Nikola Tesla’s Weird Obsession with Pigeons

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American engineer and physicist known for his groundbreaking work in electric power. He is considered a genius, with numerous patents to his name, but he had an eccentric side that many people found difficult.

Among Tesla’s quirks was his fondness for pigeons. When living in New York, he spent hours each week feeding pigeons in the park and routinely took home any that were injured so he could nurse them back to health. He often kept the windows open in the hotel suite in which he lived so pigeons could visit when they wished, resulting in a horrible mess. He once even asked a hotel chef to prepare a special mix of seeds for his feathered friends. Tesla’s acquaintances found his passion for pigeons puzzling because the inventor was a well-known germophobe.

Tesla never married, but he admitted to falling in love with a very special white pigeon that visited him regularly. He reportedly said, “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.” Tesla’s bachelor lifestyle likely stemmed from his belief that intimacy would interfere with his scientific research. “I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men,” he once observed.

In 1922 Tesla reported that the white pigeon had flown into his room to tell him that she was dying. Before the bird passed, he said, a white light shone from her eyes, brighter than anything he had ever generated with his electrical machinery. Tesla was heartbroken at her death and told friends that at that moment, he felt his life’s work was finished.

Pigeons were just one of Tesla’s many idiosyncrasies. He was obsessed with the number 3 and engaged in a number of compulsive behaviors around it. For example, he commonly washed his hands three times in a row and would walk around a building three times before entering. Tesla also hated pearls and refused to talk to women who wore them. The reasoning behind these behaviors remains a mystery, though some believe they are signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder.