The FBI and the Missing Tesla Papers Page 468

Sometime later Trump wrote to an associate about his experience in viewing the alleged death ray held in a safety deposit box at the Governor Clinton Hotel:

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. (quoted in Cheney, 1981, p. 276)

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! (p. 276)

An FBI report (1/12/1943) described the hotel managers' assessment of the inventor somewhat differently, and it does not appear that they took him as seriously as Trump alleges:

The Hotel managers report he [Tesla] was very eccentric if not mentally deranged during the past ten years and it is doubtful if he has created anything of value during that time, although prior to that he probably was a very brilliant inventor.

Did Tesla Actually Build a Prototype of the Death Ray? The inventor appears to have told both Hausler, his pigeon caretaker and Fitzgerald, the Army engineer, that he did build a working model; and from an interview I had with Mrs. Czito (1983), whose husband's father and grandfather were both trusted Tesla employees, she recalls that her father-in-law used to recount stories of Tesla bouncing electronic beams off of the moon. This is not a death ray, but it certainly supports the hypothesis that the inventor created working models along these lines.

Joseph Alsop (1934), who interviewed Tesla at the Hotel New Yorker, and who was one of the first to fully report Tesla's work with particle beam weapons, described an incident Tesla had when experimenting with cathode ray tubes:

Sometimes a particle larger than an electron, but still very tiny, would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube and hit him. He said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it entered his