In the Footsteps of Genius Page 21

and formulas, together with the plans of the apparatuses, are with the rest of Tesla’s property, and so far nothing has been done to assemble them and preserve them from people — who are hostile to the war efforts of the United Nations…” (The FBI at that time received a message from the Vice-President of the United States, Henry Wallace, in which it is stated that the government is “vitally interested in Tesla’s works”).

The FBI then had at its disposal information that Tesla had already completely finished all the experiments with the wireless transmission of electrical energy and a “revolutionary new type of torpedo.” It was considered that he had succeeded in making certain functional models, “whose construction cost him ten thousand dollars,” which are preserved in the Hotel “Governor Clinton” and are connected with the death rays or the wireless transmission of electrical energy.

Kosanović too, they say, in the Bureau for the Property of Aliens told the local official Walter Gorsuch what he first did when he learned of Tesla’s death. With several people he went to Tesla’s room to look for a will. After the safe was opened, Swezey took a book with the testimonials presented to Tesla on his seventy-fifth birthday. Kosanović took three of Tesla’s photographs with him. According to the manager of the hotel and Kosanović’s statement, nothing else was taken away. The safe was closed, and Kosanović set a new combination which only he knew.

On January ninth, Gorsuch and Bois Fitzgerald, an electrical engineer and a close friend of Tesla, sealed all his property and with two trucks transported it to a warehouse in Manhattan, where thirty packages of Tesla’s things had already been stored since 1934. They were then sealed by order of the OAP.

The Washington office of the FBI even went so far as to advise its New York office to discreetly take steps with the public prosecutor for Kosanović to be detained for alleged burglary and for various documents which, it was supposed, Kosanović had taken from Tesla’s safe to be recovered.

Secretly examined works

However, at the headquarters in Washington an unusual decision was soon made. Edward Tamm of the FBI in Washington informed D. M. Ladd of the New York office that the whole matter had been handed over to the jurisdiction of the OAP, and because of that, Tamm wrote, “there is no longer any reason to interfere with it.”⁴⁰

Soon the well-known American engineer Dr. John G. Trump, who at that time worked in the research committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development at the Ministry of National Defense, was invited to take part in the examination of Tesla’s scientific papers. Together with him other experts were also present at the examination: Willis George, Edward Palmer and John J. Corbett.

Dr. Trump stated that they then examined only those materials which were found with Tesla at the moment of death. All of them were at that time occupied with tasks which were dictated by the state of war, so they believed that by reviewing