Tesla: Man Out of Time

  On a bitter day in early January 1943, Tesla called his other messenger boy, Kerrigan, and gave him a sealed envelope addressed to Mr. Samuel Clemens, 35 South Fifth Avenue, New York City. The boy set forth into the whipping wind and searched fruitlessly for the number. As it turned out, this had been the address of Tesla’s first laboratory; but now South Fifth Avenue was West Broadway, and no one by the name of Samuel Clemens lived in the area.

  Kerrigan made his way back to the Hotel New Yorker and reported to the sick man. In a weak voice, Tesla explained that Clemens was the famous Mark Twain and that everyone knew of him. He sent Kerrigan forth once more, and this time asked him also to take care of the pigeons. The perturbed messenger fed the birds and then consulted his supervisor, who told him that Mark Twain had been dead for twenty-five years. Once again Kerrigan trudged through the cold afternoon to Tesla’s rooms, where he explained and tried to return the envelope.

  The inventor was indignant and refused to hear that the humorist was dead. “He was in my room last night,” he said. “He sat in that chair and talked to me for an hour. He is having financial difficulties and needs my help. So—don’t come back until you have delivered that envelope.” Once again the messenger went to his supervisor and together they opened the envelope. It contained a blank sheet of paper wrapped around twenty five-dollar bills—enough to help an old friend through a little fainting spell.

  On the fourth of January, the inventor, although very weak, went to his office to make an experiment that George Scherff was interested in. Scherff dropped in to help him prepare for it. The work was interrupted, however, when Tesla felt a recurrence of some sharp pains in his chest.

  Refusing medical aid, he returned to his hotel. Next day a maid came in and cleaned. As she left, he asked her to put the Do Not Disturb sign on his door to keep visitors away, and not to bother cleaning. The sign remained there the following day and the one after that.

  Early on the morning of January 8, Alice Monaghan, a maid, ignored the sign and entered the apartment to find the inventor dead in bed, his sunken, emaciated face composed.10 Assistant Medical Examiner H. W. Wembly examined the body, placed the time of death as 10:30 P.M. on January 7, 1943, and gave his opinion that the cause of death had been coronary thrombosis. Tesla had died in his sleep, and the examiner noted that he had found “No suspicious circumstances.” The inventor was eighty-six years of age.

  Kenneth Swezey was notified at once; and at ten o’clock that morning he telephoned to Dr. Rado at New York University. King Peter’s headquarters, then at 745 Fifth Avenue, was advised by the professor. Tesla’s nephew Kosanović, then wartime president of the Eastern and Central European Planning Board for the Balkan countries, also was notified.

  Then the FBI was called. Swezey and Kosanović summoned a locksmith and Tesla’s safe was opened and the contents examined.

  The body was removed to the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home at Madison Avenue and 81st Street and a sculptor was engaged by Hugo Gernsback to prepare a death mask of the inventor.

  Just before Tesla’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt had tried to intercede in his behalf with President Roosevelt—perhaps with the idea of conferring some honor upon him. In the Tesla Museum at Belgrade three brief notes on White House stationery may be read. On January 1, at the request of author Louis Adamić, Mrs. Roosevelt had promised to ask the President to write to Tesla and said that she herself would call on him on her next trip to New York. The second note is headed, “Memo for Mrs. Roosevelt” and is signed FDR: “I was having this looked into but the papers yesterday carried the story that Dr. Tesla had died. Therefore I am returning the enclosures herewith.” A third note of January 11 from Eleanor Roosevelt to Admić forwards the President’s message and adds her sorrow at learning of the inventor’s death.

  Adamić wrote a moving eulogy to Tesla that was read by New York Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia over station WNYC on January 10.11 Meanwhile the extreme tensions between Serb and Croat factions in the United States were making the planning of funeral services difficult. The body lay in state but, according to an unpublished letter of O’Neill’s, “only twelve people, some of whom were newspaper reporters,” came to view it.

  When state services were held at four o’clock on January 12, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, however, more than two thousand people crowded in. Serbs and Croats were seated on opposing sides of the cathedral, Bishop William T. Manning having exacted from both factions a promise of no political speeches. The service was begun in English by Bishop Manning and concluded in Serbian by the Very Rev. Dusan Sukletović.

  Among Balkan diplomats present were Ambassador Fotić, the Governor of Croatia, a former Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, and the Minister of Food and Reconstruction. In the front row with Kosanović, chief mourner and head of the important new trade mission, sat Swezey. Dr. Rado had been too ill to attend as an honorary pallbearer.

  Figures important in American science and industry who did attend as honorary pallbearers included Professor Edwin H. Armstrong, Dr. E. F. W. Alexanderson of General Electric, Dr. Harvey Rentschler of Westinghouse, engineer Gano Dunn, and W. H. Barton, curator of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. Newbold Morris, president of the New York City Council, headed this group.

  When word of Tesla’s death spread abroad to war-stricken Europe, telegrams of tribute and sorrow began pouring in from scientists and governmental leaders alike. In the United States three Nobel prizewinners in physics, Millikan, Compton, and James Franck, joined in a eulogy to the inventor as “one of the outstanding intellects of the world who paved the way for many of the important technological developments of modern times.”

  The President and Mrs. Roosevelt expressed their gratitude for Tesla’s contributions “to science and industry and to this country.” Vice-President Wallace, in the spirit of the new Yugoslavia, declared that, “In Nikola Tesla’s death the common man loses one of his best friends.”

  Although Louis Adamić wrongly eulogized Tesla as one who had cared nothing for money, he could not have been more accurate when he said that Tesla was not really dead: “The real, important part of Tesla lives in his achievement, which is great, almost beyond calculation, and an integral part of our civilization, our daily lives, our current war effort…. His life is a triumph….”12

  Among the honors that had come to Tesla in his life were many academic degrees from American and foreign universities; the John Scott Medal, the Edison Medal, and various awards from European governments. In September 1943 the Liberty ship Nikola Tesla was launched, an honor that would have pleased the scientist. But not until 1975 was he inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

  Eight months after Tesla’s death, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the decision that he had been confident would come eventually— ruling that he was the inventor of radio.

  His body was taken to Ferncliffe Cemetery at Ardsley-on-the-Hudson in the deep cold of the winter afternoon. In the car that followed the hearse rode Swezey and Kosanović. The inventor’s remains were cremated and his ashes later returned to the land of his birth.*

  In almost every nation in the world, the fighting and dying continued.

  29. THE MISSING PAPERS

  In addition to his acknowledged achievements, Tesla left a legacy of riddles. To pose only three of the most major: Was his unrealized concept for the wireless transmission of energy through the Earth scientifically valid? What actually was he doing in his experimentation with death/disintegrator beam weapons? And what became of his unpatented research papers and other sensitive documents in the days immediately following his death?

  In the category of subquestions, what turn of affairs rekindled the intense interest of the U.S. intelligence establishment in Tesla’s work (as something surely did) in the late 1940s?

  Like Einstein he had been an outsider and, like Edison, a wide-ranging generalist. As he himself had said, he had the “boldness of ignorance.” Where others stopped s
hort, aware of what could not be done, he continued. The survival of such mutants and polymaths as Tesla tends to be discouraged by modern scientific guilds. Whether either he or Edison could have flourished in today’s milieu is conjectural.

  The example set by Tesla has always been particularly inspiring to the lone runner. At the same time, however, his legacy to establishment science is profound for his research, although sometimes esoteric, was almost always sweeping in its potential to transform society. His contribution was major rather than incremental. His turbine failed in part because it would have required fundamental changes by whole industries. Alternating current triumphed only after it had overcome the resistance of an entire industry.

  But there was an unfortunate corollary to Tesla’s lone battles with the scientific-industrial establishment. Since he was part of no group or institution, he had no colleagues with whom to discuss work in progress, no formal, accessible repository for his research notes and papers. He worked not just in private, but—his love of flamboyant announcements to the press notwithstanding—in secret. Thus any inventions which he did not patent or give freely to the world were more or less shrouded in mystery. And, because of the handling of the papers he left behind after his death, the range of his achievement continues to remain a partial mystery.

  If this has been frustrating to the scientists who have succeeded Tesla, it has at least been stimulating. After a period of obscurity, the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in July 1956 brought an international reawakening to the importance of the inventor’s life and genius. Interest in his work, fired by a growing awareness of the riddles surrounding it, has been escalating ever since, almost as if he had been reborn in his true psychological age.

  He was honored by centennial celebrations in America and Europe. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers dedicated its fall meeting in Chicago to a review of his life and inventions. Commemorative programs were arranged by the Institute of Radio Engineers, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the Franklin Institute, and various universities, the Tesla Society playing an active role in such recognition. Permanent memorials in the form of scholarships and medals were proposed and exhibits presented by science museums. Special ceremonies were conducted at Niagara Falls, and a statue was later erected in his honor on Goat Island, a gift from the people of Yugoslavia. Chicago, reminded by attorney/author Elmer Gertz that it should be eternally grateful to him for having made the Columbian Exposition of 1893 the “wonder of the globe,” dedicated a new public school to Tesla’s memory.

  The inventor’s old colleagues of the AIEE journeyed to Europe to attend more celebrations, statue unveilings, and dedications in his honor. The International Electrotechnical Commission in Munich took formal action, making his name an international scientific unit, the tesla joining such historic electrical symbols as farad, volt, ampere, and ohm.1

  As the exploration of space accelerated, so did interest in Tesla, especially from the standpoint of beam weaponry and microwave work. In America, Russia, Canada, and various other countries, projects in his name or derived from his pioneering, from weather-control to nuclear fusion, began to attract scientific attention. Some were just the shoestring efforts of loners, their laboratories old Quonset huts. Some were top secret and financed by enormous budgets.

  Tesla’s year of secret experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899 provided the basic impetus for much of this new exploration. His Colorado Springs Notes, when they appeared in English in 1978 under the imprint of the Tesla Museum at Belgrade, were eagerly awaited by many scientists. But even this work left important questions unanswered.

  The bulk of his papers having vanished from America, reliable information was harder to come by than the recurring rumors of conspiracy, espionage, and patent theft. Scientists thought it strange that some aspects of his Colorado Springs research found in scattered sources did not appear in the Yugoslav-published Notes. Only by piecing together fragmentary information could the magnitude of his experiments be comprehended.

  Around 1928 O’Neill, by merest chance, had happened to see a legal advertisement in a New York newspaper announcing that six boxes placed in storage by Nikola Tesla would be sold by the storage warehouse for unpaid bills. Feeling that such material should be preserved, he went to the inventor and asked permission to try to obtain funds to reclaim the material.

  “Tesla hit the ceiling,” he recalled. “He assured me he was well able to take care of his own affairs…. He forbid me to buy them or do anything in any way about them.”

  Shortly after the inventor died, O’Neill got in touch with Sava Kosanović, told him about the boxes, and urged him to protect them. He was never able to get a positive statement from Kosanović that he had obtained the boxes and examined the contents. “He gave evasive assurances that there was no reason for me to worry….”

  Others too were interested in the papers. A young American engineer engaged in war work consulted Tesla on a ballistics engineering problem because he could not get time on an overworked computer, and Tesla’s mind was known to offer the nearest thing to it. Soon he became fascinated with Tesla’s scientific papers and was allowed to take batches of them home to his hotel room where he and another American engineer pored over them each night. They were returned the next day, a procedure which continued for about two weeks prior to the inventor’s death.

  Tesla had received offers to work for Germany and Russia. After the inventor died, both engineers became concerned that critical scientific information might fall into foreign hands and alerted United States security agencies and high government officials.

  The relevant records that I have obtained from federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act reveal strange twistings and inconsistencies in the handling of the inventor’s estate. Tesla left tons of papers, barrels and boxes full of them. But he left no will. He was survived by five nieces and nephews, of whom two lived in America at the time of his death.

  Curiously, the FBI released his estate to the Office of Alien Property, which promptly sealed the contents. Since Tesla was an American citizen, the OAP’s concern in the matter was hard to justify. After a court hearing, however, the estate was released to Ambassador Kosanović, one of the heirs.

  Swezey, who also had hoped to write a biography of Tesla (his death intervened), received the following account in 1963 from a former aide of Ambassador Kosanović’s:

  “Back in 1943… when Tesla died, it was a matter of very short time when Mr. K was issued a certificate from or by the Office of Custodian of Alien Property conveying to Mr. K full rights to the Tesla papers…. he had them all packed up and sent off to the Manhattan Storage Company where they remained until ready for packing and shipping off to Yugoslavia in 1952. Mr. K paid for storage charges. . . . All this time the certificate from the Alien Property Office was in my possession (in case of need). . . .

  “You will perhaps remember that a number of times Mr. K mentioned the fact that the custodian at the storage warehouse told him that some government guys were in to microfilm some of the papers. . . . when we opened the safe in the present museum building (in Belgrade, Yugoslavia) the bunch of keys, which was the last thing Mr. K. flung into the safe at the New Yorker Hotel before the combination was re-set to a new combination, were not found in the safe, but in an entirely different box. Also the gold medal (the Edison Medal) was missing from the safe…. Anyway, for years and years Mr. K was bothered by the fact that Tesla papers had been gone thru and just before his departure from Washington in 1949–50(?) he decided to follow my suggestion to call Edgar J. Hoover [sic] and ask him. Mr. Hoover denied categorically that the FBI had gone into the papers….”

  The aide said Tesla had told his nephew that “he wished to leave his works, property, etc., to his native country.” (Not only is this uncorroborated but the papers were in English.)

  Immediately after Tesla’s death an exchange of telegrams flew between FBI Agent Foxworth of the field division of the New York Bur
eau and the director of the New York Bureau of the FBI. The day following discovery of the body, Agent Foxworth reported:

  “Experiments and research of Nikola Tesla, deceased. Espionage— M. Nikola Tesla, one of the world’s outstanding scientists in the electrical field, died January seventh, nineteen forty-three at the Hotel New Yorker, New York City. During his lifetime, he conducted many experiments in connection with the wireless transmission of electrical power and… what is commonly called the death ray. According to information furnished by X [name deleted], New York City, the notes and records of Tesla’s experiments and formulae together with designs of machinery . . . are among Tesla’s personal effects, and no steps have been taken to preserve them or to keep them from falling into hands of people . . . unfriendly to the war effort of the United Nations. . . .” (The FBI was, however, advised by the office of Vice-President Henry A. Wallace that the government was “vitally interested” in preserving Tesla’s papers.)

  Bloyce D. Fitzgerald, “an electrical engineer who had been quite close to Tesla during his lifetime,” continued Foxworth, “advised the New York office that on January seventh, nineteen forty-three, Sava Kosanović, George Clark, who is in charge of the museum and laboratory for RCA, and Kenneth Swezey . . . went to Tesla’s rooms in the New Yorker [author’s note: the correct date would have been January 8], and with the assistance of a locksmith broke into a safe which Tesla had in his rooms in which he kept some of his valuable papers. . . . Within the last month, Tesla told Fitzgerald that his experiments in connection with the wireless transmission of electrical power had been completed and perfected.