Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 63

        In November, 1898, Tesla announced that he could abolish war.

        The inventor had designed a small, inexpensive, radio-controlled boat which, through its supposed ability to destroy the biggest battleships, would make great navies useless. Not many years later, he was talking of another super-weapon: a "death ray" which would annihilate whole armies.

        Yet Tesla never suspected that the real super-weapon of the future would come from atomic fission. For Einstein's basic notion which led to smashing the atom, he had only ridicule. Alone in his middle age, he had fallen out of step with the world's great thinker.

        Not all Tesla's later inventions were fantastic. Some, like his induction coils and oscillators, and pioneer work on "tuned" electrical circuits, were highly important.

        Though he never, succeeded in transmitting power without wires on a big scale, he did prove that a single wire is enough. And some of his brilliant prophecies inspired the more plodding scientists to work out the practical problems of induction heating, radio-telephone, radar and many other electronic marvels of today.

        But as he grew older, he withdrew further and further within itself. His strange prophecies sounded like a voice from another planet. For companionship now, the old man had only his dreams, and they grew stranger with the years. Completely alone at last, a stooped, gaunt figure with thin, silvery hair, he used to slip from his hotel room, buy a bag of birdseed and trudge slowly over to a park where hundreds of pigeons awaited him. These were his friends. They needed him, though the world did not.

        When he grew too ill to go out, each day he sent a Western Union messenger to the pack. After feeding the birds, the boy was instructed to see if any of them seemed sick. If so, he was to bring them back to Tesla's room where the inventor would nurse them gently back to health.

        Perhaps this sad little labor of love showed that the man who changed the world had, at last, discovered a great truth. Perhaps he knew now that the greatest power for good lies not in lonely thought but in a human heart pulsating-like his own "tuned circuits"-in tune with the hearts of his fellowmen. Or did he ever know? You could never be sure about Tesla.

Winnie Wit

IN IN THE FARLY 1920s, when Winston Churchill had offended both his own supporters and the political opposition, the late George Bernard Shaw wrote him: "I enclose two vouchers for the première of my new play, for yourself and a friend-if any."

        Back to the playwright promptly came the theater checks with this note from "Winnie": "I regret I am unable to attend the première of your new play. Please send me two vouchers for the second performance-if any."