Mr Tesla’s Great loss
On 14th March 1885 there was a fire in the basement of the building where Nikola Tesla had his laboratory.
Tesla’s employees were totally dismayed when they turned up for work in the morning and found that their occupation had gone. As was usual they turned up to work early and they just did not have the courage to go and find Their employer what had happened. They new that it would be a terrible blow for Tesla.
Nikola Tesla turned up to work at his usual hour of ten o’clock and absolutely stunned. He paced back and forth on the street in front of the building in hopeless despair because he had not taken out any insurance at all.
Apparently the fire had started on the ground floor and to this day no one knows quiet how it was started. It was discovered at about three o’clock in the morning by the night watchman Mr Mahoney as he was doing his usual round. He had tried to put it out with pail of water but it was in vain as the building burned “like a tinderbox”
The fire chief Mr Bonner and his crew arrived to hook up their fire hose but they could do very little to stop the fire. A lot of the buildings were ramshackle and the buildings adjacent were only saved by the hard work of the fire crew.
Tesla said “I am in too much grief to talk, what can I say? The work of half my lifetime, very nearly; all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus, that it has taken years to perfect, swept away in a fire that lasted only an hour or two. How can I estimate the loss in mere dollars and cents? Everything is gone. I must begin over again”
And he did…
Tesla began again in Thomas Edison’s workshop at Llewellyn Park, New Jersey. Barely a few weeks later and Tesla had rented a laboratory below Greenwich Village, near Chinatown, at 46 and 48 Houston St.
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