Tesla: Man Out of Time

  One of the final honors that came to the inventor found him too ill to make a personal acceptance. The Institute of Immigrant Welfare in 1938 invited him to a ceremonial dinner at the Hotel Biltmore for a citation. His friend Dr. Rado read his speech, which contained high praise of George Westinghouse “to whom humanity owes an immense debt of gratitude.” In absentia Tesla again claimed that he would win the Pierre Guzman prize for his work in cosmic communication.

  His last years were not entirely fixed on outer space, however, nor were they even entirely cerebral. Some of his intellectual friends were surprised, even embarrassed, when with obvious pleasure, he began to fraternize with certain shy, burly, broken-nosed gentlemen of the boxing ring. This late-blooming fascination with pugilists and boxing confused both Swezey and O’Neill.

  “Brain Dines Brawn,” declared a wire photo caption. A happy Tesla was shown at table with the amiable Zivic brothers: “Dr. Nicola Tesla, famed inventor, broke his five-year, self-imposed exile in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker on Dec. 18th when he played host to Fritzie Zivic, welterweight champion…. Dr. Tesla, an ardent sports fan, predicted that Zivic would beat Lew Jenkins in their non-title bout . . .” The ever-admiring O’Neill, present at one of these meals, claimed that the psychic energy zinging between Tesla and the brothers made his own skin itch and tingle. Another writer present admitted feeling the same odd effects.

  Removed as he was from the events in Europe, Tesla was not to be spared the tragedies of war in his last years. The honors conferred upon him by Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia had been expressions by countries enjoying their last gasps of intellectual freedom. Hitler soon invaded Austria and his demands for the autonomy of Germans in the Sudetenland led to a crisis of government in Czechoslovakia. President Eduard Beneš resigned after Britain, France, and Italy, without even consulting his government, acceded to German occupation of the Sudetenland.

  Next Yugoslavia’s Regent Paul outraged the people of that country by agreeing to a compromise with Hitler that committed Slavs to join the Axis powers. For once diverse factions of Yugoslavia pulled together in defiance—Army, church, and peasants; Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Immediately, the pro-Allied Serbian military elements staged a successful coup and replaced Prince Paul with the seventeen-year-old King Peter II, who ascended the throne on March 28, 1941.

  It pleased Tesla that the son of King Alexander, whom he had admired, was now the monarch. His closest friends in the New York/Washington Slavic communities remained those of “Great Serbian” outlook attached to the Yugoslav Embassy under Ambassador Fotić. At that time the only Croat on the Embassy staff was a young aide named Bogdan Raditsa (now a professor of Balkan history at Fairleigh Dickinson University). But soon Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kosanović, a Serb born in Croatia, arrived in America to play what seemed to the frail old man a worrying and perplexing role.

  Events began moving too fast. The inventor, aware mainly of tensions and shifting alliances among the local Slavic population, scarcely grasped the fact that as the greatest living hero of the Yugoslavs, he had been singled out by fate as an ideological pawn between East and West.

  28. DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION

  The new government of King Peter, with broad popular support, confronted the Germans and refused to ratify the compromise agreement that had been made with Hitler by Prince Paul. Almost at once reprisals began.

  On Palm Sunday, 1941, three hundred Luftwaffe bombers swept over the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade. Methodically they crisscrossed the city street by street, strafing everything that breathed. By noon 25,000 civilians were dead, and the wounded lay everywhere. Most public buildings were left in ruins, including the modern laboratory known as the Tesla Institute.

  The combined armed forces of Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded the doomed country. Within only days the Yugoslav Army was crushed, and King Peter was sent to England for safety. His government-in-exile would operate from London for the remainder of World War II.

  This, however, was only the beginning of the war for Yugoslavs. Accustomed to successive invasions for a thousand years, the people were resilient. The remnants of the Army and Communist factions withdrew into the mountains, from which they launched guerrilla attacks on the invaders. These armed fighters, men and women, were supplied with food grown by the old people and children remaining in undefended villages.

  Against them the Nazis and Fascists carried out murderous reprisals. In the fishing villages and along the stony slopes of the Adriatic, half the people in every hamlet were systematically shot.

  Soon, however, it became apparent to military strategists in the United States and England that, not only were Axis forces killing Yugoslavs, but rival guerrilla factions of monarchists and Communists had begun to vie for Allied support and were shooting each other as well as the invaders.

  Col. Drazha Mihailović, a Serbian army officer, led a faction called Chetniks (the “Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland”), composed mainly of Serbian and Bosnian monarchists. With close ties to King Peter, they became the first major resistance movement in Europe.1 The initial British aid to Yugoslavia went to the Chetniks, but it was short-lived. The National Liberation Army or Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito of the Communist Party, was swiftly rising to prominence.

  Allied strategists knew little of Tito. It was said he had been left wounded on a battlefield in 1917 and captured by the Russians. There he was trained as a Communist leader and sent to France during the Spanish Civil War to aid the Loyalists or Republicans.

  A Croat, Tito had little reason to love the monarchy, for he was imprisoned after returning to Yugoslavia. On release, he became active in organizing a metal workers’ union and helped to build the Yugoslav labor movement. His emergence as head of the Partisans in World War II was that of a natural leader who inspired his fighters and maintained rigorous discipline. He was looking ahead to a time when the Slavs could rebuild a free and united country without oppression either by foreigners or kings.

  Tito’s goal was to set up committees of popular liberation after the Russian style, while Mihailović and the Chetniks favored local administrative authorities under the monarchy. Both factions kept on killing Germans and Italians but, unfortunately, they also continued murdering each other.2

  Prof. Bogdan Raditsa,* then director of the information service of the Yugoslav Embassy in Washington, D.C., recalled, “The situation became rather complicated when Yugoslavia collapsed in 1941 and when, at the end of that year, a Royal Yugoslav Mission came to this country.” It was composed of members of King Peter’s government and the Ban (Governor) of Croatia, Dr. Ivan šubašić. Sava Kosanović, Tesla’s nephew, then a member of the Democratic Party, also arrived as a minister of the exiled government.

  “As soon as Kosanović came to the States,” said Professor Raditsa, “he tried to reorient Tesla from the exclusive Serbian policy, and he succeeded. Tesla, even before, never felt himself a Great Serbian chauvinist. He used to say, ‘I am a Serb but my fatherland is Croatia.’”3

  The conflict between Serbs and Croats in exile intensified as the war went on, paralyzing normal Slav diplomatic activities in London, Washington, and New York.

  “Kosanović, though a Serb,” recalled Raditsa, “was leading the struggle for a brotherhood between the Serbs and Croats against Fotić and many other Serb members of various Yugoslav missions. Thus he began using Tesla for the policy directed against the Great Serbians.

  “Tesla himself . . . was not aware of the deep conflict between the Serbs and Croats, and as basically a scientist and in old age, he was very candid in politics.”

  Raditsa said he seemed happy that he finally had a man of his own blood near him in New York and noted that Tesla began to rely upon Kosanović’s opinion on everything. During this period the inventor was receiving about $500 per month from the royal government as an honorarium.

  Various political messages elicited from Tesla for home consumption, said Raditsa, were actually written by Kosan
ović.4

  Toward the end of 1942 the Yugoslav Information Center was opened in New York in the Royal Mission headquarters on Fifth Avenue. Raditsa and Kosanović worked together at this office, issuing bulletins and other publications. But a crisis broke out when news reached them of the fighting between Mihailović and Tito.

  “Kosanović,” Raditsa said, “joined Tito and began to popularize the National Liberation Movement for a new Yugoslavia. He had a terrible time to convince Tesla that monarchy was losing in Yugoslavia and that a new Yugoslavia was beginning to come out from the fratricidal civil war. As the largest majority of Serbs in Croatia were joining Tito, Kosanović convinced Tesla that he too should join the movement that was largely shared by the masses of the people, Serbs and Croats. So Tesla’s message to the Serbs and Croats was written by Kosanović.”5

  On the walls of the Tesla Museum in Belgrade one may read a vastly enlarged photocopy of the words allegedly sent by Tesla to his embattled countrymen only months before his own death. American Vice-President Henry A. Wallace also had a hand in its drafting. Typewritten, it has many cross-outs and interlinings in Tesla’s own handwriting, yet the style is that of an ideologue, which the inventor was not:

  Out of this war . . . a new world must be born, a world that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity. This . . . must be a world in which there shall be no exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the good by the evil, where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of the 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 not be a world of the downtrodden and humiliated, but of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect for man.

  The inventor’s name also appeared on another message—sent to the Soviet Academy of Sciences on October 12, 1941, urging joint struggle against the Axis powers by Russia, Great Britain, and America, in aid of the revolutionary struggle of the Yugoslav people. This message is not to be seen in the Museum, however, presumably because nostalgia Russian-style has ceased to be politic.

  Kosanović became chairman of the Yugoslav Economic Mission advocating a New Yugoslav federation versus the centralistic prewar royalist Yugoslavia. This new organization also began working for a new Central East European Federation. Raditsa too became a member of the Tito movement.

  King Peter was desperately seeking for Mihailović the support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as well as that of his own Uncle Bertie, who was King George VI of England. The British, at first sympathetic to the Chetnik cause, began to change as they received reports of the aggressive actions of Tito’s Partisans.

  In 1942 King Peter visited Washington to intercede with FDR. Yugoslav pilots were being trained in Tennessee. FDR told him that America would send airplanes to the Chetniks as soon as they could be spared from the war in the Middle East. The monarch visited New York City, attending a large reception for the American Friends of Yugoslavia at the Colony Club. The Colony, the first female socialites’ club in America, had been founded at the inspiration of energetic Anne Morgan. She attended the function, as did the King’s mother, Queen Marie, and Mrs. Roosevelt. It was the sort of affair Tesla himself would have delighted in had he not been weak and ill. So King Peter went to him.

  In his diaries (A King’s Heritage), under date July 8, 1942, the young Peter II wrote: “I visited Dr. Nicola 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 honor. 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 Slovenes.’”

  The King added that he was deeply touched and that both he and Dr. Tesla had wept. He then visited Columbia University, to be warmly welcomed by President Nicholas Murray Butler and to find another link with his own country in the Pupin Physics Laboratory.

  Returning to Washington, he was assured by FDR that food, clothing, arms, and ammunition would be dropped over Yugoslavia. But he was shocked when, in 1943, the British Mission in Yugoslavia made official contact with Tito. Peter asked to be parachuted into his country, but Churchill demurred. Tito openly accused Mihailović of being a traitor.6

  At the Teheran Conference in November there occurred, largely at Churchill’s instance, what the King described as a “fatal change” of Allied policy. It was decided that “the basic force fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia recognized by the Allies was the National Liberation Army, under the command of Tito, and the Partisan force received full recognition as an Allied Army. Mihailović was thus denied and abandoned.”7

  Winston Churchill overnight became a hero of modern Yugoslavia. And when the young monarch frantically wrote to FDR for support, the ailing President replied urging him to accept Churchill’s advice “as if it was my own.” Within months Roosevelt died.

  Tesla’s nephew Kosanović, along with certain other diplomatic representatives of King Peter, had been dismissed by the monarch at the height of the 1942 crisis. He often told Bogdan Raditsa in those days that he felt Tesla had been terribly shocked by his nephew’s exclusion from the royal government. In fact, Kosanović believed that the inventor’s death was actually precipitated by his own “setback.”

  “He thought,” Kosanović repeatedly told Raditsa, “that I was punished, and that eventually I would be arrested or something of the kind, but I succeeded to convince him that it was inevitable in politics.”8

  During this period Kosanović was frank in saying that he tried to keep Tesla from seeing members of the royal government. Ambassador Fotić had become “the enemy” since he still favored a Great Serbian policy as opposed to the changes ahead. Tesla’s relationship with this old friend became “lukewarm.”

  “There is no doubt,” said Professor Raditsa, “that the whole internecine tragedy of Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1943 must have had a rather depressing impact upon Tesla. Very often he would ask me, could I explain to him what was going on among us, and why we cannot agree….”

  After the war, Mihailović would be executed by a “People’s Court” for alleged collaboration with the enemy, and the Republic of Yugoslavia declared to exist, with Tito as President for life and the Communists firmly in charge.

  A count of Yugoslavian casualties at the end of World War II disclosed that 2 million persons had died; tragically, many thousands had been killed by fellow Yugoslavs.

  “After the war,” recalled Professor Raditsa, “Kosanović became a minister in the Tito-šubašić Government, and I was his assistant in the Ministry of Information from 1944 to 1945, when I left the country, for I couldn’t become a Communist. Later on in 1946, Sava Kosanović became Tito’s ambassador in Washington but I never saw him again after I left Belgrade in October of 1945. Kosanović had accepted totally the Communist system in Yugoslavia and remained loyal until his death.”

  There had not been a time in ten centuries when the Yugoslavs had not been ruled and ransacked by invaders—by Venetians, Romans, Turks, Bulgars, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Italians, when they were not living under threat of torture, prison, or violent death. Now a marvelous truth began to dawn upon them: that they were free, in a manner of speaking.

  Tesla would not live to see this. Whether he could ever have accepted the new government, with its Soviet-type Constitution and a Soviet alliance, whether he could ever have accepted the permanent exile of his beloved monarch, are unanswerable questions.

  Unfortunately, however, all this was to have a bearing on how he would be remembered in the West. The fading of his scientific reputation, the forgetfulness of Americans in the postwar period, resulted in large degree from the disap
pearance of most of his scientific papers behind that new Cold War phenomenon, the Iron Curtain.

  In 1948 Yugoslavia ceased to be an Iron Curtain country, declaring its independence from the Soviet doctrine of “limited sovereignty.” America and her allies then were generous in sending economic and military aid to the Slavs; but the damage had been done. America had not raced to Tito’s wartime support with the alacrity that Churchill had shown. In the future it would not be made easy for American scholars to draw on Yugoslav sources to document the achievements of Nikola Tesla.

  The inventor became very feeble in the winter of 1942. His fear of germs was so obsessive that even his closest friends were required to stand at a distance, like the subjects of a neurotic Tudor. (Pigeon germs did not seem to worry him.) He had heart trouble and suffered occasionally from fainting spells. No longer able to feed his beloved birds, he often relied upon a young man named Charles Hausler, who owned racing pigeons, to take care of them for him.

  Hausler had worked for Tesla in this capacity from around 1928 onward, his job being to go to the New York Public Library at noon each day with grain and then to walk around the four sides of the building looking for young or injured birds on window sills or behind large statues. He would take them to Tesla’s hotel for rest and recuperation. Then, he has recalled, “I would release them at the library for him.” He remembered that the cages in Tesla’s rooms had been built by a fine carpenter—“as Mr. Tesla was in all his doings it had to be done right.” The pigeons also enjoyed a curtained shower bath.

  Hausler and Tesla spent many hours together, talking mostly of pigeons. Once Tesla confided to him that “Thomas Edison could not be trusted.” The boy remembered his employer as “a very kind and considerate human person,” and there was one incident that stood out in his mind long afterward. “He had a large box or container in his room near the pigeon cages and he told me to be very careful not to disturb the box,” said Hausler, “as it contained something that could destroy an airplane in the sky and he had hopes of presenting it to the world.” He believed it probably was stored in the cellar of the hotel later.9