Hey Tesla, get married, be happy and sleep o’nights! – AMERICAN ELECTRICIAN, July 1, 1896

Necessity is the mother of invention

This articles appeared at  AMERICAN ELECTRICIAN on July 1, 1896 by journalist Edward J. Wessels. Our sprightly contemporary, the Electrical Journal, takes issue with Mr. Nikola Tesla as to the undesirability of marriage for inventors, and after disproving his statement that few great inventions have been made bv married men, proceeds as follows:

“We are great admirers of Mr. Tesla and his work. We give him credit for mighty good hurd sense. We do not think he is like the Frenchman who excused his bachelorhood on the ground that he was “one butterfly, zat fly from ze flower to ze flower and sip ze honey.”

We know, too, that Mr. Tesla’s nature is a very intense one, but we have just faith enough in women – especially American women – to make Mr. Tesla a straight-out offer to find a girl for him who will not only match his intensity in all respects, but who will tax his inventive genius to the utmost-and hence encourage it – trying to explain where he was at 2 A. M. some night when she had gone to his laboratory to bring him home and found it dark, although he had told her he was going to have tn “stay down town to work tonight,”.

Then again, if Mr. Tesla were to have ordinary Benedict luck and half a score of little Teslas, his inventive genius would he kept up to a white heat, hustling for the wherewithal to supply their wants.

Mr, Tesla knows that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Fie, Mr. Tesla, fie, we say. Get married. You’ll get strong, be happy, sleep o’nights; and if you leave an invention or two less to posterity, you will leave a more material and fully as necessary a legacy in another shape.

Besides, they try to steal inventions from a man; they don‘t steal his children, seldom his wife, and never the pleasures that a married man falls heir to.”

Reference: www.teslacollection.com