The history of technology is populated with a marvelous cast of characters. On the one hand you have the colourful, hard-working inventors like Thomas Edison who slaved away morning, noon and night to produce many of the wonders that we take for granted such as the incandescent light, the telephone, and the garlic peeler. On the other you have the moonbat crazies who show up at the patent office with a cardboard box stuffed with wires and a torch battery claiming that they’ve made contact with John Kerry’s charisma. And then there is that rarest of creatures: Nikola Tesla, a man who was both a certifiable genius and just plain certifiable.
Born in Smiljan, Croatia, Tesla was educated at Graz and Prague, worked for the Continental Edison Company in Paris, and emigrated to the United States in 1884. There he worked briefly for Thomas Edison until the poetic Tesla and the pragmatic Edison fell out. Tesla then went on to sell his patents for a series of alternating current devices to the Westinghouse Electric Company, making Tesla a relatively wealthy man able to set himself up in his own laboratory.
So far so good; sounds like the biography of many a successful Victorian electrical engineer. But Tesla was a different kettle of mackerels from your average solder jockey. He was a first-class ego case with aristocratic pretensions. He was a tremendous showman who excelled at giving spectacular demonstrations of what electricity could do. He was an intuitive genius who could visualise all sorts of revolutionary new devices even though he didn’t fully understand the principles behind them. He had a remarkable memory coupled with an intense dislike of writing things down, so that much of his work has come down to us as a mystery. He was a man with no money sense who was able to persuade many an investor into pouring money down many a rat hole. He was also a visionary who, as time went on and his professional fortunes ebbed, became prone to wilder and wilder assertions about what marvels he would perform and how he could single-handedly change the world or destroy it.
Tesla’s real achievements combined with his flamboyant dreams made him a regular source for reporters looking for sensational copy and a lightning rod for nutcases who were convinced that he was really an emissary from the planet Venus. Even today a quick Google of the Internet will return any number of sites dedicated to Tesla and more than a few of these are filled with claims that Tesla really had built death rays, power broadcasters, and weather control machines; contacted other planets; built electric space ships which he used to visit Mars; could project thoughts; and Lord knows what else. And why don’t we enjoy these Teslian marvels today? According to his modern disciples, Tesla’s inventions have either been lost to history, suppressed by the government or corporations, or are the product of an alien technology for which we are Not Yet Ready.
Pretty good for a man whose best friend was a pigeon and had a life-long horror of germs that would have done Howard Hughes proud.
The thing that makes Tesla such a compelling, yet sad case is that he was genuinely brilliant and had carved himself a real place in history with his accomplishments. His contributions to the field of electrical engineering are on a scale to rival that of Edison and Steinmetz and we enjoy the fruits of his labours every time we flick on a light switch. However, his lonely work habits, refusal to write things down, and flat-out eccentricities have made him one of those figures that historians cross the street to avoid.
Tesla’s first great invention was the AC induction motor. For those of you who weren’t paying attention in science class, an electric motor works by flipping the field of an electromagnet, causing the attraction/repulsion of the magnets to spin the armature around. The sort of small motors that you see in things like toy cars do this with metal brushes that touch two metal semi-circles. As the armature spins, the brushes touch one semi-circle, then the other, and each time the electrical current in the armature reverses and therefore its magnet poles do so as well, so the armature spins ‘round and ‘round like a puppy chasing its own tail.
Tesla was the first inventor to come up with a practical way of using AC power to achieve the same reversal of polarity; only this time it’s done with clever wiring. Unlike DC, where the electrical current always flows in one direction, AC current flows in both directions. By wiring some the magnetic sections of the motor one way and then their neighbour sections in reverse, the polarity would reverse automatically with the current.
Of course, the trick was how to supply current to the armature itself without burning out the contacts with the high voltages that AC power required. Tesla’s answer was to use induction. That is, whenever AC power reverses itself, it causes an electrical field to collapse and re-establish it. When this happens, power is transmitted. It’s what allows certain makes of cordless toothbrushes to recharge without being plugged into anything. You just stick them into a coil in a charger base and the induction field transmit the power to the brush’s battery. It’s also the reason why you don’t stand under an AC power line with a steel fishing rod unless you want a shocking surprise. Anyway, in Tesla’s motor, the induction field set up by the AC current feeds power to the armature without any direct wiring needed.
But the really neat thing about electrical motors is that if you get one working you also have a perfectly good electrical generator in one of technology’s rare twofers. An electric motor works by taking electricity in and turning it into motion. But if you take a motor and spin it, out comes electricity. All this means that when Tesla perfected his motor, he was well on his way toward building a new generation of AC dynamos that form the basis of our modern electrical grid. Up to that time, the main source of electricity was DC, which relied on low voltage and heavy amperage. In practical terms that meant it took a lot of oomph to push electricity through a wire and one could only transmit power about a mile from the generator. AC power, on the other hand, used high voltages with low amperage and therefore could be transmitted over great distances.
When Westinghouse bought up Tesla’s patents it sparked commercial war between Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, who was a great backer of DC. There followed years of bitter propaganda battles, but in the end the AC system won out and Tesla had his greatest triumph when the Niagara Falls power station was built with machines that bore his design and name.
Curiously, despite his achievements, Tesla never had a very good theoretical grasp of what electricity actually is. He tended to ignore developments in physics. In fact, he greeted Einstein’s theory of relativity with downright hostility. For Tesla, electricity wasn’t a thing of electrons and energy states, but of fluids, vibrations, and harmonics in a system which he seemed to understand, but which made his explanations the thing of which headaches are made.
Whatever his theory, Tesla still managed to get results. He was fascinated with high frequency electricity, but mechanical generators could only go so fast before they started to fly apart, so he developed devices that could provide higher and higher frequencies without moving parts. The most famous of these was the Tesla coil; famed denizen of science fairs and cheap plasma globes the world over. This high-voltage transformer is familiar to anyone who has seen an old Frankenstein movie where they were used to generate the electrical arcs that are apparently necessary if you’re going to be a dedicated mad scientist. They also produce an electrical field that light fluorescent tubes and similar devices at a distance; a spectacular parlour trick that led Tesla down more than one rabbit hole.
Tesla’s interest in high frequency electricity had other benefits. A number of his circuits were basic to radio technology. Because he didn’t understand how electromagnetic radiation worked, Tesla thought that sending messages through the air required transmitting huge amounts of energy, so he never produced a working system, but his patents did predate those of Marconi by several years and Tesla was awarded precedence by US supreme court in 1943.
Another of Tesla’s certified firsts was in the field of teleautomation, or remote control to you. In New York, 1898, Tesla demonstrated a peculiar little tub-shaped boat which he was able to control at a distance with a small box. That may not seem like much today, but over a century ago this first ever exhibition of radio remote control caused a sensation. Tesla was able to start and stop his little boat, steer it, and make its lights flash. With his more advanced model, he could even make is submerge on command. As an added fillip, Tesla’s boats were designed with interlocking circuits that prevented hijacking of the boat by more powerful transmitters, though it tended to form an outline of the state of Maine when in the presence of cell phones.
This would have been as impressive an achievement as anything of the Victorian Age this side of the cotton gin and his anti-tampering circuits were close enough to a modern logic gate to prevent later inventors from patenting them, but as usual Tesla wrapped his invention inside grandiose dreams. His remote controlled boat wasn’t just an ingenious new system, it was the first in a new race of robots that would revolutionise civilisation and free men from all toil. Pretty good for something you can buy at any toy shop today for £20. And if that wasn’t enough, his submersible boats could be turned into the ultimate weapon; unstoppable and so devastating that no defence could stand against it and no attack would fail to be blunted by it.
Like many of his other military inventions, Tesla saw his teleautomation device as the solution to the scourge of war by making the price of aggression too high to pay. He offered his remote control system to the US Navy, but it was turned down like a bed sheet and with good reason. Tesla’s fantastic dreams of bringing peace to the seas, and by extension the world, with remote controlled torpedoes wasn’t as simple as he’d imagined. Not being a naval architect, Tesla couldn’t appreciate that even free-running torpedoes are some of the most complex machines ever built and adding remote control only compounds the problems. Modern navies use remote controlled torpedoes, true, but these are wire-guided and it took close to half a century of effort to produce one that didn’t go haring off at the first opportunity like a bloodhound after a false scent.
1906. This was probably Tesla’s last „sane” project before he wandered off forever down the paths of crankdom. It’s a high-speed bladeless turbine that consisted of a series of smooth disks which were turned by what is known today as a boundary-layer effect that relied on the viscosity of a flowing gas or liquid rather than striking blades. It was a neat little idea and showed a great deal of promise, but Tesla treated it much like he did his teleautomation; it wasn’t just a clever invention, it was a revolution.
Tesla touted his turbine as a powerhouse in a hat. He talked gleefully as replacing all other motors and engines as the prime mover of civilisaton. He claimed that it was 97% efficient, that it could run off of any fuel, and was streets ahead of anything previous. In fact, tests showed that its efficiency was only 41%; impressive, but not a quantum leap. Also, the high speeds that the turbine needed to turn at were too great for the disks, which distorted quickly at running speed; it didn’t scale very easily; and it performed poorly under load. Even today, when Tesla’s turbine is used in commercial pumps, the problem of materials for the power-generating version has never been overcome. But that didn’t keep Tesla from declaring that one day his turbine would find its way into power stations, ships, aeroplanes, airships, automobiles, and death rays. Indeed, he even played about with sketching his turbine motor car, which he claimed would be so efficient that it could drive clear across the United States on a single tank of petrol.
Despite approaching Henry Ford with his wondrous invention, the Tesla turbine motor car never got off the sketch pad, but his turbine did end up in cars later on; as a speedometer.
If Tesla’s induction motor and the technologies that sprang from it were the height of his serious engineering work, then his dream of perfecting broadcast power was the holy grail of his crackpot period. It’s also the episode that elicits the most animated, or fevered, talk about Tesla’s „lost” technology that rivals anything gassed about the sunken continent of Atlantis.
In the 1890s, Tesla was playing about with sending high-voltage currents through evacuated glass tubes and he discovered that a tube containing rarefied gas could conduct current rather well. Other scientists who’d noticed the same thing used this as the basis for experiments that eventually brought forth things like fluorescent lighting, plasma physics, and neon „Eat at Joe’s” signs. But for Tesla this wasn’t good enough. In typical fashion he leapt from a simple laboratory observation to declaring that he’d discovered the secret of transmitting electricity to all the world without wires. He reasoned that since he could send electricity through a tube of rarefied gas, and that the Earth’s ionosphere was also composed of rarefied gas, then it would be a simple matter to send electricity up into the outer reaches of the atmosphere and charge the entire planet like a gigantic Leyden jar that could be tapped on demand. With such a system, dynamos, batteries, and the like would all be a thing of the past. Anything from a pocket torch to an aeroplane to a battleship would have literally unlimited power at its disposal regardless of large it was, how long it ran, or where it was located.
Tesla’s first idea was to trail wires from balloons hanging high in the air, but he soon abandoned this idea in favour of constructing a gigantic Tesla coil which would transmit electricity to the ionosphere the same way as the coil could light a tube from across the room; by generating a tremendous electrical field.
So, with backing from the El Paso Power Company and Colonel John Jacob Astor, Tesla set out for Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1899. There he constructed a laboratory with a 142-foot metal mast and the world’s largest Tesla coil some 51 feet in diameter to send electricity into the heavens; or not, as the case may be.
When Tesla arrived in Colorado, he was impressed by the frequent lightning storms in the area and he noticed that during these storms the ground became electrically charged. Tesla became convinced that the secret to broadcasting power was not the upper atmosphere, but the Earth itself. He believed that the planet was filled with electrical „vibrations” and that it wasn’t even necessary to build up a charge in the Earth like a battery, but rather to simply send vibrations out from a single source. These would send electrical waves throughout the world that could be tapped with equal intensity anywhere simply by sticking a wire in the ground. It was also supposed to be able to power aeroplanes, but as to how it was going to do that Tesla was a teeny bit vague.
Tesla’s experiments at Colorado Springs were nothing if not spectacular. When he cranked up his apparatus for the first time there were electrical discharges, a hundred feet long, claps of thunder that could be heard fifteen miles away, and one dead generator at the local power plant, which Tesla managed to burn out and had to repair for free. For nine months he continued to try to create broadcast power, but with very little to show for it. He was reported to have lit a string of lights at a distance and nearly electrocuted a few horse through their iron horseshoes, though this was most likely due to good old-fashioned ground conductivity. In the end, he achieved a new scale in high voltage experiments, he may have created ball lightning, he may have observed ELF waves, he may even have recorded radio waves from space, but he certainly took his investors for a soaking.
In 1900, Tesla convinced J.P. Morgan to sink $150,000 in what Morgan thought was an improvement on wireless telegraphy. Tesla had pitched to Morgan the idea of a „World System” that would link together the four corners of the globe in an information system that would make the Internet look like two cans and a bit of string. It would allow audio transmissions as well as Morse. It would perfect television. It would synchronise all the world’s stock tickers. It would regulate all the world’s clocks and watches. It would carry telephony over any distance. It would provide governments with perfectly secure communications. Handwritten documents, drawings, and photographs could be transmitted instantly. It would provide pinpoint navigation. It would control machines across oceans.
What it did on its days off was left to the imagination.
What Tesla had not revealed to Morgan was that his World System wasn’t really a communication network, but an improvement on his broadcast power scheme. Communication was just the gravy for the electrical pot roast. With his new system Tesla expected to broadcast power to any point of on the globe; this time by turning the Earth into a giant condenser with the ionosphere as one plate and the ground as the other connected by electric channels formed by gigantic ultraviolet lamps beaming upwards. Or not. Tesla’s notes aren’t very clear and he seems to have been vacillating between three different theories as he went along. Since he was by now dreaming of using his broadcast power to control the weather and abolish war, perhaps it’s just as well that he kept practical-minded Morgan in the dark.
By 1901, Tesla was building his power broadcaster at Wardenclyffe out on Long Island in New York State, which Tesla envisioned as the centre of a great industrial community tending his device. Next to his new laboratory rose a huge tower topped by a fifty-ton steel sphere that was the heart of his transmitter.
Unfortunately for Tesla, he grossly overestimated his ability to build his installation on what little money he could raise. When he went back to Morgan for more, he had the bad judgment to reveal to Morgan the true purpose of his World System and added to his lack of foresight by explaining to the great financier that his system would turn the world into one gigantic brain of godlike intelligence. Needless to say, Morgan did not fork over any more gelt and in 1905 Wardenclyffe was sold off to pay Tesla’s $20,000 in hotel bills at the Waldorf Astoria. Tesla never abandoned his dreams of revolutionising the world with his system, but investors were becoming much more wary of him and nothing came of it.
One question is, how did Tesla think that his system would fit in with the development of atomic power? Not much. Tesla regarded atomic power as purest nonsense. Don’t be ridiculous; won’t ever happen.
If Tesla’s induction motor and the technologies that sprang from it were the height of his serious engineering work, then his dream of perfecting broadcast power was the holy grail of his crackpot period. It’s also the episode that elicits the most animated, or fevered, talk about Tesla’s „lost” technology that rivals anything gassed about the sunken continent of Atlantis.
In the 1890s, Tesla was playing about with sending high-voltage currents through evacuated glass tubes and he discovered that a tube containing rarefied gas could conduct current rather well. Other scientists who’d noticed the same thing used this as the basis for experiments that eventually brought forth things like fluorescent lighting, plasma physics, and neon „Eat at Joe’s” signs. But for Tesla this wasn’t good enough. In typical fashion he leapt from a simple laboratory observation to declaring that he’d discovered the secret of transmitting electricity to all the world without wires. He reasoned that since he could send electricity through a tube of rarefied gas, and that the Earth’s ionosphere was also composed of rarefied gas, then it would be a simple matter to send electricity up into the outer reaches of the atmosphere and charge the entire planet like a gigantic Leyden jar that could be tapped on demand. With such a system, dynamos, batteries, and the like would all be a thing of the past. Anything from a pocket torch to an aeroplane to a battleship would have literally unlimited power at its disposal regardless of large it was, how long it ran, or where it was located.
Tesla’s first idea was to trail wires from balloons hanging high in the air, but he soon abandoned this idea in favour of constructing a gigantic Tesla coil which would transmit electricity to the ionosphere the same way as the coil could light a tube from across the room; by generating a tremendous electrical field.
So, with backing from the El Paso Power Company and Colonel John Jacob Astor, Tesla set out for Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1899. There he constructed a laboratory with a 142-foot metal mast and the world’s largest Tesla coil some 51 feet in diameter to send electricity into the heavens; or not, as the case may be.
When Tesla arrived in Colorado, he was impressed by the frequent lightning storms in the area and he noticed that during these storms the ground became electrically charged. Tesla became convinced that the secret to broadcasting power was not the upper atmosphere, but the Earth itself. He believed that the planet was filled with electrical „vibrations” and that it wasn’t even necessary to build up a charge in the Earth like a battery, but rather to simply send vibrations out from a single source. These would send electrical waves throughout the world that could be tapped with equal intensity anywhere simply by sticking a wire in the ground. It was also supposed to be able to power aeroplanes, but as to how it was going to do that Tesla was a teeny bit vague.
Tesla’s experiments at Colorado Springs were nothing if not spectacular. When he cranked up his apparatus for the first time there were electrical discharges, a hundred feet long, claps of thunder that could be heard fifteen miles away, and one dead generator at the local power plant, which Tesla managed to burn out and had to repair for free. For nine months he continued to try to create broadcast power, but with very little to show for it. He was reported to have lit a string of lights at a distance and nearly electrocuted a few horse through their iron horseshoes, though this was most likely due to good old-fashioned ground conductivity. In the end, he achieved a new scale in high voltage experiments, he may have created ball lightning, he may have observed ELF waves, he may even have recorded radio waves from space, but he certainly took his investors for a soaking.
In 1900, Tesla convinced J.P. Morgan to sink $150,000 in what Morgan thought was an improvement on wireless telegraphy. Tesla had pitched to Morgan the idea of a „World System” that would link together the four corners of the globe in an information system that would make the Internet look like two cans and a bit of string. It would allow audio transmissions as well as Morse. It would perfect television. It would synchronise all the world’s stock tickers. It would regulate all the world’s clocks and watches. It would carry telephony over any distance. It would provide governments with perfectly secure communications. Handwritten documents, drawings, and photographs could be transmitted instantly. It would provide pinpoint navigation. It would control machines across oceans.
What it did on its days off was left to the imagination.
What Tesla had not revealed to Morgan was that his World System wasn’t really a communication network, but an improvement on his broadcast power scheme. Communication was just the gravy for the electrical pot roast. With his new system Tesla expected to broadcast power to any point of on the globe; this time by turning the Earth into a giant condenser with the ionosphere as one plate and the ground as the other connected by electric channels formed by gigantic ultraviolet lamps beaming upwards. Or not. Tesla’s notes aren’t very clear and he seems to have been vacillating between three different theories as he went along. Since he was by now dreaming of using his broadcast power to control the weather and abolish war, perhaps it’s just as well that he kept practical-minded Morgan in the dark.
By 1901, Tesla was building his power broadcaster at Wardenclyffe out on Long Island in New York State, which Tesla envisioned as the centre of a great industrial community tending his device. Next to his new laboratory rose a huge tower topped by a fifty-ton steel sphere that was the heart of his transmitter.
Unfortunately for Tesla, he grossly overestimated his ability to build his installation on what little money he could raise. When he went back to Morgan for more, he had the bad judgment to reveal to Morgan the true purpose of his World System and added to his lack of foresight by explaining to the great financier that his system would turn the world into one gigantic brain of godlike intelligence. Needless to say, Morgan did not fork over any more gelt and in 1905 Wardenclyffe was sold off to pay Tesla’s $20,000 in hotel bills at the Waldorf Astoria. Tesla never abandoned his dreams of revolutionising the world with his system, but investors were becoming much more wary of him and nothing came of it.
One question is, how did Tesla think that his system would fit in with the development of atomic power? Not much. Tesla regarded atomic power as purest nonsense. Don’t be ridiculous; won’t ever happen.
1928. Tesla patented his idea of for a flying machine that he (surprise) claimed would revolutionise the world. This device would be powered by one of his miraculous turbines; would be able to lift vertically, then fly horizontally; would be able to land on a rooftop; and would cost less than a thousand dollars. How this Heath Robinson contraption would make the transition from vertical to horizontal flight without dropping like a stone is left to the imagination.
One wonders why Tesla bothered with flivvers like the one above when he’d already proposed the ultimate flying machine in 1919. This wonder craft was to be powered by his World System, fly without wings or props, and would make war unthinkable by its ability to strike an enemy with impunity from thousands of miles away. Exactly how is one of those petty details that annoyed Tesla.
Tesla was convinced that life existed on Mars and that his power broadcasting apparatus would allow him to easily communicate with the mysterious inhabitants of the red planet on the grounds that with the power he had available, distance was no object. When his friends pointed out that Tesla himself claimed that his power broadcaster worked by sending vibrations through the Earth and that there was no air in space to carry any „vibrations” to Mars, Tesla dismissed them as „not helping.”
During his Colorado Springs days, Tesla was so predisposed to the idea of Martians that he was convinced that rhythmic clicking from his receiver was nothing less than a message from Mars. Since then, some have claimed that what Tesla heard were natural radio sources from outer space, though it is more likely that it was a fault in his own equipment. Whatever it was, Tesla never gave up on his hopes of being the first to make the Big Hello with Mars and continued to add it to his To Do list for his World System for decades to come.
The one thing that you could never accuse Tesla of was being overly modest. He claimed that as early as 1898 he’d developed an electromechanical oscillator about the size of an alarm clock that could apply minute taps at such a rate that it could shatter a two-inch thick link of chain in short order. With the same device, he claimed that he’d nearly brought down a steel-framed building and that he could destroy the Brooklyn bridge inside of half an hour. In later years he asserted that he had a pocket version that could disintegrate the Empire State Building faster than you could say „cartoon super villain.”
Of course, this was small beer compared to his great scheme. Tesla said (in public, mind!) that he could set up vibrations in the Earth sufficient to split the planet „like an apple.” He conceded that this might take several months, but he could at least peel the Earth’s crust away like an orange rind (again with the fruit metaphors) in a couple of weeks and that would do for the human race quite nicely, thank you. Enough’s as good as a feast, I suppose.
If Tesla’s crack-pottery was a swimming pool his death ray would be the deep end. As early as 1916 Tesla was trotting out his idea for the ultimate weapon that would make war obsolete by providing nations with unopposible destructive power. Well, we got that little number in 1945 and look how well that worked out! While Tesla wasn’t the first (or last) to come up with a scheme for building a death ray, he was the one with the credentials to get the press to take him seriously enough to interview him without breaking out in a case of the giggles.
Perhaps the best description of Tesla’s death ray can be found in a 1937 New York Times Interview where he described how the borders of a country could be ringed by a series of towers, each of which contained his death ray generator. Any approaching foe by land, sea or air would be instantly detected and each tower, in the word of the times,
will send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles from the defending nation’s border and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks
When put into operation, Dr. Tesla said, this latest invention of his would make war impossible. This death-beam, he asserted, would surround each country like an invisible Chinese wall, only a million times more impenetrable. It would make every nation impregnable against attack by airplanes or by large invading armies.
Yep. Chinese wall, Maginot Line; big static defences. What do they have in common? They don’t work worth squat if anyone actually tried to breach them. Maybe Tesla’s death ray was unstoppable, but the towers look very stoppable indeed, so I doubt there would would have had a sudden khaki surplus even if Tesla’s device had worked.
Tesla tried to sell his death ray to Great Britain for $3,000,000 and promised to make the British Isles invulnerable within three months. Whitehall opted for radar and spitfires instead. He then tried to sell it to the League of Nations without success, actually managed to rook $25,000 out of the Soviet Union without delivering, and became convinced that the US government were making unsuccessful attempts to break into his hotel room.
What puts Tesla’s death ray in a league of its own is that his design actually had competent, even inventive, engineering about it. His idea was to use a gigantic electrostatic generator run by one of his turbines to accelerate tiny particles of mercury until they became a stream of super high-powered bullets of several million volts. Since they were accelerated in a vacuum, Tesla needed a way to spit them out of the accelerator sphere without letting air in. He proposed to do this with a special nozzle which blew high-pressure air around an open tube leading to the evacuated sphere and acted like a constantly renewing plug to preserve the vacuum. What happen to the mercury stream after it left the nozzle and had to travel through the atmosphere was another matter that was never quite figured out.
Incidentally, by „particles” Tesla did not mean protons, neutron and the like, but tiny droplets. Tesla had little truck with atomic theory and for an electrician he had no time for electrons.
Tesla spent his final years from 1934 as a sort of dandified Howard Hughes in room 3327, Hotel New Yorker (<-- this link will open up in a New Window) with a permanent Do Not Disturb sign tacked to his door. The room number was very important, because Tesla insisted that it be divisible by three. Afflicted by an increasingly morbid fear of germs, he washed compulsively, ate only boiled food, and would be conspicuous in the restaurant where he always dined by the stack of eighteen napkins that he insisted on and by his compulsion to calculate the cubic volume of every dish before he tasted it.
He was also flat broke and his closest friend was a pigeon. No wonder he kept pestering the Prime Minister about death rays.
On 7 January 1943 Tesla died alone in his Hotel New Yorker room. On hearing the news, Hugo Gernsback, who had published much by and about Tesla in his magazines, commissioned a death mask of the late inventor, which graced the publisher’s offices for many years.
Since Tesla left no will, his belongings were eventually carted off to storage. But the United States government took a bit of an interest in the old man’s papers. He was, after all, a brilliant man and, this being wartime, it was better to be safe than sorry, so the OSS sent a man to review the boxes of notes that notes Tesla had stowed in his room. The OSS found a lot of scribblings about power broadcasting, cod philosophy, and no death rays. What was there was concluded as being unsound and Washington quickly lost interest. But that hasn’t stopped generations of busy conspiracy theorists from spinning elaborate yarns about papers being spirited off into the night, secret government laboratories dedicated to weather control, Soviet death ray experiments in Siberia, and „discovered” accounts of Tesla’s jaunts around the Solar System.
The old fakir would have been proud.
This article was originally posted online at:
http://worldwideinvention.com/nikola-tesla-history-of-technology-the-famous-inventors-worldwide/