hours in their Murray Hill townhouse. The couple was known for their salons featuring not only writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Samuel Clemens, naturalist John Muir, and sculptor August Saint-Gaudens, but also potential investors and love interests for the inventor and bachelor Tesla. "Luka" and "Mrs Filipov" are references to an inside joke between the three, following a late-night recitation by Tesla of the poem "Luka Filipov" by Serbian poet Jovan "Zmaj" Jovanović. (Munson, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, p. 173-75). Here Tesla apparently reacts to an editorial decision by another Century editor, Clarence Clough Buel. He notes in part, "Perhaps he was frightened away by the apparent mass of facts to be brought out and by the first diagram, which threated to make the article technical. My opinion is, that no extraordinary intelligence, such as possessed by ever Century reader, is needed to follow my ideas to recognized in them a connected whole. How then does the Century differ from other magazines?" He goes on to posit that of "equally gifted men of equal ability, the one living to-day could not put an ideal conception in as precise a form as a man who lived six hundred years ago…"