The First Casualty

21

Nikola Tesla was eccentric. Like Howard Hughes, he had an obsession with germs, washing his hands constantly. He could be easily identified in a restaurant by the stack of eighteen napkins upon which he insisted so he would not have to use the same one twice. He meticulously calculated the volume of each dish he ate and consumed only food that had been boiled. He was fascinated with numerology, demanding that the number of his hotel room be divisible by three.

He was particularly fond of the pigeons in Central Park, ordering special birdseed for them. One, a white female with gray-tipped wings, was his favorite. He told of her flying into his hotel room one night, her eyes “shining with a light the like of which I had never before seen” before she died in his hands. He took this as an omen of his own death.

As idiosyncratic as he might be, he was compelling when seeking investors for his inventions. J. P. Morgan put $250,000, a fortune by the standards of the day, into a scheme by which Tesla would use the ionosphere and the earth’s electromagnetic field as a giant transformer to power all forms of transportation worldwide. When he returned to the noted financier seeking additional money for the project, he made the mistake of telling the famously conservative banker how his invention would make the nations of the world one. Morgan was horrified and additional funding was not forthcoming.

Several of Tesla’s inventions had a decided dark side. The electromechanical oscillator so enjoyed by Mark Twin could, according to its inventor, destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in a matter of minutes. Given several days, it could “split the earth in two like halves of an apple.” When skeptics pointed out a number of flaws in his claim, Tesla replied he could at least “peel the surface of the earth away, which would serve to destroy mankind just as completely.”

Another was his so-called “Death Ray,” the stuff of which comic-book supervillains are made. In 1937, he described it thus to a New York Times reporter: “It will send a concentrated beam of particles: through the free air of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles from the defending nation and will cause enemy millions to drop dead in their tracks.”

Since light trends to diffuse over distance and the concentrated beam of the laser was still in the future, the “ray” was to consist of tiny particles of mercury charged with more than one million volts of electricity sprayed into the air from towers by means of a special nozzle that resealed itself to maintain the vacuum necessary to eject the mercury particles. This device was never patented, if indeed it ever existed, so we do not know how the nozzle both sprayed particulate matter and maintained a vacuum. We do know that both the U.S. military and Great Britain declined to purchase the device. The Soviet Union paid Tesla $25,000 for the plans. Had the Soviets succeeded in manufacturing the machine, World War II would have come to an earlier conclusion.

The author made considerable effort to find existing evidence of the “Death Ray,” if it existed, including reviewing the microfiche documents in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, some 155,000 in all, including almost 70,000 bits of correspondence both personal and business and more than 45,000 papers of scientific content. The Nikola Tesla Museum of Science in Colorado Springs, Colorado, contains re-creations of a number of the man’s inventions, including the oscillator. It also has copies of his journals, which are infuriatingly incomplete. No mention of the “Death Ray” was found.