In 1937 Tesla presented a plan to the Amtorg Trading Corporation, an alleged Soviet arms front based in New York City. Two years later, after completing stage one of the plan and testing the device in the USSR, Tesla was sent a check for $25,000. The system required a series of power plants along the country’s coast to scan for enemy aircraft. The beam was projected in a straight line and was effective up to 200 miles, the same distance of the curvature of the Earth. Tesla offered peace time applications for the beam as well such as transmitting power over great distances, and radical suggestions such as heating the upper atmosphere to provide a man-made aurora borealis.
Whether Tesla’s ideas at the time were taken seriously or not is unclear, many experts today consider his idea to be an impossible feat. Though his “peace-beam” has an unmistakable resemblance to the charged-particle weapons later developed by two of the countries he sent detailed descriptions to, the Soviet Union and the United States. Some see his technological end to war as impossible today as it was in the 1930′s. Regardless of opinion there are many mysteries surrounding what happen to Tesla’s technical and scientific papers after his death in 1943. Just before his death at the height of World War II Tesla claimed he had perfected his “peace-beam” so naturally the FBI and other government agencies took a great interest in his work. They claimed they wanted to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Axis Powers or the Soviets.
On the morning of his death, his nephew Sava Kosanovic’, who was an up-and-coming Yugoslav official hurried to his uncles hotel room. When he arrived Tesla’s body had already been removed and his room was ransacked. Many of his technical papers were gone along with Tesla’s black notebook that was labeled “Government.” P.E. Foxworth, assistant director of the New York FBI office was called to investigate. According to Forworth, the government was “vitally interested” in preserving Tesla’s papers. Two days after his death, the Office of Alien Property seized all of his possessions. After careful examination of Tesla’s work, Dr. John G. Trump concluded, “he was concerned with the production of wireless transmission of power, but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”
After World War II Tesla’s papers were sent to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH to aid in a operation code-named “Project Nick” that was heavily funded and placed under the control of Brigadier General L.C. Craigie. The project was to test Tesla’s concepts on beam weaponry, details have never been published and the results of the project are unknown. Peculiarly, the copies of Tesla’s papers disappeared and have never surfaced again. In 1952, Tesla’s remaining papers and possessions were released to his nephew Sava and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where a museum has been created in Tesla’s honor. For years journalists and scientists had little or no access to Tesla’s work, however, Soviet scientists were of course granted full access and in 1960 Soviet Premier Khushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet Council that, “a new and fantastic weapon was in the hatching stage.”
Meanwhile, work on beam weapons also continued in the United States and in 1958 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated the top-secret project code-named “Seesaw” which would develop charged-particle beam weaponry. Over ten years and $27,000,000 later the project was scraped due to high costs and “technical problems.” In the 1970′s there was speculation and fear that the Soviets had infact completed Tesla’s beam and a weapon facility was under construction near the Sino-Soviet border in southern Russia. President Ronald Reagan in 1983 responded by urging government scientist to, “turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
Today, after billions of dollars in research the SDI program is still considered a failure and we have no means of stopping a nuclear attack. For many years scientists have fought to gain access to Tesla’s “missing” papers with no avail. It looks as though Nikola Tesla took the secrets of accurately projecting beams of energy through the atmosphere to his grave.
His life and legacy is severely misunderstood and he was robbed of the credit he deserved. His genius may one day be realized if technology is ever able to make yet another of his “dreams” into reality.
This educational article was written by Matthew Jorn
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