Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (63 page)

It was a dismal night with rain falling in torrents. My brother, a youth of eighteen and intellectual giant, had died. My mother came to my room, took me in her arms and whispered, almost inaudibly, “Come and kiss [Dane].” I pressed my mouth against the ice cold lips of my brother knowing only that something dreadful had happened. My mother put me again to bed and lingering a little said with tears streaming, “God gave me one at midnight and at midnight took away the other one.”
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Viereck not only wanted Tesla to reactivate the hidden complexes associated with the death of Dane but also to reflect on the very process of how his fertile mind gave birth to ideas. One can only guess as to whether or not Viereck trod into the realm of Oedipus and Narcissus, dead-brother kissing rituals, and Tesla’s monastic life of quirks, self-denial, and affection displaced onto feathered friends.

In 1937, on his eighty-first birthday, at a luncheon in his honor, Tesla was “bestowed” both the Order of the White Lion from the minister of Czechoslovakia and the Grand Cordon of the White Eagle, the highest order of Yugoslavia, from Regent Prince Paul by order of King Peter. Belgrade also set up an endowment of $600 per month, which they paid to him for the rest of his days. Looking much like an eagle himself, with his long, hawk-shaped proboscis accentuated by his extreme leanness, the skeletal inventor “followed his annual custom [after the award ceremony] by playing host to a group of newspaper men at his Hotel New Yorker suite.” There, dressed in his finest tuxedo, the wizard read a prepared
treatise outlining his latest inventions and plans for contacting nearby planets.
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Just a few months later, in late autumn, while negotiating with emissaries from the war departments of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, England, the Soviet Union, and the United States, Tesla was run down by a taxicab. Refusing to see a doctor, the inventor managed to limp home. He stayed in bed on and off for six months. He had cracked three ribs. Thus, in May 1938, still in the process of recuperation, he declined an invitation to attend another award ceremony at the National Institute of Immigrant Welfare in honor of him, Felix Frankfurter, of Harvard Law School, and Giovanni Martinelli, of the Metropolitan Opera.

Accepting the award in Tesla’s honor was Dr. Paul Radosavljevich, professor of pedagogy at New York University. Rado read a statement from Tesla which apparently verified the famous 1885 Edison story that Edison had laughed off the promised debt to Tesla of $50,000 for redesigning machinery.
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In 1939, just as World War II was about to start, George Sylvester Viereck set off on a surreptitious journey to the Fatherland. There, amid the pageantry of swastikas and the Gestapo, he met yet again with Adolf Hitler and received a communiqué signed by the Führer in his own hand. The date was February 26, 1939. Upon his return, Viereck continued his practice of preaching the Nazi line in a variety of publications, writing some articles under an assumed name, interpreting FDR as having a “messianic complex” and Hitler as “a dynamic genius, and a poet of passion…first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his country-men.” Viereck was arrested and indicted on two counts of seditious conspiracy. It was quickly established that he was on the German payroll supposedly as a journalist but obviously as a paid propagandist. Conceited and selfdeluded, the bewildered and obtuse philosopher was sent to jail, where he wrote poetry for the next few years.
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Just as references to Tesla were deleted from engineering texts, Viereck’s name was “dropped from many anthologies, and
Who’s Who.
”
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Thus, both individuals disappeared from history books but for totally different reasons.

As World War II began, Tesla was becoming more feeble, lapsing in and out of states of coherence. During one of his more lucid moments, he wrote (with the help of his nephew Sava Kosanovic) the foreword to Vice President Henry Wallace’s address on “The Future of the Common Man” for the Serbo-Croatian edition. The essay not only portrays a prophet who envisions a better world in the future; it also betrays the conflict and humiliation he himself suffered in his dealings with the greedy industrialists who capitalized on his inventions with little regard for his well-being, let alone the welfare of mankind as a whole: “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.”
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The old man gazed out the window as his nimble fingers unconsciously preened the ruffled feathers of his beloved white pigeon with the brown-tipped wings. Although it was January, a lightning storm rumbled in the distance. “I’ve done better than that,” the wizard mumbled as the sun peeked through the clouds to reveal the iridescent purples, violets, greens, and reds of the neck feathers of another of the more hearty birds that came to visit. Tesla thought back affectionately to his days as a boy on the farm, rolling down the hill carefree with Mačak, his pet cat. And then his mind swirled with thoughts of violent arguments with Morgan, his unfinished fifteen-story transmission tower, and his friend Mark Twain, who was now in financial trouble. Requesting funds from Kosanovic, Tesla handed the money to a messenger to deliver to Twain, giving as the address his old laboratory on South Fifth Avenue, a street that no longer existed. Unable to locate the deceased writer, the boy returned to Tesla, but his explanation was ignored. The old man told the boy to keep the money if he could not deliver it.
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Having neglected to pay the rent on his belongings held at Manhattan Storage, the wizard had managed somehow to mail out a check for $500 to a Serbian church fund-raising event held in Gary, Indiana.
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G. J. Weilage, manager of Manhattan Storage, threatened to put the lot up for auction. The outstanding bill was $297. Perhaps too disillusioned to care, Tesla ignored the last warning, and Weilage made good on his promise, placing an announcement in the local papers. Noticing the advertisement, Jack O’Neill rushed to contact Tesla’s nephew Sava Kasanovic, who was now the Yugoslavian ambassador stationed in New York. Kasanovic covered the debt and continued to make the carrying charge (fifteen dollars per month), saving this invaluable legacy from tragic dismantlement.

“One night,” Tesla wrote, “as I was lying in bed in the dark, solving problems as usual, [my beloved pigeon] flew through the open window and stood on my desk. As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me—she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes—powerful beams of light. When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. I knew that my life’s work was finished.”
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Lingering at the abyss throughout the beginning years of World War II, Tesla continued to lead his dual life, meeting with friends and
dignitaries whenever possible and lending out his secret papers to mysterious men. A few months later, he was dead. The date was January 7, 1943; he was eighty-six years old.

2000 Are Present at Tesla’s Funeral

Great in Science Attend

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.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The funeral service was held in Serbian in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. With the coffin open, the Sermon for the Dead was conducted by the venerable Reverend Dushan Shoukletovich, rector of the Serb Orthodox Church of St. Sava. Over the radio, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia read a moving eulogy written by Croatian author Louis Adamić, as a long line of mourners filed past. The list of honorary pallbearers included Dr. Ernest Alexanderson of GE, who gained his wealth and fame from inventing a powerful high-frequency transmitter; Dr. Harvey Rentschler, director of the research laboratories of Westinghouse; Edwin Armstrong, father of FM radio; Consul General D. M. Stanoyevitch of Yugoslavia; William Barton, curator of the Hayden Planetarium, where Tesla often went to meditate; and Gano Dunn, president of J. G. White Engineering and Tesla’s assistant a half century before, during his paradigm-shifting experiments delivered just a few blocks away at Columbia University.
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“We cannot know, but it may be that a long time from now, when patterns are changed, the critics will take a view of history,” Hugo Gernsback wrote propitiously in his magazine. “They will bracket Tesla with Da Vinci, or with our own Mr. Franklin…One thing is sure,” Gernsback concluded. “The world, as we run it today, did not appreciate his peculiar greatness.”

Col. David Sarnoff, president of RCA, also took the soapbox in Tesla’s behalf: “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 was about to sue Sarnoff and RCA for infringing his FM patents, helped place Tesla in the proper historical perspective when he 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 forty years ago on a boy about to decide to study the electrical art. Its effect was both profound and decisive.”
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On September 25, 1943, just nine months after Tesla’s death, the Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyards near Baltimore launched the USS
Nikola Tesla,
a ten-thousand-ton Liberty ship. Sponsors at the ceremony included a number of Croats, such as Louis Adamić and violinist Zlatko Balokovic, and also Serbs, such as Tesla’s nephews Sava Kosonavic and Nicholas Trbojevich.
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The
New York Sun
editorialized:

Mr. Tesla was eighty-six years old when he died. He died alone. He was an eccentric, whatever that means. A nonconformist, 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. His guesses were right so often that he would be frightening. Probably we shall appreciate him better a few million years from now.
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War Department
Military Intelligence Service

22 January 1946

Alien Property Custodian

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. Nichola Tesla, which may contain data of great value to the above Headquarters…In view of the extreme importance of those files…we would like to request also that we be advised of any attempt by any other agency to obtain them.

Sincerely yours,
Col. Ralph E. Doty
Chief, Washington Branch
¹

A
fter Tesla’s death, the FBI, the Office of Alien Property (OAP), and factions of the War Department conspired to impound and protect the Tesla secret-weaponry papers. The United States was in the midst of a world war, and Tesla’s ties to arms merchants, Communists, through his Yugoslavian nephew, and a notorious German propagandist all helped prompt the covert agencies to safeguard this material until it was properly analyzed. A half century later, they have yet to release it.

Raised to the level of a national hero within the Slavic countries, Tesla was considered practically of royal stock. Thus, his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, rose to become a representative of the newly forming
Yugoslavia republic at the “Eastern European Planning Board,” which met in Czechoslovakia.
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Kosanovic, like Tesla, wanted a unified country, but their orientations were different.

In 1941 the Nazis continued their policy of intimidation and deception by trying to force a treaty with King Peter of Yugoslavia. Backed by the people, Peter refused to agree to an alliance and therefore suffered a fatal blow when Germany masterminded a brutal invasion involving troops from Bulgaria, Italy, and Hungary and also three hundred Luftwaffe bombers.
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Prof. Michael Markovitch of Long Island University, a Serb living in Croatia during World War II, has said that ninety thousand Serbs were killed by the Croats; and when I inquired why, he said, “Because the Croats were fascists,” that is, because they had aligned themselves with the Nazis. As a youth in the midst of the war, Markovitch had watched the bodies float down the river. When asked why he survived, his reply was “sheer luck.”

Concerning the Tesla mythology, Markovitch said that ever since he was a child, he was aware that Tesla was considered a great national hero. Years later, as Hitler’s invasion became imminent, Markovitch and his countrymen had expected Tesla himself to return to Belgrade and shield it from the Nazis by harnessing his impenetrable death shield! Unfortunately, Tesla never came.
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Kosanovic was not as romantic a figure, and although a Serb, he abandoned the exiled king in order to back the rising Croat leader, Joseph Tito (Josip Broz), and his Communist doctrine. Tito was a solid choice; although he was an ally of the Soviets, he was able to maintain autonomy. He also sought to unify the warring factions; his marriage to a Serbian woman was a powerful symbol in advancing this goal.
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Since the Soviet Union was an ally, Kosanovic, as a Yugoslavian ambassador, was able to travel freely to America to discuss various diplomatic tactics with the new leadership. Thus, during the course of World War II, he was able to attend to his ailing uncle in New York and also try to finalize plans to set up a museum in Belgrade in order to honor the great inventor.

In 1942, Tesla became more seriously ill and suffered from palpitations and fainting spells. Although Tesla’s true commitment was to the young exiled king Peter, Tesla’s nephew was able to coax the inventor into sending a message to Tito which preached unification between Serbs and Croats. Kosanovic also admitted shielding Tesla from factions of the Serbian royalty at the same time; however, when Peter arrived in New York City, he actively helped arrange a meeting between Tesla and the king.

Having unsuccessfully talked with Churchill in England and Roosevelt in Washington, both of whom were reluctantly backing Tito, King Peter was at least consoled by Eleanor Roosevelt, who attended a large
party in his honor at the Colony Club in New York. Organized by the American Friends of Yugoslavia, the king’s mother, Queen Marie, and also Anne Morgan, Pierpont’s daughter, attended, but Tesla was too ill to come.

Therefore, King Peter (with Kosanovic) took a cab to the Hotel New Yorker to confer with the virtual patriarch of his country. Shocked by Tesla’s cadaverous condition and upset by the terrible chain of events in his country, Peter told the inventor that he had hoped that he could have returned to Yugoslavia to free it from the Nazis. In his diaries, Peter also revealed that he and Tesla wept together “for all the sorrows that had torn apart [their] homeland.”
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A few months later, Tesla was dead. A maid discovered his body on January 8, 1943. While Hugo Gernsback rushed to make a death mask, Kenneth Swezey, Sava Kosanovic, and George Clark, director of a museum and laboratory at RCA, entered the apartment. With a locksmith and the hotel management present, they removed various documents from the inventor’s safe. Although the FBI alleged that “valuable papers, electrical formulas, designs, etc., were taken,” the hotel management confirmed that Kosanovic removed only three pictures and Swezey took the 1931 testimonial autograph book created for the commemoration of Tesla’s seventy-fifth birthday.

These events were monitored by the ubiquitous surveillance mastermind J. Edgar Hoover, hard-line anti-Communist and protector of American interests. Hoover wrote in a memorandum under the heading “Espionage,” that he feared that Kosanovic, as heir to the Tesla estate, “might make certain material available to the enemy.” Kosanovic had been identified as a member of the Eastern European Planning Board, but because of the complicated condition of the Balkan states, there was essentially no way for Hoover to ascertain exactly where Kosanovic’s alliances rested. He could have been affiliated with King Peter, the Communist Tito, Fascist factions associated with Mussolini, Hitler, the Soviet Union, or none of the above.
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Consistent with his suspicious nature, Hoover also questioned Tesla’s sympathies, even though the inventor was friends with Vice President Henry Wallace and Franklin Roosevelt through letters to his wife, Eleanor. One of the main reasons for Hoover’s concerns was Tesla’s address before the Friends of Soviet Russia which he gave at the Grange Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1922.
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On January 8, Abraham N. Spanel, the forty-two-year-old president of the International Latex Corporation of Dover, Delaware (now Playtex), who was residing in New York City, had called FBI agent Fredrich Cornels to discuss Tesla’s death-ray experiments. As the inventor had just died, Spanel feared that Kosanovic would obtain the pertinent papers and pass them to the Soviets.

Spanel had already begun to make a name for himself in media and military circles by having invented floating pontoon stretchers for soldiers wounded in amphibious landings and by turning back the million-dollar profits to the government for the war effort. Born in Odessa in 1901, Spanel would later became a vociferous anti-Communist who spent upward of $8 million throughout the 1940s and 1950s “buying space in the United States press to reprint articles that would contribute to an understanding of world problems.” Having fled to France in 1905 to escape the anti-Semitic pogroms of Russia with his family as a child, Spanel, at the age of seven, came to the United States in 1908. A graduate of the University of Rochester, Spanel had invented electrical appliances and pneumatic products in the early 1920s before starting the International Latex Corporation in 1929.
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Realizing the potential importance of the Tesla invention in the “democratic” fight for world supremacy, Spanel had contacted Dr. D. Lozado, adviser to Vice President Wallace, and a Mr. Bopkin of the Department of Justice. Bopkin agreed to contact J. Edgar Hoover regarding the affair, and Lozado conferred with Wallace and perhaps even FDR, calling Spanel back shortly after their conversation to convey that the government was “vitally interested in Tesla’s papers.”
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Spanel had also contacted one Bloyce Fitzgerald, whom the FBI had pegged as “an electrical engineer who was a protégé of Tesla’s,” who had also called Cornels. Having met Fitzgerald at an engineering meeting a few years earlier, Spanel became highly interested in the Tesla weapon, possibly hoping to become involved in a profitable business developing the death-beam device for the U.S. military.

Fitzgerald, still in his twenties, had been in postal communication with Tesla since the late 1930s. He had called the inventor on his birthday in 1938 to congratulate him and continued this practice for the next four years. In 1939, Fitzgerald tried to meet Tesla, but it appears that he did not do so at that time. Just two weeks prior to Tesla’s death, Fitzgerald proposed another meeting; it may have taken place. He was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professors Keenan, Woodruff, and Kay “in the solution of certain problems regarding the dissipation of energy from rapid fire weapons” and desired to discuss his “radiation problem” with the elderly inventor.
¹¹

It is plausible that at this delicate time Fitzgerald was able to borrow the various papers in which he was interested. Coincidentally, Tesla had declared that “efforts had been made to steal the invention. [My] room had been entered and [my] papers examined, but the…spies left empty handed.”
¹²
Fitzgerald, who also worked for the Ordinance Department of the U.S. Army, later told Cornels that he “knows [that] the complete plans, specifications and explanations of the basic theories of these things are some place in the personal effects of Tesla…[and] that there is a working
model [of the death ray]…which cost more than $10,000 to build in a safety deposit box of Tesla’s at the Governor Clinton Hotel.”
¹³

To corroborate this story, another acquaintance of Tesla’s, Charles Hausler, a hired hand who took care of the inventor’s pigeons, later said that Tesla “had a large box or container in his room near the 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 for presenting it to the world.” Hausler also added that the device was later stored in the basement of a hotel.
¹⁴

Fitzgerald reported that Tesla had claimed that he had eighty trunks in different locations in the city containing inventions, manuscripts, and plans of his various work. The young engineer reiterated the need for the government to obtain the Tesla papers “for use in war.” He was also worried about the “loyalty and patriotism to the Allied Nations” of Sava Kosanovic and another nephew, Nicholas Trbojevich.

During these same days, Cornels’s overseer, D. E. Foxworth, an assistant director of the FBI, assured those concerned that “this matter would be properly handled,” that Tesla’s “nephew, who is his heir,” would not be able to send the papers to “the Axis Powers.”
¹⁵
On the eleventh, yet another FBI agent, T. J. Donegan, brought up the possibility that the New York district attorney could have Kosanovic and Swezey picked up “discretely on a burglary charge.” However, this was not done. Three days later, Donegan notified Hoover that the situation “was being handled as an enemy custodian matter and therefore we should take no further action.”
¹⁶

What happened appears to be this: The FBI attempted to remove themselves from the responsibility in the Tesla case, thereby allowing the OAP to take charge. Nevertheless, because of the FBI’s initial involvement, numerous people contacted them through the years in attempts to gain access to the Tesla estate. The OAP questioned the legality of their own jurisdiction, since Tesla was a naturalized citizen. However, as Kosanovic was probably legally entitled to his uncle’s estate, the OAP had justification in considering the material alien property. According to Irving Jurow, who was the attorney assigned to the Tesla case at the time of his death, “the activities of the OAP were not only not ‘illegal,’ it was the only government agency with statutory power to seize ‘enemy assets’ without court order.”
¹⁷
Because of this unique jurisdiction, it was the OAP and only the OAP that maintained legal control over the papers until they were released ten years later. Naturally, both real and imagined concerns involving the war situation were the key factors influencing what to the uninformed appeared
to be an illegal action. The Germans still controlled a large part of Europe, and the outcome of the war was by no means determined in January 1943. Rumors that the enemy was also developing an ultimate weapon were also well founded.
¹⁸

Walter Gorsuch, alien property custodian, thereupon ordered all of Tesla’s belongings, including the safe from his apartment and other holdings in the basement of the New Yorker, shipped to where Tesla’s other possessions were, Manhattan Storage. Gorsuch, however, was out of the office the day Tesla’s body was discovered, and it was the young attorney Irving Jurow who handled the case.

“At about noon, on Saturday, January 9th,” Jurow recalled, fifty years later, “I was ordered by telephone from the Washington office not to close up shop, but to wait for further instructions. I was informed that a Nikola Tesla had just died, that he was reputed to have invented, and in the possession of a ‘death ray,’ a significant military device capable of destroying incoming war planes [presumably Japanese on the West Coast] by ‘projecting’ a beam into the skies and creating a ‘field of energy’ which would cause the planes to ‘disintegrate.’ Moreover, it was suspected that German [enemy] agents were in ‘hot pursuit’ to locate the device or the plans for its production.”

With orders to impound all of Tesla’s belongings, Jurow was also instructed to “visit other hotels where Tesla had resided and to take similar action.” Jurow was accompanied by four individuals from the Office of Naval Intelligence, army intelligence, and the FBI. Arriving at the Hotel New Yorker, “We learned that Tesla had been found dead by the service maid. We were told that he was laid out in his bed…with only a pair of stockings on.” The officials were also told that Kosanovic had been in the room and had removed three photographs.