---
title: 'Nikola Tesla''s Weird Eating Habits'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=LpfV-0kT56o'
video_id: 'LpfV-0kT56o'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 1713
---

# Nikola Tesla's Weird Eating Habits

> Source: [Nikola Tesla's Weird Eating Habits](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LpfV-0kT56o)

## Summary

Nikola Tesla, known for inventing AC electricity and the Tesla coil, had increasingly eccentric eating habits throughout his life. This video explores his peculiar dietary practices, from his early days as a heavy meat eater to his later vegetarianism and germaphobic rituals, while also recreating his signature roast duck smothered in celery.

### Key Points

- **Tesla's Eccentric Genius** [00:00] — Tesla is known for inventing AC electricity, the Tesla coil, and a supposed death ray, but also for his bizarre eating habits.
- **Germaphobe Rituals** [00:29] — Tesla required two dozen napkins per meal to wipe each utensil, and would go to the kitchen to oversee food preparation.
- **Dining Alone** [02:01] — He always dined alone at reserved tables in upscale restaurants like Waldorf-Astoria, avoiding being on exhibition.
- **Heavy Meat Eater** [03:45] — In his youth, Tesla ate two to three steaks at a sitting, later preferring large portions of lamb like crown of lamb or saddle of lamb.
- **Roast Duck with Celery** [04:24] — Tesla often made roast duck smothered in celery stalks a central motif of dinners, eating only the breast meat.
- **Recipe: Duck Prep** [07:33] — Stuff duck with apples, truss, score skin, rub with butter, salt, pepper, and flour, then smother with celery and roast at 400°F for about 1 hour 15 minutes.
- **Celery Sauce** [10:01] — A sauce made from boiled chopped celery, chicken broth, butter, flour, nutmeg, and milk.
- **Early Gluttony** [13:03] — Tesla once ordered two large steaks in Paris after working non-stop for two days.
- **Quitting Coffee and Whiskey** [14:40] — Gave up whiskey during Prohibition and spent 11 years weaning off coffee, only smelling it afterward.
- **Later Vegetarianism** [17:31] — Transitioned to boiled fish and eventually a vegetarian diet with warm milk as a staple.
- **Two Meals a Day** [19:04] — Tesla advocated for two meals daily, avoiding lunch as it made him sluggish.
- **Dietary Philosophy** [20:03] — He believed in avoiding acid-producing foods, eating fresh vegetables, fish sparingly, and potatoes daily.
- **Sleep Habits** [21:35] — Tesla claimed to doze only an hour or so, with a long sleep of 5-7 hours about once a year.
- **Factor Actus Controversy** [22:14] — A quote about a health tonic called 'factor actus' is often misattributed to Tesla; its source remains unverified.
- **Tasting the Duck** [25:01] — The host finds the duck skin not crispy and the celery flavor subtle, but enjoys the celery sauce with nutmeg.

### Conclusion

Tesla's eating habits evolved from heavy meat consumption to a strict vegetarian diet, reflecting his controlling nature and obsession with longevity. While his early culinary choices were indulgent yet peculiar, his later years saw extreme austerity, making his roast duck with celery a fascinating middle ground.

## Transcript

He's probably best known for inventing things like the modern alternating current or AC electricity supply system,   the Tesla coil, and a supposed death ray in the  years before World War II.
Though he's also known as one of the most eccentric scientific geniuses in history, especially when it comes to his eating habits. Now later on in life, he'd really go off the deep end. But even when he was younger,   he would only eat at a handful of restaurants,  demanding that two dozen napkins be given to him  
so that he could wipe down each individual piece of silverware before going to the kitchen himself to oversee the preparation of dishes like this roast duck with celery served with a glass of wine and a pot of coffee, which he wouldn't drink, but merely smell.
So thank you to Wildgrain for sponsoring this video as we endeavor to eat like Nikola Tesla, this time on Tasting History.
Nikola Tesla was a rather tragic figure, often  being taken advantage of by less brilliant but more business savvy men throughout his lifetime  and even after it. But before he became the milk drinking vegetarian who slept for only two hours a night that newspapers of the 1930s and 40s loved to write about,
he was actually a wildly successful inventor and the toast of New York city. Now much of what we know about his early life, these kind of better years comes from his good friend John O'Neill who wrote a book about him called 'Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla'.  
And in it he talks about not only his career but also his personality and some of his more quirkier habits. And he says that in the 1890s and early 1900s Tesla was known for being an impeccably dressed man
walking around New York City often wearing tails. And he was so fascinating   that everyone wanted to invite him to be their dinner guest. And he would also often throw dinners and have you know the elite come to eat with him.
"Tesla always dined alone, and never under any circumstances would he dine with a woman at a twosome dinner... At the Waldorf-Astria and at Delmonico's, he had particular tables which were always reserved for him.
They occupied secluded positions in the dining rooms because when he entered either room he was the cynosure of all eyes and did not enjoy being on exhibition." At these solo dinners at two of New York's swankiest restaurants, he had a peculiar manner of his dinner setup.
And I guess he had always been a germaphobe, but it got really bad when he peered into a microscope to see all of the microbes that were living in the water that he drank.
And this was right when germ theory was really gaining acceptance, so it's understandable. When it came to his tie and gloves, he would get a brand new pair every week. And when it came to his collars on his shirts,  
So it's no wonder that that kind of behavior extended to the dinner table.   "A fresh tablecloth was required for every meal. He also require that a stack of two dozen napkins be placed on the left side of the table.
As each item of silverware and each dish was brought to him - and he required that they be sterilized by heat before leaving the kitchen - he would pick each one up, interposing a napkin between his hand and the utensil, and user another napkin to clean it.
He could then drop both napkins on the floor. Even for a simple meal, he usually ran through the full stock of napkins. Flies were his pet abomination. A fly alighting on his table was adequate cause
for removing everything from the table and making an entirely new start with the meal." I'm going to guess Tesla never attended a barbecue, but he was a big meat eater in his youth. He preferred to have steak, filet minion,
and he would very often have two or three at one sitting. And then he moved on to preferring lamb. And he would often order what was known as a crown of lamb or an entire roast saddle of lamb.
Both of these being portions enough to serve 8 to 10 people, but he would get it just for himself. Except that like when it came to the saddle of lamb, he would only eat the very center portion
"...Roast duck. He required that it be roasted under  a smothering of celery stalks. He very often made it the central motif around which a dinner was designed when entertaining friends,
and on such occasions he would go to the kitchen to superintend its preparation. Of the duck he only ate the meat on either side of the breast bone."
So I figured I would make this roast duck smothered in celery stalks. I'm not entirely sure how you smother something in celery stocks, but I'm going to give it a go. Now since it was a dish of his own devising, we are unlikely to find an actual recipe but
since he spent a lot of time at the Waldorf Astoria, I figured I would make a recipe from 'The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf', which came out in 1896 when Tesla would have actually been eating there. The hotel was then owned by his friend and investor John Jacob Astor, 
and Tesla loved it so much that eventually he  moved there, living at the hotel for 20 years. Now again, we don't have Tesla's exact preparation of  the dish, but the cookbook has a good place for us to start with a recipe for roast ducks.
"Truss the birds... tub a little butter over them and dredge with flour, salt, and pepper, and roast in a hot oven for twenty or thirty minutes. If preferred stuffed,   peel, core, and quarter some apples and fill the body with them,
removing them when the bird is done as they are not fit to eat, the flavor being too strong..." Now, it was said that Tesla himself would superintend the preparation of this dish, but he wasn't actually doing the cooking
because the guy was very busy. He didn't have time to do all of that. And I totally get it because sometimes I get too busy and I don't have time to do all the cooking and baking that I want to do which is why I really love today's sponsor Wildgrain
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or scan this QR code and use my code TASTINGHISTORY, and you will get $30 off of your first box, plus And now let's get to our duck, for which you will need one duck.
Then 2 apples, 2 tablespoons or 28 grams of butter, 1 tablespoon of salt,   1 teaspoon of pepper, 1/2 cup or 60 grams of flour, and a lot of celery. So start by making sure that your duck is nice and cleaned out.
They often put like the neck and giblets and other things inside. So, make sure to get all that stuff out. And then we will stuff it with the apples. Now, these  should be peeled, corded, and cut into little pieces. And then you want to get as many into the duck as you can. Then take some kitchen string  
and tie it around the legs of the bird, trussing it to  keep all the stuffing in. Then take your knife and make several slices into the skin of the breast. You want to do like a cross-hatch pattern.   Make sure not to cut into the meat itself, just the skin and the fat.
This will let the bird baste in its own fat as it cooks. And you can also give the legs some slices as well. Once trussed and sliced, rub the duck with a liberal amount of butter. You may not need the full 2 tablespoons.
And then rub it down with the salt and the pepper. Then pour  the flour onto a plate and set the duck on it,   rolling it in the flour and sprinkling it with the flour on top, coating the duck entirely. Now I have never cooked a duck like this, and I'm pretty sure it's going to make it so it doesn't have a crispy skin,
I think that would be completely undone by the fact  that it is smothered with celery stalks. Again, whatever that exactly means. My version is this: I cut off the ends of the celery along with the leaves and make sure that the stalks are nicely cleaned.
And then set the duck in a roasting tray and build a little house of celery around it. The celery, I think, will drip its juices all over the bird as it cooks. And also, as it cooks, the celery should wilt and kind of fall all over the duck, thus smothering it. At least that's my hypothesis.
And we will learn if my hypothesis is correct after we place the duck in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, 205 Celsius, and roast until it is done. Now, the recipe says that it should be 20 to 30 minutes.
These must have been very, very small ducks, otherwise that meat's going to be raw. 30 minutes ain't going to do it. Now you don't want to overcook a duck, but especially  with a whole duck, you need to get the breast
to like 135°, maybe 140°. So that for me took  about an hour and 15 minutes. And as it roasted, the celery did in fact wilt over it. So my hope is that that celery imparts some celery flavor to the duck.
Now the original recipe says that it should actually be served with green peas and olive sauce, but Mr. Tesla seemed to prefer celery. So I'm going to make a celery sauce,   which there is a recipe in this same book  for that. And so for that, what you'll need is:
1 head of celery, 1 tablespoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of flour, 1/2 cup or 120 ml of chicken broth,   2 tablespoons or 28 grams of butter, 1/4 teaspoon of  nutmeg, and 1/2 cup or 120 ml of milk.
For this, you need to clean and trim the celery as before,  but then cut it into pieces so that it will fit in a pot. Add the salt and fill the pot with water. Then set it on the stove and let it come to a boil   And pour it into a colander and let it cool while you prepare the main part of the sauce.
This is just flour whisked into the chicken broth. Then add the butter and the nutmeg and the milk. Stir it all up, and set it over a medium heat and let it come to a gentle boil. And while it boils, take the celery and chop it into 1/2 inch pieces.
I don't know why the recipe doesn't have you do this at the start because it'd be easier to chop raw celery rather than boiled,   Once it's all chopped, you can add it to the boiling sauce and let it warm again and then it's ready to go.
Though if you want a thinner sauce, you just add some more milk or more chicken broth and it'll be a thinner sauce 'cus this is almost more like a stew that you kind of put over the bird, I guess. let's take a closer look at the odd eating habits of Mr. Tesla,
especially as he got later in life. So I want to start by thanking Daniel and Akiva  who are the hosts of the Biographers podcast.  
and they recently did a five-part deep dive into Nikola Tesla and that's kind of what their whole thing is. They do deep, deep dives into different people through history.
So definitely worth giving them a listen. And they of course will focus more on the non-food related history of Nikola Tesla. But for me, the Croatian born Nikola Tesla is a fascinating character and invented everything from the alternating current system to advances in radio technology,
early fluorescent lighting, and a supposed death beam capable of destroying anything within 200 miles. Supposedly, after his death, the FBI came in and took all of  his papers about the death beam and other things, 
and it has led to all these conspiracy theories  about a death ray being out there. Anyway, what concerns me is not his ingenious and interesting and rather varied inventions,
but rather his maybe ingenious and definitely interesting and rather varied opinions on food. And his dietary views have actually fascinated people since fairly early on in his career. In a newspaper article from 1900, it says,
"Sometimes the ability to meet a prolonged and highly productive mental strain   which is another way of saying that great thinkers are sometimes great eaters."
In his early days, Tesla's views on food were very different than they would one day become, but they were nonetheless noteworthy. Namely, about how much the man ate. He actually told a story about when he was very young in Paris, 
he worked for Thomas Edison in his laboratory  there. And he was so eager to please that he worked for the first two days non-stop. And within the first 2 weeks, he says that he had probably had less than 48 hours of sleep. So like 3 hours a night or so.
And so the foreman at the laboratory, a man named Mr. Fulton, said, hey Tesla, you're going to exhaust yourself so let me take you to a nice dinner. So, they go to  one of Paris's nicer restaurants and he says, order whatever you want.
And Tesla proceeds to order the largest cut of meat that they could give him along with several sides. And he said, it was a meal at least big enough for two people, but he ate it all by himself.
and I wish you would order anything you want.' Tesla looked around vaguely for a moment, as if making up his mind, and then said, 'Mr. Fulton, if you don't mind, I would like another steak.' "
Now, during these early years of eating a lot of meat and then later fowl and eventually fish, He really enjoyed drinking whiskey, sometimes wine, and a lot of coffee.
But he eventually gave up both the whiskey and the coffee. He gave up the whiskey when Prohibition set in and never seems to have taken it back up.   And the coffee, he decided that the caffeine  was actually not good for him. And so he
said no to coffee and tea and even cocoa, but he loved  coffee so much that it took him 11 years to wean himself off of it. And he later claimed that
For eleven years I had the finest coffee prepared for me at my table every day, and never touched a drop." He would simply smell the coffee and then eventually the  nuisance of having the coffee on the table just  
outweighed his desire to smell it and he stopped  having any coffee. So this of course was when he had lots of money that he could afford, you know, fresh pot of the best coffee just to smell it.
Those days when he was hobnobbing in New York and he was rather wasteful with money, like I said, always buying new collars every single day.  But he did one thing that I'm really jealous of.  
"He would visit a barbershop three times a week  and have the barber rub his scalp for half an hour. He was insistent upon the barber placing a clean towel on his chair, but strangely enough,   he did not object to the use of the common shaving  mug and brush."
That would be a great way to spend money. Now, the  reason that his friend was so surprised that   he was fine using the shaving brush and  mug that other people used was because again,  
total germaphobe was Tesla. He would often go  out of his way not to shake hands with people,   having his hands behind his back when he met  people. And if he did end up having to shake their hands, he would- or their hand, he would often get out of the situation that he was in  
long before any conversation was done. So he could go to the bathroom and wash his hands. He actually had a private washroom that only he could use in his offices. And he would wash his hands many times throughout the day. And every single time he needed a brand new towel to dry them with.  
Now I kind of get it because he had cholera when  he was young so it's only natural to have a bit of a germaphobia, but he also had a phobia that I don't quite understand.
For "If a woman guest at a dinner party to which he was invited wore pearls ,he was unable to eat.   Smooth round surfaces, in general were an abomination to him; it had even taken him a long time to learn to tolerate billiard balls."
So if you get invited to one of Tesla's fancy dinners, wear your emeralds and leave your pearls at home. Now, as time went on, Tesla began to eat less and less meat, and less and less fowl
and instead turned to boiled fish and eventually "He later almost entirely eliminated the fish and lived on a vegetarian diet. Milk was his main standby, and toward the end of his life it was the principal item of diet served warm."
And that is the point in his life when newspapers and magazines really got interested in learning more about Tesla's eating habits. And he was more than willing to tell them all about his eating habits. And this was like in the 1920s and 30s and even  early 40s. And so he was in his 60s and 70s.  
And he had seen most of his work go to the benefit of other people. And so his peculiar and rather rigid diet kind of puts me in mind of a quote  
that the great Olaf from Frozen 2 once said "We're calling this controlling what you can when things feel out of control." He became more and more controlling about everything in his life, but especially about his food.
He said that people in his family lived very very long, some up to 140 years old. And he was determined to live to be older than 140.
And one of the first things that he did to achieve this kind of longevity was to   fine-tune the timing of when he ate.  "I have tried everything - six meals a day, like most Europeans;
three a day, one a day; I have tried continuous  feeding. Finally I decided that two meals are most beneficial. Lunch is a superfluous meal... Lunch loads the stomach with food which it cannot transform quickly into energy for work..." 
And I actually get that because very often after a big lunch, I just want to kind of take a nap. What else he said kind of in contrast with his three steaks a day or three steaks a meal eating process when he was young was
that "... we eat too much... and we eat the wrong kinds of foods and drink the wrong kinds of liquids." Most of the harm is done by overeating and under exercising, which bring about toxic conditions in the body and make it impossible to throw off the accumulated poisons.
My regime for the good life in my diet? Well, for one thing, I drink plenty of milk and water... I eat but two meals a day, and I avoid all acid-producing foods. Almost everyone eats too many peas and beans and other foods containing uric acid and other poisons.
I partake liberally of fresh vegetables, fish and meat sparingly, and rarely. Fish is reputed as fine brain food, but has a very strong acid reaction, as it contains a great deal of phosphorus.
Acidity is by far the worst enemy to fight off in old age.   Potatoes are splendid, and should be eaten at least once a day. They contain valuable mineral salts and are neutralizing."
In most of his interviews about food during this period, it's all about keeping uric acid levels low,   except that his idea of what foods caused uric acid levels to be high was not always correct,
like no rice, no legumes, nothing like that, but lots of butter,   completely fine. He actually was really into  butter, and cheese and vegetables.
"Cheese is the most nourishing of all foods, containing one hundred and forty grains of protein per ounce... I am fond of a fine cooked mixture of onions and chopped celery prepared with a great deal of butter..."
He also claimed that while he no longer drank alcohol, he did think of it in moderation as an elixir of life, and suggested other people should drink alcohol, that and get plenty of exercise.
Even when he was old, he would walk 7 to 10 miles every single day rather than taking cabs if he could possibly avoid it. That and he attributed his health to hot baths followed by very long cold showers.
And then he also found it rather important to share details about his sleep habits. In 1933 when he was 77, the New York Times interviewed him and they  asked him how many hours of sleep he got.  
Sleep, he implied, is a racial habit growing out of the fact that we spend half our life in darkness because of the rotation of the earth. With a diet from which poisonous substances are excluded, he thinks,
one might live virtually without sleep and attain very great age.   'Sometimes I doze for an hour or so', he said,  'and once in a long time - perhaps once in a year -   I have a long sleep of five, six or seven hours.
When I awake from that, I am so full of energy that I have to work it off." What's interesting is that that article is often cited as the source of a story about factor actus. All over the internet today, you'll hear about factor actus and there is a quote about this
health giving tonic that Tesla supposedly created for himself. And the thing is   the New York Times has an archive and you can go read this article for yourself and ain't nothing in there about factor actus.
So where does this quote come from? Well, I'm going to share the quote with you, but instead of my reading it, I'm going to have Akiva from The Biographers's podcast read it. "I walk ten miles a day, pure thoughts, abstinence, hard work, an occasional glass of wine,
and a strict diet of a product I call factor actus... It's a simple health potion equivalent to the protein value of a dozen eggs made from twelve vegetables, including white leeks, cabbage hearts, flour of cauliflower, white turnips, and lettuce hearts.
The product can be eaten warm in a soup or as a powdered substance added to purified water. I also recommend fish, stewed prunes, marinated in honey and fresh oranges." So, the reason I had Akiva read that quote is because he, Daniel, who's the other host of the podcast,
and I recently recorded a podcast, and it is up, and I'll put a link in the description to where you can hear it, all about the difficulty of research today, and especially using the internet
and other books and and things online to find things because   there's so much fake information out there, not  just about Tesla, but about a lot of things. I did a whole episode about all of the fake food  information about Da Vinci a couple years back.  
So we talk all about how difficult it is sometimes to track down the real source of some of these claims and very often they're just made up. And we aren't sure if this is made up or not.  
This Tesla quote, Akiva thinks he might have  tracked it down to some place at the Smithsonian,   but it's not digitized. So, one of us will  actually have to go there to see if we can find it. I don't know if that's going to happen, but it's just an interesting talk that we had.
So I'll put a link to that in the description. Now,  the thing about that quote is whether it's real or not is not clear because it could be. It does sound like something that Tesla would have said
and that he might have done because he did have some very interesting views on food, things like ordering an entire pot of coffee just  to smell it and to make a roast duck by smothering it in celery,
which is something that I'm about to try right now. So once the duck is cooked remove it from the oven and let it rest for 10 minutes before serving it with the celery sauce.  And here we are, Nikola Tesla's roast duck with celery along with a glass of wine,  
I don't know how he needed two dozen napkins. I guess they used a lot more silverware back then, but here we go. Also, I don't have a kitchen staff to sterilize these for me before bringing them out, but so be it.
[chomp] Nothing spectacular. I don't know that celery really... You know, it's not a very strong flavor. The  problem is that the skin is not only not crispy,  
it's like super soft and and so I kind of  want to try it without the skin. And then I'll also add a little bit of this  celery sauce. And again, by sauce it's not really a sauce. It's more of like a  a soup
that you would put on it. But that is a lot of older sauces were like that. It's kind of like- they would pour it all over and smother it. There's smothering- in the celery sauce.
Hmm. Now that is interesting.
Interesting compliment between the celery and the nutmeg. It's not super strong, but it's definitely there. And it's a flavor  you don't often get in things like this.
Yeah, I actually like that- the sauce. I mean, I love duck, but very often it's for me duck is kind of about the sauce. I like sweeter sauces with it.
I guess it's fine with this sauce. What I don't get  is the need to smother it in the celery stalks.   And the recipe does say, the description does  say it was roasted, smothered in celery stalks.  
It's not that the celery is after. It is cooked with it. It just doesn't really add much flavor. I wouldn't do it again. That said, I will take some duck smothered in celery over
some of his later- you know, ideas. just a warm glass of milk and kind of a puree of celery or boiled celery.  You know, he kind of went downhill in the deliciousness department, I feel like. So I prefer the young Tesla's eating habits,  
even if they were a little strange, to the older  Tesla's eating habits, which were definitely very strange but what a fascinating character he was, and definitely learn more about him.
Again, I'll put a link to The Biographers's podcast so you can listen to me on there   talking about some of the difficulties of researching online as well as you can listen to
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.