Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah (19 page)

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.