research paper nikola tesla

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The Mystery of Nikola Tesla’s Missing Files

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: June 1, 2023 | Original: May 3, 2018

After Nikola Tesla was found dead in January 1943 in his hotel room in New York City, representatives of the U.S. government’s Office of Alien Property seized many documents relating to the brilliant and prolific 86-year-old inventor’s work.

It was the height of World War II, and Tesla had claimed to have invented a powerful particle-beam weapon, known as the “Death Ray,” that could have proved invaluable in the ongoing conflict. So rather than risk Tesla’s technology falling into the hands of America’s enemies, the government swooped in and took possession of all the property and documents from his room at the New Yorker Hotel.

What happened to Tesla’s files from there, as well as what exactly was in those files, remains shrouded in mystery—and ripe for conspiracy theories. After years of fielding questions about possible cover-ups, the FBI finally declassified  some 250 pages of Tesla-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act in 2016. The bureau followed up with two additional releases, the latest in March 2018. But even with the publication of these documents, many questions still remain unanswered—and some of Tesla’s files are still missing.

Three weeks after the Serbian-American inventor’s death, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was tasked with evaluating his papers to determine whether they contained “any ideas of significant value.” According to the declassified files, Dr. John G. Trump reported that his analysis showed Tesla’s efforts to be “primarily of a speculative, philosophical and promotional character” and said the papers did “not include new sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

The scientist’s name undoubtedly rings a bell, as John G. Trump was the uncle of the 45th U.S. president, Donald J. Trump. The younger brother of Trump’s father, Fred, he helped design X-ray machines that greatly helped cancer patients and worked on radar research for the Allies during World War II. Donald Trump himself cited his uncle’s credentials often during his presidential campaign. “My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,” he once told  an interviewer.

At the time, the FBI pointed to Dr. Trump’s report as evidence that Tesla’s vaunted “Death Ray” particle beam weapon didn’t exist, outside of rumors and speculation. But in fact, the U.S. government itself was split in its response to Tesla’s technology. Marc Seifer, author of the biography Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla , says a group of military personnel at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, including Brigadier General L.C. Craigee, had a very different opinion of Tesla’s ideas.

“Craigee was the first person to ever fly a jet plane for the military, so he was like the John Glenn of the day,” Seifer says. “He said, ‘there’s something to this—the particle beam weapon is real.’ So you have two different groups, one group dismissing Tesla’s invention, and another group saying there’s really something to it.”  

Then there’s the nagging question of the missing files. When Tesla died, his estate was to go to his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who at the time was the Yugoslav ambassador to the U.S. (thanks to his familial connection with Serbia’s most celebrated inventor). According to the recently declassified documents, some in the FBI feared Kosanovic was trying to wrest control of Tesla’s technology in order to “make such information available to the enemy,” and even considered arresting him to prevent this.

In 1952, after a U.S. court declared Kosanovic the rightful heir to his uncle’s estate, Tesla’s files and other materials were sent to Belgrade, Serbia, where they now reside in the Nikola Tesla Museum there. But while the FBI originally recorded some 80 trunks among Tesla’s effects, only 60 arrived in Belgrade, Seifer says. “Maybe they packed the 80 into 60, but there is the possibility that…the government did keep the missing trunks.”  

For the five-part HISTORY series The Tesla Files , Seifer joined forces with Dr. Travis Taylor, an astrophysicist, and Jason Stapleton, an investigative reporter, to search for these missing files and seek out the truth of the government’s views on the “Death Ray” particle-beam weapon and Tesla’s other ideas.

Despite John G. Trump’s dismissive assessment of Tesla’s ideas immediately after his death, the military did try and incorporate particle-beam weaponry in the decades following World War II, Seifer says. Notably, the inspiration of the “Death Ray” fueled Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, in the 1980s. If the government is still using Tesla’s ideas to power its technology, Seifer explains, that could explain why some files related to the inventor still remain classified.

There is evidence that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, discussed “the effects of TESLA, particularly those dealing with the wireless transmission of electrical energy and the ‘death ray’” with his advisors, according to FBI documents released in 2016. Along the same lines, Seifer and his colleagues in  The Tesla Files  uncovered the role played by Vannevar Bush, whom FDR appointed as head of the  Manhattan Project , in the evaluation of Tesla’s papers. They also looked at the possibility that FDR himself may have sought a meeting with the inventor just before he died.

By visiting some of the key places in Tesla’s life—from his laboratory in Colorado Springs to his last living quarters at the Hotel New Yorker to the mysterious wireless tower he built at Wardenclyffe, Long Island—Seifer, Taylor and Stapleton sought to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the celebrated, enigmatic inventor. They also traveled to California, where some of Tesla’s other groundbreaking ideas —many of which were seen as unrealistic or even crackpot during his own lifetime—now fuel some of the most dominant industries in Silicon Valley.

Although some of his more sensitive innovations may still be hidden, Tesla’s legacy is alive and well, both in the devices we use every day, and the technologies that will undoubtedly play a role in our future. “Tesla is the inventor of wireless technology. He’s the inventor of the ability to create an unlimited number of wireless channels,” Seifer says of the inventor’s lasting impact. “So radio guidance systems, encryption, remote control robots—it’s all based on Tesla’s technology.”

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The inventions, researches, and writings of Nikola Tesla

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Case Files: Nikola Tesla

Introduction

Born in a rural village in Croatia, Nikola Tesla would bring his brilliant scientific mind to America in 1884 to work with Thomas Edison. It was George Westinghouse, however, who fully recognized Tesla's brilliance and initiated a partnership with him. During that temporary partnership with Westinghouse and for many years that followed, Tesla generated amazing new advances in electrical engineering and earned patents by the dozen.

Who was Nikola Tesla? What were his contributions to research in high frequency phenomena?

Brilliant Imaginings

Nikola Tesla was born on July 9, 1856, in Smiljan, a village in rural Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest who was a notable preacher, and a clever and inventive, though uneducated, mother. Tesla was the second son in a family of two boys and three girls. His brilliant 12-year-old brother, Dane, died from an accident when Nikola was five years old.

Tesla grew up a keenly imaginative child, becoming fluent in six languages and developing a fascination for mechanical contraptions. A science prodigy, he was destined for the family occupations of priesthood or the military, but he was able, during a childhood illness, to get permission to pursue his dreams in science. He described his adventurous imaginings to be much more than dreams; instead, they were highly detailed visualizations with a dash of intuition added.

Between the age of 10 and 14, Tesla attended school in the town of Gospic, graduating as a brilliant student who had taught himself as much outside the classroom as he had learned inside. During the next three years at college in Carlstadt, Tesla discovered his lifetime passion: the science of electricity. His announcement of this choice was resisted by his parents, but decisions delayed when Tesla succumbed to the cholera epidemic in his hometown. He was dangerously ill and restricted for a year, and when he recovered, his father permitted his son's engineering ambitions to go forward.

Planting Seeds

In 1875, Tesla began studying electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria. Again, with obsessive effort that permitted only study, he excelled. In Graz, Tesla was able to observe the new Gramme machine, which generated direct current electricity using electromagnets and could also be reversed to operate as an electricity-driven motor. The demonstration planted an intuitive seed in Tesla's brain. Why was it necessary to go to such lengths to convert the alternating current (AC) produced by the dynamo to direct current (DC)? Why not leave the current AC and run the motor that way?

The electrical standard at that time was DC, the same mode produced by a battery, the mode that everyone was used to and accepted. To even imagine usable alternating current was visionary. Tesla's strong instincts told him this was possible, but at that time, in spite of his visualization efforts and the mental gymnastics of picturing many operating dynamo models, he failed to find the solution to this nagging problem.

Breakdown and Revelation

Tesla moved on to study electricity at the University of Prague and, short of funds, left after a year for a minor position with the newly-established Hungarian Telegraph Office in Budapest. Recognition of his ability came quickly and, in 1881, he was made manager of the telephone company and, with his characteristic enthusiasm, worked, invented, and began his avalanche of discoveries. However, his fixation with the alternating motor idea remained and eventually manifested in a critical mental and physical breakdown with highly mysterious symptoms. A hypersensitivity to sounds, light, and vibration brought shivers, twitches, and wildly erratic pulse rates. The illness continued for some months and defied medical diagnosis. Physical improvement came, the extreme sensitivity subsided, and Tesla returned to work still maintaining his captivation with the AC motor puzzle.

The puzzle's solution came to him in dramatic fashion in February, 1882. While walking with a friend at sunset, reciting poetry by Goethe, a spasm of revelation struck Tesla. He stood transfixed, explaining how an AC motor would work. The vision he outlined in minute detail had surfaced spontaneously in response to the questions he had asked himself back in 1875. Tesla later described his visualization powers with the example that he would envisage a design in meticulous detail, then return to the retained image days or weeks later and be able to examine it for wear as if it had been running during the intervening period.

In the midst of this excitement, Tesla's employer sold the telephone company but encouraged this unusual genius to move to Paris for work and expanded opportunities. Tesla moved to Paris in April of 1882.

Interested in learning more about Nikola Tesla? Learn More About His Cresson Award

Dreams to Reality

In Paris, Tesla was referred to a junior engineer position with the Compagnie Continental Edison, the branch of the American company set up to expand Edison’s DC generators and lighting systems. Advancing quickly, Tesla became one of the traveling repairmen sent to work on installations throughout Europe. He continued to be a strange, phobic character and talk enthusiastically about his AC system. He received little attention from colleagues who were too busy expanding the DC system. The company had stunned the public by illuminating the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition and was setting up generators to light-restricted areas such as factories. However, the one-mile transmission range for practical DC transmission limited sales to larger installations such as towns and cities.

The German city of Strasburg did purchase an Edison system, but the dedication ceremony for the railroad station lighting was disastrous. Throwing the switch caused an immediate explosion which blew out a wall of the train shed. The German-speaking Tesla was dispatched to deal with the problem. He spent a year doing the repairs and waiting for various levels of bureaucracy to approve the work.

During the slow time of waiting, Tesla was able to convert his dreams to reality. In a rented machine shop, he built the solid version of the dynamo he had preserved in his mind's eye during the previous year. The model worked beautifully. On returning to Paris, Tesla's plan was to collect his Strasburg bonus for start-up funds and find French financial backers as he built his new AC generators and motors.

The bonus did not materialize, either through lack of funds on the Edison company's part or misplaced expectations on Tesla's part. Edison managers advised Tesla to take his dreams and plans and try them out in America. The 28-year-old who had studied, worked, and traveled through much of central Europe set out for the United States.

Coming to America

Nikola Tesla arrived in New York on June 6, 1884, and set out to look for the friend he would live with. He stopped to do an engine repair job he happened to find along the way, and met with Thomas Edison, a meeting he described as "a memorable event in my life."

Working for Edison, Tesla again advanced quickly and his many patentable designs improved efficiency and controls. Tesla again became convinced that Edison had not lived up to a promise of bonuses and he resigned from the company within a year.

By this time, Tesla's engineering reputation was known and he found financial backing to develop his cherished AC generators and motors. The Tesla Light and Manufacturing Company was established and began to produce AC-driven arc lighting. Following completion of the project that illuminated the city of Rahway, New Jersey, Tesla expected to go on to manufacture his generators but his naivety brought failure. In the fall of 1886, the backers disagreed with Tesla, tricked him out of his money and patents, and left him penniless.

In the next step of his eventful life, Tesla spent the winter of 1886 working as a ditch digger and no doubt telling everyone he met of his AC electricity systems. A foreman recognized his promising labor and introduced Tesla to superiors who also appreciated his possibilities.

Recognized Genius

In April of 1887, the Tesla Electric Company was born in southern Manhattan and Tesla finally had the opportunity to build—in reality—the entire electrical systems, from generators through transformers to motors, that had been in his visual memory since that day in Budapest.

When he applied for the patent on his invention, he was directed by the patent office to rework and resubmit it broken into seven separate sections to reflect the inventive scope of the work. U.S. patents numbered 381,968 through 381,970 and 382,279 through 382,282 were issued on May 1, 1888.

The engineering fraternity began to notice Tesla and he was persuaded to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on May 16, 1888. Tesla's description of the theory and realization of his inventions was greeted as a masterwork; his genius was recognized.

Partnerships

Tesla had very little interest in the commercial development of his inventions, preferring to continue his "dreaming" and trust that somehow funding would materialize. Opportunity came in the form of George Westinghouse, an inventor and businessman from Pittsburgh who had made his fortune manufacturing air brakes for the burgeoning railroad industry. Westinghouse saw Tesla's potential and Tesla accepted his offer of one million dollars for his patents plus a royalty of one dollar per horsepower on all motors produced. Tesla now had enormous riches to match his reputation and his genius.

The arrangement required that Tesla spend time at the Pittsburgh plant as production of his motors started up. He did not enjoy the inevitable conflicts that arose in converting theoretical and pilot plant design to full scale production and gladly returned to New York at the end of the year. Manufacture of the motors began soon afterwards and Tesla happily went back to his laboratory. During the next four years, he received 45 U.S. patents.

At this time, the major application for electricity was in lighting from the DC incandescent lamps developed by Thomas Edison and the AC arc lights supplied by Westinghouse and the Thomson-Houston Company. The United States financial climate in this era of industrial expansion was dominated by the demand for capital and consolidations were common. Thomson-Houston merged with Edison and others to become the General Electric Company and Westinghouse needed partners to ensure its solvency.

These potential partners demanded that Westinghouse cancel his royalty arrangement with Tesla, a step this fellow inventor was reluctant to take. With no other choice, Westinghouse approached Tesla to cancel their contract with its multimillion-dollar value while stressing his commitment to AC power and Tesla's efforts. Citing his friend's confidence and support, Tesla simply tore up the contract. This hugely generous gesture meant that the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company flourished. By definition, Tesla had also shrunk the funding for his own further research and inventions by at least ten million dollars.

Electrical Endeavors

Now 33 years old, a rich man who had rejected marriage in favor of his devotion to science and nature, Tesla applied his genius to wider, greater endeavors. He set out to investigate the limits of electromagnetic radiation. He created an electric current operating at up to 10,000 cycles per second (the U.S. standard is 60) in an effort to duplicate a light beam. He noted the advantage of high frequency current in the transformer used for electricity transmission and went on to invent the Tesla coil transformers in insulating oil baths still in use today. Tesla's experiments reached a frequency of 20,000 cycles per second at extremely high voltages. At an address to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in May, 1891, he caused a sensation by demonstrating 100,000 volt spark discharges five inches long, plus the brightest of electric lamps, from transformed alternating current.

Tesla was now a public hero, celebrated everywhere, yet still obsessed with his appetite for knowledge of all things electrical. He returned the favor of many invitations with elaborate meals for his guests followed by a laboratory show of all kinds of spellbinding, glowing, sparking, and spinning objects driven by electricity. The highlight was a demonstration in which he passed electric current through his body from head to toe, having first determined the optimum frequency and power, then producing these conditions using his high-frequency dynamos and coil transformers.

Eventually accepting European invitations, Tesla took his enlightening lecture and show of amazing electrical experiments on the road. In just eight years since leaving Paris for the United States, Tesla had gone from penniless immigrant to engineer to destitute ditch digger to international celebrity—all by the age of 36. Among the innovative, and later widely adopted, inventions he demonstrated were neon and phosphorescent lamps, electronic tubes for wireless signal reception, and coil tuning principles used in radios.

While in Paris, Tesla learned of his mother's serious illness and left for Gospic; he was able to be with her during her final weeks of life. He was treated as a national hero while in his homeland. A severe illness he suffered while in Serbia prompted Tesla to self-examination and a resolution to avoid all further distractions and concentrate on his experimentation. He returned to New York, resumed his solitary lifestyle, and restarted his investigations of electricity's promise.

In May, 1893, The Columbian Exhibition opened in Chicago with illumination inside and out supplied by the Westinghouse Company using Tesla technologies. The Westinghouse installation was "outshining" Edison's lighting efforts and Tesla supplied a spectacular personal rebuttal to Edison's claim that AC current was by nature too dangerous for everyday use.

Since Tesla's first introduction of AC electricity, the "War of Electric Currents" had been waged, with Edison insisting on the safety of DC current over AC current. The safeness in fact came from the minimal strength of the direct current.

Now Tesla disproved that claim by letting a charge of one million volts be passed through his body without harm. Alternating current had won the "War."

Westinghouse also used the Tesla polyphase system in harnessing the power of Niagara Falls to produce 37,300 kilowatts electrical output from ten generators and transmit it to Buffalo, which was 22 miles away. The system went online in August, 1895.

Front Page News

To advance his experiments with high frequency, Tesla built a reciprocating engine, operable by air or steam, which led to an altercation with the Police Department. From watching the machine's vibrations, he was side-tracked into investigating the mechanical vibrations it caused. He came to believe that mechanical vibrational resonance was similar to the resonances of electric current. The "high-vibrations" machine he built worked too well. It operated strongly enough to raise neighborhood fears of an earthquake and caused the police shutdown of his experiments.

In September, 1898, Tesla was again front page news with his demonstration of a remotely-controlled robotic boat. The model boat was wirelessly controlled by the signals from Tesla's transmitter to its antenna and receiver and then to a servomechanism which translated the signal to a variety of maneuvers: starting, stopping, turning, etc. This was a remarkable combination of wireless telegraphy and robotics.

Tesla, an American citizen since 1889, offered this invention to the U.S. government but it was ridiculed and rejected. A patent was granted in November, 1898, but only after the Chief Examiner had visited New York to confirm the machine was really operable.

Next, Tesla returned to his experiments with power sources but having built an oscillator that produced 4 million volts, he had reached his laboratory's safety limitations and was short of money yet again.

An offer of much space and operating funds sent Tesla to Colorado Springs in May, 1899. The Tesla coil transformers in Colorado were huge, 75 feet in diameter and produced correspondingly large voltages and frequencies—artificial lightning bolts 135 feet long and accompanying thunder heard 15 miles away. Tesla had charged the earth to a level that would only have been achievable by hundreds of natural lightning bolts. Enough power was used to overload and cause short circuits at the powerhouse of the Colorado Springs Electric Company. Again Tesla's experiments were curtailed and he returned to New York to report on his findings. Further details of the Colorado experiments remained locked in Tesla's imagination until he died.

Advancing Humanity

Out of money again, Tesla returned to New York in the fall of 1899, satisfied that he had advanced his overriding and glorious goal of improving the condition of humanity by extending scientific knowledge. Through a friend, he published an article entitled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" which outlined his personal philosophy and his Colorado discoveries. Tesla believed that the type of energy available had been and would continue to be the controlling factor in the progress of the human condition, reducing such developments to a mechanical process. Thus, by discovering and improving electrical energy, he was playing his part in advancing humanity: a grandiose assertion.

J. Pierpont Morgan was Tesla's next benefactor. He had underwritten the Niagara Falls power system and was aware of Tesla's genius and now supported his ideas on transmitting electric power through the earth and on worldwide wireless broadcasting. Morgan could imagine the commercial potential, which never occurred to Tesla, and the importance of controlling the release of the ideas' conclusions. Tesla now had a willing supporter and spoke of Morgan's "noble generosity."

Again, in 1900, Tesla set out to build a new plant in Long Island, New York, intended as a source of a universal power supply and world-wide broadcasting. The enormous scope of his project never troubled Tesla; with Morgan's first donation, he confidently went forward. Stanford White agreed to design the centerpiece building of this new industrial city, a 154-foot-high tower to be the origin of the electrical power. Inevitably, delays crept into the project and bills went unpaid. The project ceased in 1905 and Tesla returned to New York City.

Pure vs. Applied Science

Tesla refused further lucrative offers which did not meet his idealistic purposes and took the consequences. He returned to the design of turbines and by 1910 had models available. However, his entry competed with machinery which had been developed in the interval since Niagara when Tesla was occupied with his Colorado and Long Island enterprises. Tesla's secretive nature and stubbornness caused problems and he met an audience which was not inclined to cooperate. The Tesla turbine, a machine of great ingenuity and promise, did not succeed.

In 1912, the Nobel Committee announced that Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were the recipients of the Physics Prize; instead, the prize went to Gustav Dalen. Details of the reversal are unclear but it is known that Tesla refused the prize (and the $20,000 that came with it). Tesla differentiated between inspirational discoverers such as himself and methodical improvers such as Edison; he gave greater value to the former. Tesla was a pure scientist and Edison an applied scientist, and they should not be in combination. Tesla was persuaded to accept the 1917 Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers but made his disinterest noticeable.

Continued Progress

Tesla continued his work on power generation, making occasional announcements of progress which reached the press. He mentioned many discoveries but supplied no experimental details. He had enough money to live and always remained optimistic. There was talk of Tesla having invented a "death ray beam"; he spoke of sending a beam from Earth to the dark side of the moon. The discovery of atomic physics sent Tesla's mind racing to cosmic possibilities as he celebrated what he saw as the reach of man nearing that of “the Creator”. He described himself as "merely an automaton endowed with power of movement, responding to the stimuli of the sense organs and thinking and acting accordingly”.

His admiration for the human mind stood in contrast to his definition of the human body as "a meat machine which responds to external forces”.

Tesla died of heart failure, a forgotten man, on January 7, 1943, the Orthodox Christmas Day of that year. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately removed the papers from Tesla's safe, citing wartime security concerns. His funeral was conducted in New York, and his body was cremated.

Introduction (Science)

Michael Faraday first demonstrated the connection between magnetism and electricity by moving a magnet inside a coil of wire. So long as the magnet moved in relation to the coil, an electric current was induced in the wire; when the magnet was stationary, the current ceased. Faraday further suggested that the electromagnetic forces which occurred spread into the area around the wire. The first electricity generator, known as a dynamo, applied these principles with a cranked permanent magnet spinning inside a wire coil. Each time the magnet turned, a current in alternating directions was produced, depending on which pole of the magnet was passing the wire. All electric currents available at the time of this discovery were the direct currents from the batteries invented by Alessandro Volta, so this alternating current was altered to direct by adding a commutator (switch) to the dynamo design.

The Gramme dynamo, which so intrigued Tesla, improved on previous versions. It was made up of a series of thirty coils, connected in series with a commutator at each connection, placed inside a rotating, magnetized iron ring. It created an almost uninterrupted direct current with the drawback that Tesla noticed—sparking at the commutator brushes due to the tiny power disruptions. The dynamo was reversible; a supply of electricity to the coils induced rotation of the magnet, which could be connected to the spindle of a motor. Electrical force could be converted to mechanical force and vice versa.

Two-Phase Induction Motor

In the two-phase motor, two sets of coils are set perpendicular to each other surrounding the core. When alternating current is sent to the coils, they become electromagnets where polarity rapidly changes with each reversal of current flow. As the first coils are supplied with current, they create a magnetic field which starts the core turning. When the first coil’s current supply reverses, the second coil set is at its maximum supply point and creates its own magnetic field; the core spins on. In effect, the "magnetization" amount never varies and a rotating magnetic field is created. The result is a smooth-running, commutator-free motor with the rotor as its only moving part.

The Tesla Transformer

Tesla described his coil as "a simpler device for the production of electric oscillations" for use in the design of high frequency machines.

In this device, a primary transformer coil with a few turns of wire is connected to a selected condenser (or capacitor) through a spark gap. When the condenser is supplied with electric current, it continuously charges up to reach the point where it achieves the selected breakdown voltage of the gap, and a spark results. At the moment of sparking, the condenser and primary coil are connected and form an oscillating circuit.

As the charge-to-spark process is rapidly repeated, the high energy pulsation in the primary coil induces voltage in the secondary transformer coil, which has many turns of smaller wire. Settings and adjustments of each circuit control the oscillation frequencies of each circuit and optimum operation is achieved when the oscillating frequencies match, i.e. resonate. Then, the oscillation in the second coil is multiplied, the coil produces high voltage, and strong sparks are emitted by the secondary terminal. With this output voltage reaching many millions of volts, some exceptional lightning-like discharges can be created.

The Nikola Tesla presentation was made possible by support from The Barra Foundation and Unisys.

Read the Committee on Science and the Arts Report on “Nikola Tesla’s Researches in High Frequency Phenomena."

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Innovation Lessons: Implications of Nikola Tesla’s Life for Today’s Engineers, Scientists, and Technology Designers

• Conference paper
• First Online: 01 January 2015
• Cite this conference paper

• Maximus Schmorrow 2 &
• Dylan Schmorrow 3  

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 529))

Included in the following conference series:

• International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

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Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest inventors of all time. His life was full of interesting twists and turns. He is most famous for inventing the Alternating Current motor, Tesla Coil, and the Bladeless Turbine, to name a few. Other inventors inspired him, such as, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. His trust in the people that inspired him eventually impacted him negatively. Nikola Tesla made mind-blowing discoveries and inventions that are still used today. His first break-through was creating a rotating magnetic field to make an Alternating Current without having to use a commutator. He also invented the Tesla Coil, which was able to produce a high voltage of electricity for transporting the electricity farther distances. These coils can be seen at the tops of electrical poles that hold electrical wires and cables sometimes for miles. Tesla’s final invention was the bladeless turbine, able to produce energy using fluids, gases and centripetal force. His most popular invention was the Alternating Current motor, which did not use a dynamo or a commutator, but the rotating magnetic field. This would prove to be one of Tesla’s greatest contributions. This paper examines the life of Nikola Tesla and document the ups and downs he faced while becoming one of the greatest inventors of all times. Although there have been many attempts to extract ubiquitous lessons learned from his life, this paper is unique in it’s international focus (i.e., impact on North American innovation from European thought leadership) and serves as a mechanism for discussing the implications for HCI (i.e., process, design and social interactions). It also provides specific innovation lessons from his life and provides a summary of the implications of these lessons for 21 st century engineers, scientists and technology designers.

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• Implications

1 Introduction

Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest inventors of all time [ 1 ]. His life was full of interesting twists and turns. He is most famous for inventing the Alternating Current motor, Tesla Coil, and the Bladeless Turbine, to name a few [ 2 – 5 ]. Other inventors inspired him, such as, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. His trust in the people that inspired him eventually impacted him negatively [ 6 ].

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10,1856 in a small town called Smiljan where Croatia is located today. His father, Milutin, was a minister and his mother, Djouka, stayed on the farm selling products they made and grew. When Tesla was a young boy, he caught Cholera and spent his time reading his father’s Mark Twain novels. Nikola had four siblings: Dane (Dah-nay), Angelina, Milka, and Marica. Dane was their parent’s pride and joy, until he was thrown of their horse and passed because of the injuries. Nikola couldn’t make or build anything without his parents mourning over Dane’s passing. This made him want to become an inventor so his parents would be proud [ 7 ].

In 1875, Nikola Tesla enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute located in Graz, Austria. He was planning on to be a mathematics professor, so he studied arithmetic, geometry, calculus, theoretical and experimental physics, analytical chemistry, mineralogy, machinery construction, botany, wave theory, optics, French, and English. Nikola studied more than twenty hours a day and changed his major to engineering. After he returned from school, his father urged him not to go a second year because of his unhealthy study habits. He went back for a second year, and a Gramme dynamo, patented by a Belgian engineer, was sent to his physics class. Tesla suspected that the dynamo could work without a commutator, but his physics teacher proved him wrong and for the rest of the class explained how impossible that is. This triggered a spark that made Tesla determined to prove his professor wrong [ 8 ].

For four years Tesla tried to create alternating current without a dynamo or a commutator. During that time, his friend Anthony Szigeti was hired as Tesla’s assistant. Anthony was a former classmate and good friend of Nikola. They would go on walks, thinking of ways to design the alternating current motor. On one walk Nikola froze with the answer to the question. As Szigeti helped him down to a bench, Tesla explained how the motor worked with a rotating magnetic field. Since constantly rotating, it was able to alternate without a commutator. While Tesla had all the information, he needed to get the money to do it [ 1 ].

The first person Tesla went to was Thomas Edison. Tesla and Edison entered a deal that Tesla agreed to fix all Edison’s electrical issues he had and perfect the light bulb, for fifty thousand dollars. After a year, Tesla came back with all the electrical issues gone and the light bulb perfected. When he asked Edison for payment as agreed, Edison was shocked, and all he said was, “You don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla was angry and quit even though Edison offered him a raise to stay [ 9 ]. Soon after, Nikola Tesla met Alfred Brown and they created a company called Tesla Electric Company, where Brown provided Tesla with a lab to work in. In this lab, they were able to develop many of the inventions that Tesla is known for to include the Tesla Coil and the Alternating Current Motor [ 9 ].

2 Inventions and Challenges

Nikola Tesla made mind-blowing discoveries and inventions that are still used today. His first break-through was creating a rotating magnetic field to make an Alternating Current without having to use a commutator [ 4 ]. He also invented the Tesla Coil, which was able to produce a high voltage of electricity for transporting the electricity farther distances. These coils can be seen at the tops of electrical poles that hold electrical wires and cables sometimes for miles. Tesla’s final invention was the bladeless turbine, able to produce energy using fluids, gases and centripetal force. His most popular invention was the Alternating Current motor, which did not use a dynamo or a commutator, but the rotating magnetic field. This would prove to be one of Tesla’s greatest contributions [ 4 ]. Alternating Current and Direct Current had many differences though. Direct Current is a way of transporting electricity that can only flow one direction and it’s voltage can not be changed. Alternating Current is the natural flow of electricity and can change the amount of voltage it is transporting. Alternating Current is more efficient because it can transport electricity for further distances and doesn’t need a power plant every mile [ 1 ].

Nikola Tesla led a life full of ups and downs. On one hand, he was famous for his inventions and his discoveries and was able to work alongside many other world famous inventors. On the other hand, he did not make wise business decisions. For example, he did not enter into a written contract with Thomas Edison. Edison ended up cheating him out of payment that they had verbally agreed to. Also, George Westinghouse took advantage of Tesla by taking ownership of Tesla’s many patents and inventions. Although, Tesla was brilliant and famous due to all the discoveries he made, Nikola died on January 8, 1943 penniless and alone. He deserves more recognition for his scientific contributions to our world [ 1 , 6 , 8 , 9 ].

3 Innovation Lessons and Implications for HCI

Although there have been many attempts to extract ubiquitous lessons learned from his life, Barbara Eldredge summarizes these succinctly in five general lessons [ 10 ]. Her lessons included: (1) when someone tells you it can’t be done, do it anyway; (2) take risks, they always make you stronger; (3) learn from failure, success will follow; (4) don’t stop, use past achievement to propel future progress; (5) time can always turn crazy ideas into genius innovations. However, other innovation lessons can be derived from examining Nikola Tesla’s life. John Buescher examined innovation and technology in the 19 th century [ 11 ] and identified two key technological innovations that profoundly altered life in Europe. They were steam and electricity. These technological innovations dramatically expanded the power of humans and animal strength as well as simple tools. Much of the foundational thinking that led to these innovations originated in Europe and subsequently had a profound impact on the rapid growth in North American. In many ways Nickola Tesla’s on life story showcases the impact on North American innovation from European thought leadership. In the 21 st century many still see the profound impact of European thinking on North American innovation. A current example is the European Commission’s 2020 Initiative, Digital Agenda for Europe. In this example policies focused on the socio-economic impact of open innovation is helping promote long-term sustainability as well as creating new products and services [ 12 ]. Thought leadership in Europe not only has a direct impact on the European economy and society, but it also impacts North American innovation profoundly in a similar way Nikola Telsa’s efforts impacted North America.

4 Conclusion

In this paper, we advocate that Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest inventors of all time. We also suggest that his trust in the people that inspired him eventually impacted him negatively. However, he made mind-blowing discoveries and inventions that are still used today and his innovations transformed North American. There are many lessons to be derived by examining the life of Nikola Tesla. There are lessons for the individual innovator and there are lessons that help foster an understanding of the role of European thought leadership on North American innovation. Understanding the implications of these lessons benefit 21st century engineers, scientists and technology designers. The story of Nikola Tesla’s life provides a role model innovator to model oneself on as well as providing an example of how thinking on one continent can impact innovation on another continent.

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Schmorrow, M., Schmorrow, D. (2015). Innovation Lessons: Implications of Nikola Tesla’s Life for Today’s Engineers, Scientists, and Technology Designers. In: Stephanidis, C. (eds) HCI International 2015 - Posters’ Extended Abstracts. HCI 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 529. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21383-5_31

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Did the U.S. Government Really Steal Nikola Tesla’s Research Papers?

Shortly after the famous inventor’s death, the government (likely illegally) confiscated Tesla’s property and kept it for 10 years, citing wartime national safety. But did it return everything?

Tesla was a renowned Serbian-American inventor who created the Tesla coil, engineered the first hydroelectric plant, pioneered the use of the alternating current , and laid the foundation for our modern power grid , among countless other inventions and scientific contributions. Tesla was truly ahead of his time, and quite a few of his ideas—notions that were unfathomable in that day and age—are still being pursued to this day.

According to the FBI’s redacted files on Tesla , made public in 2016, Kosanović indeed went to his uncle’s room to open the safe and retrieve a few things (a book and three photos), though no mention is made of the supposedly missing items. The FBI reported that Kosanović later told Walter Gorsuch, of the Office of Alien Property Custodian (APC), that he had been looking for Tesla’s will. (The APC was in charge of confiscating enemy-owned property during WWI and WWII.)

The FBI’s files clearly express that the U.S. government didn’t trust Tesla’s research in the hands of his nephew, who was the Yugoslavian ambassador to the U.S. The bureau was concerned that he might turn over such coveted information to the “enemy.” So the following day, the APC confiscated all of Tesla’s items, which amounted to “two truckloads”—though it’s worth noting the FBI files state the office didn’t think it even had the legal ability to do so, since Tesla was a naturalized citizen.

At the time it was rumored that Tesla may have made some incredibly powerful and life-changing discoveries. On September 22, 1940, the New York Times reported that Tesla had created a “death ray” that could melt airplane motors from 250 miles away, called the “teleforce.” Supposedly, this teleforce “would operate through a beam one-hundred-millionth of a square centimeter in diameter, and could be generated from a special plant that would cost no more than $2,000,000 and would take only about three months to construct,” according to the Times . If true, such a weapon would be critical to national security.

Tesla had also worked on trying to beam electricity through the air (this also inspired his teleforce), which would have been a huge breakthrough; in fact, wireless electricity is still a potential technology being explored by the U.S. government and others to this day.

Tesla furthermore thought he could collect and harness what he called “ cosmic energy ” that he theorized existed in the atmosphere. There’s been a long-running (and debunked) conspiracy theory that Tesla succeeded in creating a way to generate this free, unlimited energy , but that the government suppressed the information as it would have upended the industry and revolutionized society.

Soon after the APC collected Tesla’s belongings, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee (created during WWII as a way for the government to coordinate with scientists for purposes of national defense) by the name of Dr. John G. Trump (yes, of that Trump family—Donald Trump’s uncle) was tasked with investigating Tesla’s papers for anything that might be of importance to the government. Officially, he concluded that Tesla’s papers “did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods” for wireless power. And that may have very well been true—Tesla became increasingly eccentric and obsessive later in life, and his claims could’ve just been wild theories that never came to fruition.

Still, following WWII, the U.S. government renewed its interest in developing beam weapons inspired by Tesla’s research. As described in Margaret Cheney’s biography, Tesla: Man out of Time , in 1945, the Air Technical Service Command at Wright Reid, Ohio, requested photostatic copies of Tesla’s papers on beam weaponry from the Office of Alien Property Custodian. Four months after the APC sent them, the agency requested them again, supposedly having never received them. Two years later, the APC asked for the copies to be returned, and the Air Technical Service Command said they would be, sometime in 1948—but they never were.

It took years and a court hearing for Kosanović to finally receive his uncle’s possessions in 1952 . Even then, a good number of Tesla’s belongings were missing —reportedly, his family only received 60 trunks full of his research out of the eighty Tesla had said he’d had .

The U.S. government did keep classified copies of Tesla’s research papers, but the originals are now housed in the archives of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.

The question remains, though: Did it return all of them?

When she’s not out riding her mountain bike, Jessica is an editor for Popular Mechanics . She was previously an editor for Bicycling magazine. 

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NIKOLA TESLA AND MEDICINE: 160TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF THE GENIUS WHO GAVE LIGHT TO THE WORLD - PART II

• PMID: 29693867
• DOI: 10.2298/mpns1612391v

Introduction: Nikola Tesla (1856- 1943) was a genius inventor and scientist, whose contribution to medicine is remarkable. Part I of this article reviewed special contributions of the world renowned scientist to the establishment of radiology as a new discipline in medicine. This paper deals with the use of Tesla currents in medicine. Tesla Currents in Medicine. Tesla's greatest impact on medicine is his invention of a transformer (Tesla coil) for producing high frequency and high voltage currents (Tesla currents). Tesla currents are used in diathermy, as they, while passing through the body, transform electrical energy into a therapeutic heat. In 1891, Tesla passed currents through his own body and was the first to experience their beneficial effects. He kept correspondence on electrotherapy with J. Dugan and S. H. Monell. In 1896, he used high frequency currents and designed an ozone generator for producing ozone, with powerful antiseptic and antibacterial properties. Tesla is famous for his extensive experiments with mechanical vibrations and resonance, examining their effects on the organ ism and pioneering their use for medical purposes. Tesla also designed an oscillator to relieve fatigue of the leg muscles. It is less known that Tesla's inventions (Tesla coil and wireless remote control) are widely used in modern medical equipment. Apart from this, wireless technology is nowadays widely applied in numerous diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.

Conclusion: Nikola Tesla was the last Renais- sance figure of the modern era. Tesla bridged three centuries and two millennia by his inventions, and permanently indebted humankind by his epochal discoveries.

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Nikola Tesla's Contributions to Electrical Engineering: A Review of His Life, Work, and Legacy"

Nikola Tesla was one of the most important and innovative electrical engineers of the 20th century. His contributions to the field of electrical engineering are numerous, including the development of alternating current (AC) electrical systems, wireless communication, and the Tesla coil. This paper provides a review of Tesla's life, work, and legacy, with a focus on his contributions to electrical engineering. The paper discusses Tesla's early life and education, his work at the Edison Machine Works and Westinghouse, and his later years as an inventor and visionary. The paper also examines the impact of Tesla's work on modern electrical engineering and the ways in which his legacy continues to inspire and inform the field today

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Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla

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WE have here an account of Nikola Tesla, his scientific inventions and work, by a devoted admirer. Mr. Martin is not a Boswell, and from the nature of the case his book could hardly have about it all that human interest which pervades the life and achievements of a veteran discoverer in science. Mr. Tesla is a young man whose career has been somewhat romantic, and whose ingenuity is such as to rank him very high indeed among the electrical workers and discoverers of the day. Born in Austro-Hungary, educated at the Realschule at Carstatt and the Polytechnic at Gratz, and professionally first in the Government Telegraph Department, and afterwards in Paris, his career as an engineer really began when he arrived in America little more than ten years ago.

Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla.

By Thomas Commerford Martin. (New York: The Electrical Engineer , 1894.)

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‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power

Tesla speculated electricity from thin air was possible – now the question is whether it will be possible to harness it on the scale needed to power our homes

I n the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity – hygroelectricity – is now capturing researchers’ imaginations again. The difference: they’re not thinking big, but very, very small.

In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It’s a claim that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did.

“To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”

The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless.

Each nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other.

“So it’s really like a battery,” says Yao. “You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow.”

For their recent study, Yao’s team have moved on from nanowires, and instead are punching materials with millions of tiny holes, or nanopores. The device they have come up with is the size of a thumbnail, one-fifth the width of a human hair, and capable of generating roughly one microwatt – enough to light a single pixel on a large LED screen.

So what would it take to power the rest of the screen, or indeed a whole house? “The beauty is that the air is everywhere,” says Yao. “Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power.”

That’s exactly what another team, Prof Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin sons, Profs Andriy and Sergiy Lyubchyk, are trying to do. Svitlana Lyubchyk and Andriy are part of the Lisbon-based Catcher project , whose aim is “changing atmospheric humidity into renewable power”, and along with Sergiy they have founded CascataChuva , a startup intended to commercialise the research. They first began working on the idea in 2015, some time before Yao’s team at the UMass Amherst. “We were considered the freaks,” says Andriy. “The guys who were saying something completely impossible.”

In fact, trying to prove the worth of an early proof-of-concept at conferences had them literally red in the face. He says: “The signal was not stable and it was low. We were able to generate 300 milliwatts, but you had to put all your effort into your lungs in order to breathe enough humidity into the samples.”

They’ve come a long way since then, with Catcher and related projects receiving nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.

A device that can generate usable electricity from thin (or somewhat muggy) air may sound too good to be true, but Peter Dobson, emeritus professor of engineering science at Oxford University, has been following both the UMass Amherst and Catcher teams’ research, and he’s optimistic.

“When I first heard about it, I thought: ‘Oh yes, another one of those.’ But no, it’s got legs, this one has,” says Dobson. “If you can engineer and scale it, and avoid the thing getting contaminated by atmospheric microbes, it should work.”

He goes on to suggest that preventing microbial contamination is more an “exciting engineering challenge” than a terminal flaw, but there are far greater problems to overcome before this technology is powering our homes.

“How do these devices get manufactured?” asks Anna Korre, professor of environmental engineering at Imperial College London. “Sourcing raw materials, costing, assessing the environmental footprint, and scaling them up for implementation takes time and conviction.”

Even once the remaining challenge of connecting thousands of these devices together has been overcome, cost remains a significant issue. “All new technologies for energy need to think of the ‘green premium’,” says Colin Price, a professor of geophysics at Tel Aviv University, referring to the additional cost of choosing a clean technology over one that emits more greenhouse gases. “The green premiums are huge at the moment for this technology, but hopefully would be reduced by R&D [research and development], investments, tax breaks for clean energies and levies on dirty energies.”

The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy – the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime – from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production, they hope to lower it significantly, ultimately making this hygroelectric power competitive with solar and wind. For that to work, though, they’ll need investment, access to raw materials and the equipment to process them.

While the UMass Amherst researchers are working with organic materials, which in theory can be produced with relative ease, the Catcher team have achieved superior results using zirconium oxide – a material of interest in fuel cell research. The Lyubchyks had hoped to establish a supply from their native Ukraine, which has rich deposits, but Russia’s continuing full-scale invasion of the country has forced them for the time being to work with relatively small amounts bought from China.

The team accept that it may take years to optimise a prototype and scale up production, but if they’re successful, the benefits are clear. Unlike solar or wind, hygroelectric generators could work day and night, indoors and out, and in many places. The team even hope one day to make construction materials from their devices. “Imagine you can construct parts of a building using this material,” Andriy says. “There’s no need to transfer the energy, no need for infrastructure.”

It may all seem like blue-sky thinking, and Tesla’s dreams of limitless electricity from the air are still a long way off, but Yao suggests we may find grounds for optimism among cloudier skies. “Lots of energy is stored in water molecules in the air,” he says. “That’s where we get the lightning effect during a thunderstorm. The existence of this type of energy isn’t in doubt. It’s about how we collect it.”

• The Observer
• Nikola Tesla
• Technology sector
• Nanotechnology

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Nikola Tesla Mysteries

The missing papers

As is known, after Tesla's death on the night of January 7, 1943, his nephew Sava Kosanovic came to his room at the New Yorker Hotel in the morning. He found the room where the body had already been removed. Going through his belongings it seemed to him that someone went through them because some technical documents were missing along with Tesla's notebook marked "Government".

Several trunks of papers, records and equipment were removed from his room by the Department of Justice's Alien Asset Custody Office. As FBI President J. Edgar Hoover claimed, "they had no knowledge that the papers had been photographed or that his men had done such a thing." What causes additional controversy is the fact that Tesla was a US citizen and it is incomprehensible why the Department of Justice's Alien Asset Custody Office could even be authorized to take over Tesla's assets and have jurisdiction at that time.

The FBI states that the analysis of the documents was carried out by John G. Trump, a RADAR scientist from MIT, with the assistance of senior officials of the Naval Intelligence. After a careful review of the documents, Trump states that he considers the papers safe for publication because they “do not constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands”. In his report, he also mentions information from Tesla's work related to the beam of particles, which he describes as insufficient for the manufacture of weapons, and if there is a possibility of performing the configured version it would be very limited in power.

According to the official statement by the FBI:

When Tesla died in New York in January 1943, his papers—which were thought to include plans for a particle beam weapon, dubbed a “death ray” by the press—were temporarily seized by the Department of Justice Alien Property Custodian Office (“alien” in this case means “foreigner,” although Tesla was a U.S. citizen). Despite longstanding reports and rumors, the FBI was not involved in searching Tesla’s effects, and it never had possession of his papers or any microfilm that may have been made of those papers. Since 1943, we have told a consistent story to all who have asked. Reports to the contrary appear to be based on an initial confusion of FBI agents with other government officials—especially Alien Property Office personnel. These rumors have long been repeated in biographies and articles on Tesla without double-checking the facts as reported in our files.

Here are available  Official FBI files .

TESLA AND WINES FROM CROATIA

While exploring the life of Nikola Tesla, we found an interesting correspondence with his uncle who lived in Varaždin, Croatia. In several of his letters, Tesla asked his uncle to send him wines from Varazdin to the USA because he liked those wines the most. In his letters, Tesla was very passionate about wine from Varazdin. These wines are equally excellent today.

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