Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 150

1. THE MISSING PAPERS ← 276 in creating through the medium of a high-speed jet of suitable fluid a vacuous space around a terminal of a circult and supplying the samy with currents of the required tension and volume."" Long afterward in a letter to a colleague, Dr. Trump told what happened when he visited the Hotel Governor Clinton to examine the "device"-eföred in its vault, presumably the same box remembered by the messenger boy in Tesla's room. "Tesla had wamed the management that this ‘device' was a secret weapon," said Dr. Trump, "and it would detonate if opened by an unauthorized person. Upon opening the vault and indicating the package containing the secret weapon, the hotel manager and enployees promptly left the scene." The federal agents who had come along pleo pulled back, the better to głye him the sole distinction of opening the parcel It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string te remembered hesitating, thinking how beautiful the weather was out doors, and pondering on why he was not outside too. He lifted the parcal onto a table and, mustering his courage, snipped the string with his pocket knife. He removed the wrapping Inside was a handsome polished wooden chest bound with brass. It required a final effort of courage to raise the hinged tid. Inside stood a multidecade resistance box of the type used for Wheatstone bridge resistance measurements a common standard Hem to be found in every electrical laboratory before the turn of the century! Why had Tesla seen fit to terrify the staff and management o the hotel with this harmless object for so many years? Perhaps he had become so accustomed to having his hotel bills paid behind his back believing that the hotels, honored to have him living there, had routinely dismissed the billings), that he was insulted when the Governor Clinton brashly demanded its $400. Although the FBI closed its Tesla file in 1943, it didn't seem to want to stay closed. It was reopened in 1957 when an informant complained that a New York couple were issuing newsletters containing “Information pertaining to flying saucers and interplanetary matters and explotting the Inventor's name and fame. They allegedly claimed that Tesla's engineers, after his death, had completed a "Testa Set," a radio device for interplanetary communication, that the device had been placed in operation in 1950 and since then Tesla engineers had been in close touch with alien spaceships. Once again the FBI decided no action was warranted and the file was closed. THE MISSING PAPERS ← 277 Sweasy had never put much credence in the "secast weapon" rumors and had written to an inquisar: "Because Tesla was a recluse, and himself liked to talk in mystifying terms during his later years, i think many legends have been built up about the dozens of ideas he had evolved but which were not permitted by others to see the light of He said he had known the Inventor wall for two decades before his death: "Tesla's greatest genius flamed up during a doaen or so years just before and slightly after the turn of the century. What he did after that may have carried the germs of some of the developments we are witnessing today, but he had not carried any of them at least on paper or in any other tangible form-to the point of practicality …..” Perhaps, but between 1945 and 1947 an Interesting exchange of letters and cables occured among the Air Technical Service Command at Wright Field, Ohio, in whose Equipment Laboratory much top-secret research was being performed, Military Intelligence in Washington, and the Office of Allen Property subject, fles of the late Nikola Tesla On August 21, 1945, the Air Technical Service Command sequested permission from the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Force in Washington, D.C., for Private Bloyce D. Fitzgerald to go to Washington for a period of seven days "for the purpose of securing property clearance on enemy impounded property" On September 5, 1945, Colonel Holliday of the Equipment Laboratory, Propulsion and Accessories Subdivision, wrote to Lloyd L. Shaulis of the OAP in Washington, confirming a conversation with Fitzgerald and asking for photostatic copies of the exhibits annotated by Trump from the estate of Tesla. It was stated that the material would he used "in connection with projects for National Defense by this department," and that all of it would be returned in a reasonable length of time. That was the last time that the Office of Allen Property or any other federal agency in the United States admitted to having possession of Tesla's papers on beam weaponry Shaulls wrote to Colonel Holliday on September 11, 1945, saying. "The materials requested have been forwarded to Air Technical Service Command in case of Lt. Robert E. Houle. These data are made available to the Army Air Force by this office for use in experiments, please return them." They were never returned. These were the full photostatic copies, not merely the abstracts. OAP has no record of hour many coples were made by those who 150