The FBI and the Missing Tesla Papers Page 470

470 two beers and three hot dogs, and a good salary would have been $18.00 per week. Nikola Tesla was an honorable man who had his share of bad luck. Due to various reasons, he had been forced out of the Waldorf-Astoria for lack of payment of rent 15 years earlier, but he did sign over Wardenclyffe to them in lieu of the debt. Nikola Tesla was also self- centered and may have believed that the world owed him a place to live — for he had given the world a power and lighting system that had advanced civilization in many incalculable ways including the spawning of a multi-billion dollar industry.

Perhaps Nikola Tesla characteristically took out his anger on hotel personnel? He was known to have been abrasive to maids and his office secretaries (O'Neill, 1944). Perhaps Nikola Tesla enjoyed knowing he had talked a hotel into accepting a useless apparatus in place of $400. This was at least the third time he did not pay his hotel bills (i.e., $935 to the Waldorf-Astoria in 1917 [New York Times, 3/18/1916, p. 8, col. 3]; $3,299 to the St. Regis Hotel in 1924 [New York Times, 5/28/1924, p. 14, col. 1]). Nikola Tesla was known to live on credit as the following bold headline states: "Inventor Now Penniless — Tells Court He Has Lived on Credit for Years at Waldorf" (New York Sun, 3/1618/1918, in Anderson and Ratzlaff, 1979, p. 104). Referring again to the Governor Clinton Hotel episode (circa, 1933), a decade later (i.e., 1943), the hotel locked the supposed dangerous device in their vault. Nikola Tesla had an unusual sense of humor, and this could have been something to chuckle about during lugubrious nights when he was forced to confront his failures.

On the other hand, Nikola Tesla had constructed hundreds of working inventions through 50 years of remarkable industrial achievement. My own opinion is that he had created a working model of his death ray, and that early precursors could even have been destroyed in the fire that ravaged his laboratory in 1895.

The recent publication of Nikola Tesla's (1937d/1985) article establishes that the inventor wrote out the entire specifications to his device. I have assumed that this paper, and possibly other related treatises were confiscated by a military agency. Nikola Tesla may have displayed a laser-like device to the Governor Clinton Hotel management in order to prove the worth of the collateral, and at some point in the future swapped it for another machine — or federal agents could have achieved this same end, so that Trump ended up looking at a bogus contraption thereby inadvertently furthering the cause of secrecy by honestly reporting what he found.