Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (64 page)

The military officers were “concerned about the death ray model, but I was the only one who had authority.” Taking a taxi, Jurow and the others visited each of the hotels, which included the St. Regis, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Governor Clinton, and they also visited Manhattan Storage. Tesla’s possessions were impounded there, and the safe-deposit box at the Governor Clinton was also impounded.

With Walter Gorsuch, Jurow went to visit Ambassador Kosanovic at his hotel on Central Park South, where they apparently also met Nikola Trbojevich, Tesla’s other nephew, and an elderly lady who did not speak English. Gorsuch and Jurow saw the photos on a table and left. “I was told later,” Jurow recalled, “probably through the staff of the OAP, that Tesla’s trunks contained mostly newspapers and bird seed, and that the safe deposit box contained a model of some type of device, whether the ‘death ray’ or not, is not clear. It was also rumored that the Soviet Union had
offered Tesla $50 million to come to the USSR and work on his ‘death ray’ but he refused.”

As Jurow had never heard of Tesla before January 8, 1943, he saw the inventor as a “deadbeat” because he did not pay his hotel bills. “He may have been ‘disturbed’ because he spent so much time feeding pigeons,” Jurow said. But the story was too strange and too incomplete for him, so he called the Westinghouse people to try to verify who Tesla was. “They were ecstatic,” Jurow recalled. “They said that without Tesla there would have been no Westinghouse.”
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The Manhattan Storage inventory did not mention the birdseed, which played so prominently in Jurow’s memory. Possessions listed included “12 locked metal boxes, 1 steel cabinet, 35 metal cans, 5 barrels and 8 trunks.” Gorsuch also ordered the “large hotel box at the Hotel Governor Clinton held for over 10 years as security for unpaid bills sealed.”
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Jack O’Neill’s papers were also confiscated,
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although they were probably returned to him, for he was able to publish his extensive biography a year later.

Although Kosanovic assured O’Neill that “there was no reason to worry” and that the OAP “conveyed full rights” to the Tesla papers to him; in fact, Kosanovic was highly concerned. He hired Philip Wittenberg, from Wittenberg, Carrington & Farnsworth, to protect his interest. Although the lawyer pleaded the case, the government countered with advice from the War Policies Unit of the Department of Justice. They ruled that Kosanovic could not touch the estate. This edict was maintained throughout the 1940s. Tesla’s secret weaponry papers were scrutinized by various divisions of the military, although the nephew was given the combination to the safe and took care of the fifteen dollars-per-month rent for the storage of the property during the entire period.

Within a week of Tesla’s death, Walter Gorsuch met with his Washington representative, Joseph King, and together with H. B. Ritchen of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, they called in Colonel Parrott of Military Intelligence and “Bloyce Fitzgerald of the U.S. Army,” whom they considered “a former employee of Tesla’s.” One key problem discussed was that Tesla was “supposed to have been working for, and in the pay of the Yugoslav government-in-exile.” Fitzgerald also discussed the supposed Tesla model held in a vault at the Governor Clinton Hotel.
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It was determined that before Tesla’s estate could be released to Kosanovic, a thorough probe of its contents should be undertaken. Prof. John O. Trump, director and founder of MIT’s High Voltage Research Laboratory and secretary of the Microwave Committee at the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was commissioned to go to the warehouse and conduct
the investigation of the contents of the eighty-eight-odd trunks. They were held in rooms 5J and 5L. Trump set aside two days for the task. He was aided in the search by an inventory of the Tesla holdings compiled by Mr. O’Sullivan, one of the guards at Manhattan Storage.

Trump was accompanied by five individuals: two members of the OAP—John Newinton, from the New York office, and Charles Hedetneimi, chief investigator from Washington—and three from Naval Intelligence—Willis George, a civilian agent; John Corbett, who served as stenographer; and Edward Palmer, who took photographs and probably microfilm copies. Both Corbett and Palmer were also listed as chief yeomen of the U.S. Marine Reserves.
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As the only qualified scientist able to comprehend the work, Trump spent little more than half this time actually perusing the wizard’s cache. “The second day was somewhat cursory in character,” Hedetneimi reported reluctantly, “since Dr. Trump was confident that nothing valuable would be found. He was entirely convinced that it would be useless to look in the 29-odd trunks which…had…been stored since 1933.”
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The Trump papers, which included a synopsis of about one dozen articles by or about Tesla, began with an opening letter. The professor acknowledged that he and his colleagues investigated the Tesla trunks at Manhattan Storage on January 26 and 27, summarizing first that (1) “no investigation of the Tesla trunks held for 10 years in the basement of the Hotel New Yorker was conducted”; (2) “no scientific notes, descriptions of hitherto unrevealed methods or devices or actual apparatus…of scientific value to this country or which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands [was found]…I can therefore see no technical or military reason why further custody of the property should be retained.” Nevertheless, Trump “removed…a file of various written materials which covers typically and fairly completely the ideas which he [Tesla] was concerned [with] during the later years” and forwarded it or copies of it to Mr. Gorsuch of the OAP.

Trump concluded in his report that the last fifteen years of Tesla’s life were “primarily of a speculative, philosophical and somewhat promotional character.”

On his return to Washington, Trump met with Homer Jones, chief of the Division of Investigation and Research. “Sir,” the MIT professor smugly concluded, “upon the basis of my examination, it is my opinion that the Tesla papers contain nothing of value for the war effort, and nothing which would be helpful to the enemy if it fell into enemy hands.”

“Are you quite certain in this conclusion, Dr. Trump?”

“I am willing to stake my professional reputation on it.”
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Satisfied, Jones sent the report and Trump’s recommendations to
Lawrence M. C. Smith, chief, Special War Policies Unit of the War Division of the Department of Justice, and that, for one faction of the government, ended the matter.
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Trump drew up a report which described a number of articles by the inventor, interviews, and scientific treatises. Exhibits D, F, and Q refer to a highly technical and heretofore underground Tesla treatise written in 1937 entitled
The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media.
This article, in contradiction to Trump’s statement, contained explicit information which had never been published describing the actual workings of a particle-beam weapon for destroying tanks and planes and for igniting explosives. Novel features included (1) an open-ended vacuum tube sealed with a gas jet “while at the same time, permitting and facilitating the exit of the particles”; (2) a way to generate many millions of volts for charging minute particles; (3) a method of creating and directing a non-dispersive stream of such particles with a trajectory of many miles.

Written virtually as a patent application, the Tesla article presents in clear and straightforward terms the mathematical equations and schematics of his death ray. Aside from the unpublished drawing and mathematical analysis of its capability, it employed three most unusual features. The first was its mechanism for creating 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. Electrostatic repulsion was the only means to this end…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.”

The second feature involved the creation of an open-ended vacuum tube by replacing the walled enclosure or glass window with a “gaseous jet of high velocity”; and the third outstanding feature was the means for generating large voltages. Having studied the precursors in the Van de Graaff electrostatic generator (a device which Tesla said was all but useless for generating usable amounts of energy), Tesla replaced the circulating cardboard belt that transferred the charge with an ionized stream of air hermetically sealed in a 220-foot-long circular vacuum chamber. Analogous to the way a shock can be created and transferred by rubbing one’s shoes along a carpet on a dry day, the new fluid airstream belt achieved the same end but to a degree “many times greater than a belt generator.” This charge, which apparently could be as much as 60 million volts, was in turn transferred to the myriad small bulbs at the top of the tower, their round shape and internal structure constructed to augment the accumulation of energy.

Atop this domed citadel, which was planned to be over a hundred feet in height, was the particle-beam weapon. Nestled in a turret as a supergun, the weapon was set up so that tungsten wire could be fed into its highvacuum firing chamber. There minute “droplets” of this metal would be sheared off and repelled out the long barrel at velocities exceeding 400,000 feet per second.
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The entire apparatus apparently was also constructed for nonmilitary purposes, such as for transmitting streams of electrical energy to distant places, much like microwave wireless telephone trunk lines do today.

Although Trump downplayed the importance of this paper, it is, to the present day, classified top secret by the U.S. military, with copies at the time going to naval intelligence, the FBI, the OAP, the NDRC, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, MIT, and most likely, the White House.

Exhibits D, F, and Q state explicitly that Tesla sold the plans for the construction of his particle-beam weapon to A. Bartanian, a Soviet agent of the Amtorg Trading Corporation! These exhibits also specify that Tesla offered the device to the U.S. military, Great Britain, and Yugoslavia.
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Surprisingly, the FBI did not exploit this blatant Soviet connection, even though this was just the kind of thing that J. Edgar Hoover thrived on. One possible reason was that the Soviet Union was an ally at that time. Furthermore, a number of major corporations, such as Bethlehem Steel, RCA, and Westinghouse, were selling equipment to the Soviets via Amtorg, a company that did over a billion dollars of business in America by the time of World War II. FDR, for instance, in 1933, approved $4 million in credit to Amtorg to purchase cotton from American suppliers. Amtorg, in return, supplied the country with furs, caviar, oil, and precious metals. Still operating in America today, Amtorg was unable “to find any mention of Mr. Tesla [in their] records.”
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If Tesla really did receive $25,000 from Amtorg in 1935, which the communiqué with the Soviets implied, why wouldn’t he have paid off his debts to the Hotels Pennsylvania and Governor Clinton and retrieved his secret device held as collateral? An amount as large as $25,000 at the height of the Great Depression was worth roughly twenty times that figure today, yet there is no indication that Tesla obtained great wealth during that period, although he may have received this amount and used it to pay off other debts and purchase other equipment.

A few days after viewing the estate, Trump went to the Governor Clinton to view the actual death ray held in their vault. Charles Hedetneimi of the OAP, reported that “officers of the hotel showed us the handwritten letter in which Tesla stated that he was leaving the equipment as security
and
that it was worth $10,000.
” Trump later recalled the incident: “Tesla had warned the management that this “device” was a secret weapon, and it would detonate if opened by an unauthorized person. Upon opening the vault…the hotel manager and employees promptly left the scene.”

The Trump letter went on to describe his reluctance to remove the brown paper covering and that before summoning his courage, he looked outside and noticed that the day was pleasant. “Inside was a handsome wooden chest bound with brass…[containing] a multidecade resistance box of the type used for a Wheatstone bridge resistance measurements—a common standard item found in every electric laboratory before the turn of the century!”
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“At this point,” Hedetneimi concluded, “Dr. Trump indicated that he had no further interest in the case.”

An FBI report written just two weeks prior to Trump’s visit to the hotel described the managers’ assessment of the inventor somewhat differently, and it does not appear that they took him as seriously as Trump alleges. “The Hotel managers report he [Tesla] was very eccentric, if not mentally deranged during the past ten years and it is doubtful if he has created anything of value during that time, although prior to that he probably was a very brilliant inventor.”
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The inventor appears to have told both Hausler, his pigeon caretaker, and Fitzgerald, the army engineer, that he did build a working model; and in an interview I had with Mrs. Czito, whose husband’s father and grandfather were both trusted Tesla employees, she recalls that her father-in-law used to recount stories of Tesla bouncing electronic beams off the moon. This is not a death ray, but it certainly supports the hypothesis that the inventor created working models along these lines.

The well-known columnist Joseph Alsop, who interviewed Tesla at the Hotel New Yorker and who was one of the first to fully report Tesla’s work with particle-beam weapons, described an experience Tesla had when experimenting with cathode-ray tubes, “Sometimes a particle larger than an electron, but still very tiny, would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube and hit him. He said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out. The particles in the beam of force, [i.e., the] ammunition…will travel far faster.”
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