by Marc Seifer
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
OFFICE OF ALIEN PROPERTY
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.
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.”19
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.”20 Jack O’Neill’s papers were also confiscated,21 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.22
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.23
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.”24
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.”25
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.26
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.27 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.
AMTORG TRADING CORPORATION
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.28
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 do
llars 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.”29
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!”30
