Tesla: Master of Lightning Page #8

Nikola Tesla, inventor of the Tesla

coil, the induction motor

and hundreds of other electrical

devices, died last night

in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker.

On last Thursday night,

here in our city of New York,

a man who was 87 years of age

died in his humble hotel room.

On January 10th 1943, Mayor Fiorello

LaGuardia of New York

paid tribute to Tesla on the radio.

He died in poverty

but he was one of the most useful

and successful men who ever lived.

Were we to eliminate from our industrial

world the result of Tesla's work

the wheels of industry would

cease to turn

and our electric trains and cars

would stop.

Our towns would be dark,

our mills and factories dead tonight.

But Tesla is not dead.

The real, the important part of Tesla

lives in his achievement, which is great,

an integral part of our civilization,

of our daily lives,

of our current war effort.

Ironically, only five months

after Tesla's death,

the United States Supreme Court declared

elements of the Marconi patent invalid.

The decision confirmed Nikola

Tesla's patent priority

for the fundamental

technology of radio.

Unknown subjects, equipment, experiments

and research of Nikola Tesla

deceased. Espionage.

Following Tesla's death, fears

rapidly increased

that he might have invented

a powerful new weapon.

FBI special agent in charge, P. E. Foxworth,

was called in to investigate.

He had been informed that Tesla's

papers were not secure.

Tesla is reported to have completed

and perfected his experiments in the

radio transmission of electrical power

commonly referred to as the death ray.

A distant relative of Tesla named

Sava Kosanovich

is taking steps to get possession of

these important documents and plans.

Tesla's nephew Kosanovich was an

up-and-coming Yugoslav diplomat

with suspected connections

with the communists.

He insisted that his uncle's

effects be returned to Yugoslavia.

Kosanovich had asked a locksmith

to come and open the safe

thinking there might be a

testament, a will, in the safe.

A will was never located.

And there was a lot of talk

then about secret weapons and

negotiations with the USSR.

It was all kinds of talk, you know.

Shortly before his death,

Tesla showed a delivery boy

a box in his room

that he said contained

a powerful weapon.

A number of people called me

and asked me,

did I ever see in the hotel room

a certain kind of a box, you know...

They were looking for some secret

contraption that Tesla had invented.

I never saw anything like that.

The U.S. Office of Alien Property

immediately seized all of

Tesla's possessions

until their ownership

could be established.

There's every evidence that they

did look through all his papers

because the papers were not in

order and certain things were missing.

All his technical papers

on beam weapons

were secretly microfilmed

by U.S. military agents.

On August 6th 1945, the first atomic

bomb was exploded on Hiroshima, Japan.

Soon after, the bomb would

be in the Soviets' hands.

During this period, copies of Tesla's

papers on the beam weapon

were shipped to Wright Field

in Dayton, Ohio.

There, a top-secret research

program began called "Project Nick"

to find a defense against

nuclear-missile attack.

Copies of his... Some of his papers

were sent to Wright-Patterson in 1945,

not to my facility, not even to a

predecessor of my facility,

but to another part of the base,

for analysis.

And then they vanished. Nobody

seems to know what happened to them.

In 1952, Sava Kosanovich obtained

permission from U.S. authorities

to return Tesla's estate, still stored in

New York, to the inventor's homeland.

I personally believe

that the U.S. government may have

overlooked some things of value

in the Tesla papers before they were

released to the Yugoslav government.

A Tesla museum was opened in Belgrade

by Yugoslavia's president, Marshal Tito.

But during the Cold War,

the museum was off-limits to

western scientists and scholars.

Then, in 1960, Soviet Premier

Khrushchev announced that the USSR

had developed a powerful

new weapom.

There was concern in the U.S. that

the Russians may have access to

Tesla's missing papers on beam

weapons in Belgrade and elsewhere.

It's possible that these papers

on the particle-beam weapon

were obtained by the Soviet Union.

But that wasn't the only topic.

In other words, I think that

the United States

has always had Tesla's papers

on particle-beam weaponry.

An American beam weapon

program began at Lawrence

Livermore laboratories.

But engineers could not produce

an effective directed-energy weapon.

I've always been a sort of a fan

of Nikola Tesla, an admirer,

and definitely he had the concept

of a charged particle-beam weapon

back in the 1930s.

I haven't a clue, to be quite honest,

how he meant to actually do it.

In 1978 evidence suggested that

the Soviets were attempting to build

a huge beam weapon

near Semipalatinsk in the Ukraine.

Soon after, President Ronald Reagan

announced the Strategic Defense Initiative

in March 1983.

I call upon the scientific community

in our country,

those who gave us nuclear weapons,

to turn their great talents now to

the cause of mankind and world peace,

to give us the means of rendering these

nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

Tesla's concept for a beam weapon

defense shield

was finally taken seriously

by the United States

to combat the destructive

threat of atomic weapons.

In spite of circumstantial evidence,

there is no direct proof that

Tesla's ideas or plans

were used in the

Strategic Defense Initiative.

And even today, after decades of

investment and research,

scientists still disagree on

whether beam weapons are realistic.

Basically, let me just make

a short statement.

It's all I'm really at liberty to say.

A considerable amount of effort

has taken place in the United States

and in a number of other countries

trying to get these things up

to a real weaponizable status.

And we stopped at that point.

No U.S. government archive has any

record of Tesla's technical papers,

which were copied immediately

after his death.

And what has become of

Tesla's great dream

to transmit electrical power

without wires?

This is the Navy and Air Force High-

Frequency Active Auroral Research Program,

or HAARP, in Gakona, Alaska.

The large antenna array is designed

to beam high-energy microwaves

into the ionosphere.

Tesla was a genius,

because way before anybody

knew or even understood

the physics of the Earth and

what we call today the ionosphere,

which is a layer of ionized particles

about 80 kilometers above the Earth,

he conceived it, and he tried to use it

to produce a variety of new concepts.

The HAARP project evolved from

a patent filed in 1987

in which Tesla's work is referenced.

It proposed using the ionosphere

like an enormous electrical circuit

to transmit power around the planet.

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