[The Guzman Prize was finally awarded to the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969 after the first Moon landing.]
His apparatus, Tesla said, employed more than three dozen of his own inventions. ‘It is absolutely developed,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be surer that I can transmit energy a hundred miles than I am of the fact that I can transmit energy a million miles up.’
It used a different kind of energy than was commonly employed which travels through a channel of ‘less than one-half of one-millionth of a centimetre’. ‘I could undertake a contract to manufacture the apparatus,’ he said.
While he was certain that there was life on other planets, the problem with his equipment, he said, was hitting other moving planets with a needle-point of tremendous energy. But he thought that astronomers could help solve this problem. First they should aim this Tesla Ray at the Moon where they could easily see its effects – ‘the splash and the volatilization of matter’. He also imagined advanced thinkers living on other planets were experimenting in this field, mistaking Tesla energy rays for cosmic rays.
On the practical front, he announced a new type of tube. His experiments had been rewarded with ‘complete success’ and he had ‘produced a tube which it will be hard to improve further’.
It is of ideal simplicity, not subject to wear and can be operated at any potential, however high – even 100 million volts – that can be produced. It will carry heavy currents, transform any amount of energy within practical limits and it permits easy control and regulation of the same. I expect that this invention, when it becomes known, will be universally adopted in preference to other forms of tubes and that it will be the means of obtaining results undreamed of before. Among others, it will enable the production of cheap radium substitutes in any desired quantity and will be, in general, immediately more effective in the smashing of atoms and the transmutation of matter. However, this tube will not open up a way to utilize atomic or subatomic energy for power purposes. It will cheapen radium so that it will be just as cheap – well, it will get down to $1 a pound – in any quantity.
Tesla was annoyed that some newspapers said he would be giving a full description of his invention at his birthday lunch. He could not release the information, he said, because he was bound by financial obligations involving ‘vast sums of money’. And this was not an idle boast, he insisted: ‘It is not an experiment. I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.’
The New York Times, perhaps with tongue in cheek, went on to report that Dr Tesla entertained his guests with colourful personal reminiscences and observations including his opinions on dieting and immortality.
More Money Worries
Although Tesla’s mind was as fertile as ever, his financial situation continued to decline. When Hugo Gernsback showed him Westinghouse’s latest radio set, Tesla saw immediately that they were flagrantly infringing his wireless patents. He protested, but was in no position to fight a large corporation.
Unable to pay his hotel bill, again, Tesla handed over the ‘working model’ of his death beam as collateral. It was worth, he said, $10,000. He also told Jack Morgan that the Russians were keen to buy his death beam to defend themselves against the Japanese. However, he already owed Morgan a great deal of money over his bladeless turbines and, despite filling his letters with attacks on Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ with Astor who Morgan hated, no money was forthcoming.
Eventually, Westinghouse acknowledged Tesla’s contribution to the company and paid him $125 a month as a consulting engineer. They also came to an agreement with the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lived rent free for the rest of his life. In his last years, the Yugoslav government also gave him an honorarium of $7,200 a year. This allowed him to give generous tips to those who had rendered him the slightest assistance and hand-outs, that he could ill-afford, to anyone he thought was in need.
Tesla’s Last Interviews
Tesla gave some of his last interviews to Nazi apologist George S. Viereck. Again he explained that he was not a believer in God in the conventional sense. Perhaps under Viereck’s influence, Tesla espoused eugenics – the forced sterilization of those thought to be mentally unfit – which were then being practised in the US as well as Nazi Germany.
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
Although at the time, the environment was hardly on the agenda, Tesla told Viereck:
Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War. The pollution of our beaches such as exists today around New York City will seem as unthinkable to our children and grandchildren as life without plumbing seems to us. Our water supply will be far more carefully supervised, and only a lunatic will drink unsterilized water.
He looked forward to a time where science and education would be more important than war:
Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The 21st century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the 21st century will give a mere ‘stick’ in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
Now gaunt from his meagre diet, he had clear views on the future of food:
More people die or grow sick from polluted water than from coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants. I myself eschew all stimulants. I also practically abstain from meat. I am convinced that within a century, coffee, tea, and tobacco will no longer be in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life. The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly. It will simply be no longer fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients. [Bodybuilder] Bernarr Macfadden has shown how it is possible to provide palatable food based upon natural products such as milk, honey, and wheat. I believe that the food which is served today in his penny restaurants will be the basis of epicurean meals in the smartest banquet halls of the 21st century.
There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India, now chronically on the verge of starvation. The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected 14 years later under the stress of war by German chemists.
After subsisting on a diet of bread, warm milk and what he called ‘Factor Actus’, Tesla gave up solid food altogether, living on thin gruel of cauliflower, leeks, cabbage, turnips and lettuce. But he was still strong enough to make predictions. Then, in his last days, he lived on milk and honey, believing them to be the purest foods. Nevertheless, the future looked bright:
Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.
What’s more, the work would be done by robots, something Tesla had been working on for nearly 40 years.
At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.
Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a ‘thinking machine’. I anticipated this development.
I actually constructed ‘robots’. Today the robot is an accepted fact, but the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the 21st century the robot will take the place which slave labour occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations.
Fragments of Olympian Gossip
Under the influence of Viereck, Tesla, who was always competitive, wrote a poem call Fragments of Olympian Gossip, poking fun at the scientific establishment:
While listening on my cosmic phone
I caught words from the Olympus blown.
A newcomer was shown around;
That much I could guess, aided by sound.
There’s Archimedes with his lever
Still busy on problems as ever.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable.
Below, on Earth, they work at full blast
And news are coming in thick and fast.
The latest tells of a cosmic gun.
To be pelted is very poor fun.
We are wary with so much at stake,
Those beggars are a pest – no mistake.
Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teaching all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable.
I am much too ignorant, my son,
For grasping schemes so finely spun.
My followers are of stronger mind
And I am content to stay behind,
Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,
These masters of mine may do the rest.
Come, Kelvin, I have finished my cup.
When is your friend Tesla coming up.
Oh, quoth Kelvin, he is always late,
It would be useless to remonstrate.
Then silence – shuffle of soft slippered feet –
I knock and – the bedlam of the street.
World War II
Tesla was growing feeble, but with the help of his nephew Sava Kosanovic he wrote a foreword to a Serbo-Croat edition of The Future of the Common Man by the then Vice-President Henry Wallace (1888 – 1965). In it, he said: ‘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.’
While the regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul (1893 – 1976), sought to make a treaty with the Nazis, King Peter (1923 – 70) opposed it. When he came of age at 17, Germany invaded and the king went into exile. Sava Kosanovic went with him. However, he began to favour the Communist guerrilla leader Josip Broz Tito (1892 – 1980), who the British and Americans were also reluctantly backing. However, in the US, Kosanovic brought King Peter to Tesla’s hotel. In his diary King Peter wrote:
I visited Dr Nikola Tesla, the world-famous Yugoslav-American scientist, in his apartment in the Hotel New Yorker. After I had greeted him the aged scientist said: ‘It is my greatest honour. I am glad you are in your youth, and I am content that you will be a great ruler. I believe I will live until you come back to a free Yugoslavia. From your father you have received his last words: “Guard Yugoslavia.” I am proud to be a Serbian and a Yugoslav. Our people cannot perish. Preserve the unity of all Yugoslavs – the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes.’
The two of them wept over the fate of their homeland.
Generous to the End
Although Tesla was dogged by his own financial problems, he was generous to the end. A few days before he died, he called one of his favourite messenger boys, a lad named Kerrigan, and gave him an envelope, addressed to: Mr Samuel Clemens, 35 South Fifth Avenue, New York City. He told him it was to be delivered as quickly as possible. After a while the boy returned, saying that there was no such street as South Fifth Avenue. Tesla was furious. Mr Clemens was a very famous author who wrote under the name of Mark Twain, he told Kerrigan, and the address he had given was correct.
Kerrigan tried again. And when he had no luck he reported to his office manager, who quickly spotted the boy’s difficulty. South Fifth Avenue had changed its name to West Broadway years before and Mark Twain had been dead over 30 years. The address Tesla had given him was that of his laboratory that had burnt down. Kerrigan returned to Tesla to explain his difficulties. Tesla was outraged when the boy told him that Mark Twain was dead. ‘He was in my room here last night,’ Tesla insisted. ‘He is having financial difficulties and needs my help.’ And he sent the boy to deliver the envelope again. Confused Kerrigan returned to his manager who opened the envelope to see whether it contained any clue to where it should be delivered. All that was inside was a blank piece of paper and $100 in $5 bills. When Kerrigan returned the envelope to Tesla yet again, the inventor told him that, if he could not deliver the money, he should keep it.
At the same time, while Tesla could not pay the $297 for his possessions that were being kept in storage, he sent a cheque for $500 to a Serbian Church in Gary, Indiana. Tesla’s biographer John J. O’Neill saw an advertisement for Tesla’s possessions that were being sold off by the storage company to cover the bill and contacted the inventor’s nephew Sava Kosanovic who paid the bill, preventing the loss of Tesla’s priceless papers.
The Slight Hint of a Smile
During the latter part of 1942, Tesla became practically a recluse. Physically weak, he retired to bed and permitted no visitors. Hotel staff were not to visit his room unless he summoned them and he refused to listen to any suggestion that they call a doctor. On 5 January 1943, he called a maid to his room and issued orders that he was not to be disturbed. Nothing was heard from him for three days. Finally the maid decided to risk his wrath and check up on him. She entered the room in trepidation and found him dead, with the slight hint of a smile on his gaunt face.
As he had died alone without medical attention, the police were called. The Medical Examiner put the time of death as 10.30 pm on Thursday 7 January, just a few hours before the maid’s early morning visit. Tesla had died in his sleep. The cause of death was given as coronary thrombosis and the Medical Examiner noted that there were ‘No suspicious circumstances.’
Agents from the FBI came to open the safe in Tesla’s room and read his papers in case there was anything in them that might aid the war effort. However, Hugo Gernsback, Kenneth Swezey, Sava Kosanovic and George Clark of RCA had already entered the apartment. While Gernsback went to organize a death mask, the other three had the safe opene
d by a locksmith with representatives of the hotel management present. The FBI said that valuable papers were taken. However, the hotel management said that Kosanovic only took three pictures and Swezey took the testimonial book created for Tesla’s 75th birthday. However, Kosanovic was sure that someone had already gone through his uncle’s effects. Technical papers were missing, along with a black notebook he knew that Tesla kept. It contained several hundred pages of notes, some of which were marked ‘government’.
State Funeral
The Yugoslav ambassador Dr Constantin Fotitch laid on a state funeral for Tesla at the Cathedral of St John the Divine. Over 2,000 mourners were present, including other inventors. While the church was Episcopalian, the service was Orthodox and conducted in Serbian. The honorary pallbearers included Dr Ernst Alexanderson of General Electric who patented a high-frequency transmitter, Edwin Armstrong, father of FM radio, Gano Dunn, president of J.G. White Engineering who had been Tesla’s assistant at his ground-breaking lecture at Columbia, and representatives from Westinghouse, Columbia University and the Hayden Planetarium where Tesla would often go to meditate. A number of Yugoslav ministers were there. King Peter II of Yugoslavia sent a wreath and the chief mourner was Tesla’s nephew Sava Kosanovic, who was by then president of the Eastern and Central European Planning Board, representing Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Greece. Later he became Yugoslav ambassador to the US.
Scientists paid tribute to his intellect and technological achievements, and telegrams of condolence came from Nobel Prize winners, prominent scientists, literary figures and US officials. A message from Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt read: ‘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.’
Vice-President Henry Wallace paid a more personal tribute: ‘Nikola Tesla, Yugoslav born, so lived his life as to make it an outstanding example of that power that makes the United States not merely an English-speaking nation but a nation with universal appeal. In Nikola Tesla’s death the common man loses one of his best friends.’
Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah Page 17