Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 45

TU The Genius Who Walked Alone by ALFRED HI. SINKS Nikola Tesla was a great inventorand also a prophet without honor WHEELS C Started turning early on the morning of January 8, 1943. Anxious FBI agents slipped into a room in the Hotel New Yorker where, Late the night before, a chambermaid had discovered the body of Nikola Tesla, dead at 86, regarded by many as the greatest scientifie genius of his time. For years, Tesla had been making scientific predictions so fantastic as to be literally out of this world. Of late he had been working or so he said-on revolutionary new weap ons powerful enough to annihilate armies at a single blow. There was only one Tesla, and the story might-incredible as it sounded be true. The old man's safe might hold these secrets, and JUNE, 1955 the Government could not risk the chance of enemy spies getting there first. Half hoping to find something which would bring a sudden and decisive end to World War II, the G-men broke open the dead man's strong box. If anything of importance was discovered, it has never been revealed. Yet, their quick action was jus tified, for you could never De Sure about Tesla, one of the strangest men who ever lived. Most people took him with a grain of salt, ver no serious scientist dared shrug away his claims as nonsense. N after Thomas Edison ried it and Tesla proved him wrong. The world's leading physicists and electrical engineers had to eat crow back in the 1880s when Tesla solved a problem they had thought impossible. That one accomplishment the invention of a practical alternating-current motor and gen115 i 45