2.28.2008

Nikola Tesla was a numismatist

It is well known that many famous people - rulers, scientists, artists... had been interested in numismatics. Starting with Roman Emperors Augustus Octavian and Hadrian, up to Italian king Victor Emanuel III and Egyptian King Farouk and up to famous poets Petrarca and Goethe etc. Among them was also the famous scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, a Serb born in Smiljan, Lika, in 1855, died in New York in 1943.
Tesla lived and worked for a long time in Colorado Springs, now the seat of the headquarters of the American Numismatic Association. In 1900, when Tesla moved to Long Island due to the construction of the giant Power Plant for J.P. Morgan, he had officially became the member of the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society. Detailed articles about Nikola Tesla as numismatist have been published by Edward C. Rochette in his book The Other Side of the Coin,
and in the Numismatist Vol. 101, no. 1, under the title The Man Too Soon for His Time. Nothing is known however about Teslas numismatic collecting interests, nor about the destiny of his collection.