Chapter 15 – The Final Days

 

What has the future in store for this strange being, born of a breath, of perishable tissue, yet Immortal, with his powers fearful and Divine? What magic will be wrought by him in the end? What is to be his greatest deed, his crowning achievement?

Nikola Tesla

 

At 81, Tesla was honoured by both the Yugoslav and Czechoslovakian governments. He was awarded the Grand Cordon of the White Eagle, Yugoslavia’s highest honour bestowed by King Peter through his regent Prince Paul, and Czechoslovakia’s Order of the White Lion. These were presented at his birthday luncheon at the Hotel New Yorker. Meanwhile he was still making his birthday announcements of new discoveries to newspapermen.

In 1937, he told them that he had perfected the principle of a new tube that would make it possible to smash atoms and produce cheap radium. He would give a demonstration of it in ‘only a little time’. He was expecting to put his discovery forward for France’s Pierre Guzman Prize of 100,000 francs (around €50,000). It was awarded by the Académie des Sciences to ‘the person of whatever nation who will find the means … of communicating with a star and of receiving a response’.

The money, of course, is a trifling consideration, but for the great historical honour of being the first to achieve this miracle I would be almost willing to give my life. I am just as sure that prize will be awarded to me as if I already had it in my pocket. They have got to do it. It means it will be possible to convey several thousand units of horsepower to other planets, regardless of distance. This discovery of mine will be remembered when everything else I have done is covered in dust.

[The Guzman Prize was finally awarded to the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969 after the first Moon landing.]

His apparatus, Tesla said, employed more than three dozen of his own inventions. ‘It is absolutely developed,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be surer that I can transmit energy a hundred miles than I am of the fact that I can transmit energy a million miles up.’

It used a different kind of energy than was commonly employed which travels through a channel of ‘less than one-half of one-millionth of a centimetre’. ‘I could undertake a contract to manufacture the apparatus,’ he said.

While he was certain that there was life on other planets, the problem with his equipment, he said, was hitting other moving planets with a needle-point of tremendous energy. But he thought that astronomers could help solve this problem. First they should aim this Tesla Ray at the Moon where they could easily see its effects – ‘the splash and the volatilization of matter’. He also imagined advanced thinkers living on other planets were experimenting in this field, mistaking Tesla energy rays for cosmic rays.

On the practical front, he announced a new type of tube. His experiments had been rewarded with ‘complete success’ and he had ‘produced a tube which it will be hard to improve further’.

It is of ideal simplicity, not subject to wear and can be operated at any potential, however high – even 100 million volts – that can be produced. It will carry heavy currents, transform any amount of energy within practical limits and it permits easy control and regulation of the same. I expect that this invention, when it becomes known, will be universally adopted in preference to other forms of tubes and that it will be the means of obtaining results undreamed of before. Among others, it will enable the production of cheap radium substitutes in any desired quantity and will be, in general, immediately more effective in the smashing of atoms and the transmutation of matter. However, this tube will not open up a way to utilize atomic or subatomic energy for power purposes. It will cheapen radium so that it will be just as cheap – well, it will get down to $1 a pound – in any quantity.

Tesla was annoyed that some newspapers said he would be giving a full description of his invention at his birthday lunch. He could not release the information, he said, because he was bound by financial obligations involving ‘vast sums of money’. And this was not an idle boast, he insisted: ‘It is not an experiment. I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.’

The New York Times, perhaps with tongue in cheek, went on to report that Dr Tesla entertained his guests with colourful personal reminiscences and observations including his opinions on dieting and immortality.

 

More Money Worries

Although Tesla’s mind was as fertile as ever, his financial situation continued to decline. When Hugo Gernsback showed him Westinghouse’s latest radio set, Tesla saw immediately that they were flagrantly infringing his wireless patents. He protested, but was in no position to fight a large corporation.

Unable to pay his hotel bill, again, Tesla handed over the ‘working model’ of his death beam as collateral. It was worth, he said, $10,000. He also told Jack Morgan that the Russians were keen to buy his death beam to defend themselves against the Japanese. However, he already owed Morgan a great deal of money over his bladeless turbines and, despite filling his letters with attacks on Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ with Astor who Morgan hated, no money was forthcoming.

Eventually, Westinghouse acknowledged Tesla’s contribution to the company and paid him $125 a month as a consulting engineer. They also came to an agreement with the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lived rent free for the rest of his life. In his last years, the Yugoslav government also gave him an honorarium of $7,200 a year. This allowed him to give generous tips to those who had rendered him the slightest assistance and hand-outs, that he could ill-afford, to anyone he thought was in need.

 

Tesla’s Last Interviews

Tesla gave some of his last interviews to Nazi apologist George S. Viereck. Again he explained that he was not a believer in God in the conventional sense. Perhaps under Viereck’s influence, Tesla espoused eugenics – the forced sterilization of those thought to be mentally unfit – which were then being practised in the US as well as Nazi Germany.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Although at the time, the environment was hardly on the agenda, Tesla told Viereck:

Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War. The pollution of our beaches such as exists today around New York City will seem as unthinkable to our children and grandchildren as life without plumbing seems to us. Our water supply will be far more carefully supervised, and only a lunatic will drink unsterilized water.

He looked forward to a time where science and education would be more important than war:

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The 21st century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the 21st century will give a mere ‘stick’ in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

Now gaunt from his meagre diet, he had clear views on the future of food:

More people die or grow sick from polluted water than from coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants. I myself eschew all stimulants. I also practically abstain from meat. I am convinced that within a century, coffee, tea, and tobacco will no longer be in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life. The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly. It will simply be no longer fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients. [Bodybuilder] Bernarr Macfadden has shown how it is possible to provide palatable food based upon natural products such as milk, honey, and wheat. I believe that the food which is served today in his penny restaurants will be the basis of epicurean meals in the smartest banquet halls of the 21st century.

There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India, now chronically on the verge of starvation. The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected 14 years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

After subsisting on a diet of bread, warm milk and what he called ‘Factor Actus’, Tesla gave up solid food altogether, living on thin gruel of cauliflower, leeks, cabbage, turnips and lettuce. But he was still strong enough to make predictions. Then, in his last days, he lived on milk and honey, believing them to be the purest foods. Nevertheless, the future looked bright:

Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.

What’s more, the work would be done by robots, something Tesla had been working on for nearly 40 years.

At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.

Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a ‘thinking machine’. I anticipated this development.

I actually constructed ‘robots’. Today the robot is an accepted fact, but the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the 21st century the robot will take the place which slave labour occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations.

 

Fragments of Olympian Gossip

Under the influence of Viereck, Tesla, who was always competitive, wrote a poem call Fragments of Olympian Gossip, poking fun at the scientific establishment:

While listening on my cosmic phone

I caught words from the Olympus blown.

A newcomer was shown around;

That much I could guess, aided by sound.

There’s Archimedes with his lever

Still busy on problems as ever.

Says: matter and force are transmutable

And wrong the laws you thought immutable.

Below, on Earth, they work at full blast

And news are coming in thick and fast.

The latest tells of a cosmic gun.

To be pelted is very poor fun.

We are wary with so much at stake,

Those beggars are a pest – no mistake.

Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown

And turned your great science upside down.

Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,

Puts on your high teaching all the blame.

Says: matter and force are transmutable

And wrong the laws you thought immutable.

I am much too ignorant, my son,

For grasping schemes so finely spun.

My followers are of stronger mind

And I am content to stay behind,

Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,

These masters of mine may do the rest.

Come, Kelvin, I have finished my cup.

When is your friend Tesla coming up.

Oh, quoth Kelvin, he is always late,

It would be useless to remonstrate.

Then silence – shuffle of soft slippered feet –

I knock and – the bedlam of the street.

 

World War II

Tesla was growing feeble, but with the help of his nephew Sava Kosanovic he wrote a foreword to a Serbo-Croat edition of The Future of the Common Man by the then Vice-President Henry Wallace (1888 – 1965). In it, he said: ‘Out of this war, the greatest since the beginning of history, a new world must be born that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity, where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall be a world of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect.’

While the regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul (1893 – 1976), sought to make a treaty with the Nazis, King Peter (1923 – 70) opposed it. When he came of age at 17, Germany invaded and the king went into exile. Sava Kosanovic went with him. However, he began to favour the Communist guerrilla leader Josip Broz Tito (1892 – 1980), who the British and Americans were also reluctantly backing. However, in the US, Kosanovic brought King Peter to Tesla’s hotel. In his diary King Peter wrote:

I visited Dr Nikola Tesla, the world-famous Yugoslav-American scientist, in his apartment in the Hotel New Yorker. After I had greeted him the aged scientist said: ‘It is my greatest honour. I am glad you are in your youth, and I am content that you will be a great ruler. I believe I will live until you come back to a free Yugoslavia. From your father you have received his last words: “Guard Yugoslavia.” I am proud to be a Serbian and a Yugoslav. Our people cannot perish. Preserve the unity of all Yugoslavs – the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes.’

The two of them wept over the fate of their homeland.

 

Generous to the End

Although Tesla was dogged by his own financial problems, he was generous to the end. A few days before he died, he called one of his favourite messenger boys, a lad named Kerrigan, and gave him an envelope, addressed to: Mr Samuel Clemens, 35 South Fifth Avenue, New York City. He told him it was to be delivered as quickly as possible. After a while the boy returned, saying that there was no such street as South Fifth Avenue. Tesla was furious. Mr Clemens was a very famous author who wrote under the name of Mark Twain, he told Kerrigan, and the address he had given was correct.

Kerrigan tried again. And when he had no luck he reported to his office manager, who quickly spotted the boy’s difficulty. South Fifth Avenue had changed its name to West Broadway years before and Mark Twain had been dead over 30 years. The address Tesla had given him was that of his laboratory that had burnt down. Kerrigan returned to Tesla to explain his difficulties. Tesla was outraged when the boy told him that Mark Twain was dead. ‘He was in my room here last night,’ Tesla insisted. ‘He is having financial difficulties and needs my help.’ And he sent the boy to deliver the envelope again. Confused Kerrigan returned to his manager who opened the envelope to see whether it contained any clue to where it should be delivered. All that was inside was a blank piece of paper and $100 in $5 bills. When Kerrigan returned the envelope to Tesla yet again, the inventor told him that, if he could not deliver the money, he should keep it.

At the same time, while Tesla could not pay the $297 for his possessions that were being kept in storage, he sent a cheque for $500 to a Serbian Church in Gary, Indiana. Tesla’s biographer John J. O’Neill saw an advertisement for Tesla’s possessions that were being sold off by the storage company to cover the bill and contacted the inventor’s nephew Sava Kosanovic who paid the bill, preventing the loss of Tesla’s priceless papers.

 

The Slight Hint of a Smile

During the latter part of 1942, Tesla became practically a recluse. Physically weak, he retired to bed and permitted no visitors. Hotel staff were not to visit his room unless he summoned them and he refused to listen to any suggestion that they call a doctor. On 5 January 1943, he called a maid to his room and issued orders that he was not to be disturbed. Nothing was heard from him for three days. Finally the maid decided to risk his wrath and check up on him. She entered the room in trepidation and found him dead, with the slight hint of a smile on his gaunt face.

As he had died alone without medical attention, the police were called. The Medical Examiner put the time of death as 10.30 pm on Thursday 7 January, just a few hours before the maid’s early morning visit. Tesla had died in his sleep. The cause of death was given as coronary thrombosis and the Medical Examiner noted that there were ‘No suspicious circumstances.’

Agents from the FBI came to open the safe in Tesla’s room and read his papers in case there was anything in them that might aid the war effort. However, Hugo Gernsback, Kenneth Swezey, Sava Kosanovic and George Clark of RCA had already entered the apartment. While Gernsback went to organize a death mask, the other three had the safe opened by a locksmith with representatives of the hotel management present. The FBI said that valuable papers were taken. However, the hotel management said that Kosanovic only took three pictures and Swezey took the testimonial book created for Tesla’s 75th birthday. However, Kosanovic was sure that someone had already gone through his uncle’s effects. Technical papers were missing, along with a black notebook he knew that Tesla kept. It contained several hundred pages of notes, some of which were marked ‘government’.

 

State Funeral

The Yugoslav ambassador Dr Constantin Fotitch laid on a state funeral for Tesla at the Cathedral of St John the Divine. Over 2,000 mourners were present, including other inventors. While the church was Episcopalian, the service was Orthodox and conducted in Serbian. The honorary pallbearers included Dr Ernst Alexanderson of General Electric who patented a high-frequency transmitter, Edwin Armstrong, father of FM radio, Gano Dunn, president of J.G. White Engineering who had been Tesla’s assistant at his ground-breaking lecture at Columbia, and representatives from Westinghouse, Columbia University and the Hayden Planetarium where Tesla would often go to meditate. A number of Yugoslav ministers were there. King Peter II of Yugoslavia sent a wreath and the chief mourner was Tesla’s nephew Sava Kosanovic, who was by then president of the Eastern and Central European Planning Board, representing Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Greece. Later he became Yugoslav ambassador to the US.

Scientists paid tribute to his intellect and technological achievements, and telegrams of condolence came from Nobel Prize winners, prominent scientists, literary figures and US officials. A message from Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt read: ‘The President and I are deeply sorry to hear of the death of Mr Nikola Tesla. We are grateful for his contribution to science and industry and to this country.’

Vice-President Henry Wallace paid a more personal tribute: ‘Nikola Tesla, Yugoslav born, so lived his life as to make it an outstanding example of that power that makes the United States not merely an English-speaking nation but a nation with universal appeal. In Nikola Tesla’s death the common man loses one of his best friends.’

Over the radio New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (1882 – 1947) read a eulogy written by Slovene author Louis Adamic. After the service, Tesla’s body was taken to Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, New York, and was later cremated.

 

Tributes to Tesla

Tesla had always been loved by the popular press for his shocking experiments and outrageous pronouncements. On his death, the New York Sun wrote:

Mr Tesla was 86 years old when he died. He died alone. He was an eccentric, whatever that means. A non-conformist, possibly. At any rate, he would leave his experiments and go for a time to feed the silly and inconsequential pigeons in Herald Square. He delighted in talking nonsense; or was it? Granting that he was a difficult man to deal with, and that sometimes his predictions would affront the ordinary human’s intelligence, here, still, was an extraordinary man of genius. He must have been. He was seeing a glimpse into that confused and mysterious frontier which divides the known and the unknown ... But today we do know that Tesla, the ostensibly foolish old gentleman at times was trying with superb intelligence to find the answers. Probably we shall appreciate him better a few million years from now.

More tributes came rolling in. Hugo Gernsback wrote: ‘We cannot know, but it may be that a long time from now, when patterns have changed, the critics will take a view of history. They will bracket Tesla with Da Vinci, or with our own Mr Franklin … One thing is sure. The world, as we run it today, did not appreciate his peculiar greatness.’

The President of RCA David Sarnoff said: ‘Nikola Tesla’s achievements in electrical science are monuments that symbolize America as a land of freedom and opportunity … His novel ideas of getting the ether in vibration put him on the frontier of wireless. Tesla’s mind was a human dynamo that whirled to benefit mankind.’

Edwin Armstrong, who went on to sue RCA for infringing his patents, said:

Who today can read a copy of The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, published before the turn-of-the-century, without being fascinated by the beauty of the experiments described and struck with admiration for Tesla’s extraordinary insight into the nature of the phenomena with which he was dealing? Who now can realize the difficulties he must have had to overcome in those early days? But one can imagine the inspirational effect of the book 40 years ago on a boy about to decide to study the electrical art. Its effect was both profound and decisive.

Nine months after Tesla’s death the USS Nikola Tesla – a Liberty ship, vital to the Allied war effort – was launched in Baltimore.

 

The Missing Papers

The papers from the safe in Tesla’s room were lodged with the Office of Alien Property. This was unusual as Tesla was a US citizen. The day after Tesla died Abraham N. Spanel, the designer of floating pontoon stretchers, got in touch with FBI agent Fredrich Cornels about the Tesla papers, fearing that, via Kosanovic, they might fall into Communist hands. Before he had started the International Latex Company of Dover, Delaware (who later made space suits), Spanel had worked as an electrical engineer and considered that some of Tesla’s unmade inventions might play a vital role in the war. He made waves in high places, contacting others in the White House and the FBI.

Spanel also got in touch with the young electrical engineer Bloyce Fitzgerald who had also contacted Cornels. Fitzgerald had been writing to Tesla for some time. Finally he got to meet Tesla just a few weeks before his death. At the time, Fitzgerald was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on the ‘dissipation of energy from rapid-fire weapons’. Around the same time Tesla had complained that someone had been trying to steal his invention. His room had been entered and his papers examined, but ‘the spies had left empty handed,’ he said.

Fitzgerald told Cornels that, among Tesla’s papers, were complete plans for his death beam, along with specifications and explanations of how the thing worked. There was also ‘a working model … which cost more than $10,000 to build in a safety deposit box of Tesla’s at the Governor Clinton Hotel’.

Charles Hausler, one of Tesla’s pigeon handlers, also said that Tesla kept a large box in his room near his pigeon cages. ‘He told me to be very careful not to disturb the box as it contained something that could destroy an airplane in the sky and he had hopes of presenting it to the world,’ Hausler said.

 

Trunks Full of Alien Property

According to Fitzgerald, Tesla had claimed that he had some 80 trunks in various places around the city. It was vital for the war effort that the government get their hands on the Tesla papers. He also expressed doubts about the loyalty of nephews Sava Kosanovic and Nicholas Trbojevich. There was even talk of having Kosanovic and Swezey arrested for theft, but as the papers were now with the Office of Alien Property, this seemed unnecessary.

Cornels’ boss P.E. Foxworth, assistant director of the New York FBI office, was called in to investigate. The government, he said, was ‘vitally interested’ in preserving Tesla’s papers.

The legality of the OAP holding onto Tesla’s papers was questionable. Although legal title had fallen to Kosanovic, who was a foreigner, the government agency was not permitted to seize ‘enemy assets’ without a court order. Nevertheless Alien Property custodian Irving Jurow got a call ordering him to impound all of Tesla’s belongings as he was reputed to have invented a death ray that disintegrated enemy planes in the sky and German agents were after it. Along with agents from Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence and the FBI, Jurow visited the Hotel New Yorker, the Governor Clinton, the St Regis, the Waldorf-Astoria and the storage facility where Tesla had kept the rest of his things. Papers in possession of John J. O’Neill, who was preparing a biography of Tesla, were also confiscated. These were perused by various branches of the military.

Dr John G. Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was also called to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody. Following a three-day investigation, Dr Trump concluded that Tesla’s ‘thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results’. However, in his report, he admits that he had not bothered to open many of the trunks, so confident was he that nothing of value would be found.

 

The Particle Beam

However, among the papers was the still unpublished ‘The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media’. This was classified top secret and distributed to Naval Intelligence, the National Defense Research Council, the FBI, MIT, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base – where the V1 flying bomb was reverse engineered – and, probably, the White House.

The paper described in detail the new features, including how to create a non-dispersive beam of particles:

I perfected means for increasing enormously the intensity of the effects, but was baffled in all my efforts to materially reduce dispersion and became fully convinced that this handicap could only be overcome by conveying the power through the medium of small particles projected, at prodigious velocity, from the transmitter. Electro-static repulsion was the only means to this end and apparatus of stupendous force would have to be developed, but granted that sufficient speed and energy could be realized with a single row of minute bodies then there would be no dispersion whatever even at great distance. Since the cross section of the carriers might be reduced to almost microscopic dimensions an immense concentration of energy, irrespective of distance, could be attained.

Then there was a diagram of the open-ended vacuum where, he said:

It will be observed that in this tube I do away with the solid wall or window indispensable in all types heretofore employed, producing the high vacuum required and preventing the inrush of the air by a gaseous jet of high velocity. Evidently, to secure this result, the dynamic pressure of the jet must be at least equal to the external static pressure.

The high-potential generator, creating a charge of up to 100 million volts, worked on the principle of a Van de Graaf generator – with the belt replaced by a high-speed stream of ionized air. The charges would be stored in specially shaped bulbs around the top of a 100 ft (30 m) tower. In the super-gun itself, tungsten wire would be fed into the high-vacuum firing chamber. Under the huge electrostatic forces generated, tiny droplets of metal would be sheared off and projected out of the chamber at over 400,000 feet per second (120 km per second).

John Trump also went to the Hotel Governor Clinton to examine the working model that Tesla had said he left there. Tesla had told the management that the box containing a secret weapon that was rigged to detonate if it was opened by an unauthorized person. Trump approached with trepidation. All he found inside was ‘a multi-decade resistance box of the type used for Wheatstone bridge resistance measurements – a common standard item to be found in every electrical laboratory before the turn of the century’. Trump took no further interest.

 

The Vanishing Death Ray

In 1937, Tesla had claimed that he had built his death beam, saying: ‘It is not an experiment. I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.’ At the time, he did have two secret labs where journalists were not allowed.

Mrs Czito, whose husband’s father and grandfather both worked for Tesla, said that her father-in-law said Tesla had a device that could bounce a beam off the Moon. There is also a story that the deBobula design was taken to Alcoa Aluminium who said they would furnish the material required once the capital had been raised.

There is, of course, a conspiracy theory to account for the missing model. When the safe in Tesla’s room was opened, the locksmith was asked to change the combination. Inside the safe, when it was locked again, was a set of keys and Tesla’s 1917 Edison Medal. The new combination was given to Kosanovic and no one else. When the safe was finally shipped to Belgrade and opened some 10 years later, the medal and the keys were missing. The medal has never been found, but the keys were found in one of the numerous cases of documents that accompanied the safe in the shipment.

According to the Office of Alien Property, the two representatives of the hotel management who were present were Mr L.O. Doty, credit manager, and Mr L.A. Fitzgerald, assistant credit manager. We have already met Bloyce Fitzgerald in connection with Tesla, but Tesla’s biographer Marc Seifer has also unearthed a letter from a Colonel Ralph E. Doty, chief of the Washington Branch of the Military Intelligence Service. Dated 22 January 1946, it is addressed to the Alien Property Custodian and reads:

Dear Sir: This office is in receipt of a communication from Headquarters, Air Technical Service Command, Wright Field, requesting that we ascertain the whereabouts of the files of the late scientist, Dr Nikola Tesla, which may contain data of great value to the above Headquarters. It has been indicated that your office might have these files in custody. If this is true, we would like to request your consent for a representative of the Air Technical Service Command to review them. In view of the extreme importance of these files to the above command, we would like to request that we be advised of any attempt by any other agency to obtain them. Because of the urgency of this matter, this communication will be delivered to you by a Liaison Officer of this office in the hope of expediting the solicited information.

If the Fitzgerald and Doty at the opening of the safe were government agents, they might easily have got hold of the combination and the keys. It seems that Spanel was already under surveillance by the FBI for his pro-Communist sympathies. In November 1942, he met Fitzgerald at an engineering meeting, shortly before Tesla’s death. At the time Fitzgerald was an army private at Wright Field. The FBI report later describes him as ‘a brilliant 20-year-old scientist who spent hours with Tesla before his death … Fitzgerald had developed some sort of anti-tank gun’. Spanel tried to form a partnership with Fitzgerald to sell the weapon to the Remington Arms Company, but the deal fell through when a more lucrative offer came from the Eiogens Ship Building Company.

Fitzgerald was fired by Eiogens in November 1943 and returned to Wright Field as a private. According to his FBI file, in 1945, he was ‘engaged in a highly secret experimental project at Wright Field … In spite of his rank as private, Fitzgerald is actually director of this research and is working with many top young scientists … on the perfection of Tesla’s ‘death ray’ which in Fitzgerald’s opinion is the only defence against the offensive use by another nation of the atomic bomb.’

The files that Colonel Doty requested did find their way to Wright Field because, on 24 October 1947, the Director of the Office of Alien Property wrote to the commanding officer of the Air Technical Service Command, asking for them back. The following month, a Colonel Duffy wrote back, saying: ‘These reports are now in the possession of the Electronic Subdivision and are being evaluated. This should be completed by January 1, 1948. At that time your office will be contacted with respect to final disposition of these papers.’

 

Belgrade Bound

In 1946, Sava Kosanovic had become Yugoslavian ambassador to the US after the US recognized Tito’s Communist government. But by 1950, he was still not allowed access to Tesla’s effects. He made official representations and in 1952, 80 trunks containing Tesla’s papers, equipment and other belongings were shipped to Belgrade. Five years later, Tesla’s ashes followed. In the Tesla Museum they were placed in a spherical urn as this was Tesla’s favourite shape.

This did not stop American Scientist being interested in Tesla’s papers. Regularly individuals contacted the FBI who were thought to have made microfilm copies of everything sent to Yugoslavia. In the 1970s, it was thought that Tesla’s fireballs might be a way of containing nuclear fusion. During the Cold War, both sides again investigated the possibility of making a particle beam to disable incoming nuclear missiles. Naturally Tesla’s work would have been a starting point.

In 1977, Aviation Week & Space Technology published an article called Soviets Push for Beam Weapon. In it, the retired head of Air Force Intelligence, General George J. Keegan said that the Soviet Union was attempting to develop a charge-particle beam at the test facility near the city of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. The editor of Aviation Week, Robert Holtz said:

The Soviet Union has achieved a technical breakthrough in high-energy physics applications that may soon provide it with a directed-energy beam weapon capable of neutralizing the entire United States ballistic missile force and checkmating this country’s strategic doctrine … The race to perfect directed-energy weapons is a reality. Despite initial skepticism, the US scientific community is now pressuring for accelerated efforts in this area.

The news got through to the White House, but President Jimmy Carter (1924 – ) said: ‘We do not see any likelihood at all, based on our constant monitoring of the Soviet Union, that they have any prospective breakthrough in a new weapons system that would endanger our country.’

Nevertheless, under the Carter administration, work began on a major space-based laser programme. Under the direction of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the ALPHA chemical laser project was begun in 1978. Contracts for the TALON GOLD targeting system were awarded in 1979, and the Large Optics Demonstration Experiment (LODE) started in 1980. These programmes formed the basis for the Strategic Defense Initiative – aka ‘Star Wars’ – announced by President Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004) in 1983. SDI added X-ray lasers and neutral particle beams, all of which were reminiscent of Tesla’s ‘Chinese wall’. While this work was going on, fresh applications were made to the FBI to release any copies of the Tesla files they had, if only to know what the Soviets may had learned about beam weapons in Belgrade.

However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union it was discovered that the test site outside Semipalatinsk was not working on a beam weapon at all, but rather on nuclear-powered rockets. John Pike, defence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said that the misidentification of the Semipalatinsk test site ‘must rank as one of the major intelligence failures of the Cold War’.