Nikola Tesla was a man of his word.
He said he could build power generators better than those of Thomas Edison.
He built them.
Tesla said he did not need copper wires to deliver power.
Electricity could be transmitted through the air.
He proved that it could.
Tesla told us of other mechanisms of miracle.
What were his most outrageous inventions... and how were they lost?
Nikola Tesla did not draw blueprints for his inventions.
He merely pictured them in his mind.
When he put together the parts of a new machine, he worked exclusively from memory.
Tesla never wrote anything down, except as an afterthought.
But it is known where he kept his most important documents... in a standalone safe, which he
kept in the posh, New York City hotel room, in which he lived.
In 1898 at the Manhattan address he was using as a laboratory, Tesla manufactured a small
device he attached to one of the building's load-bearing steel columns.
It was an oscillating piston driven by compressed air and it was less than three feet long.
He only tested the Oscillator once, during a visit by the famous American author Mark
Twain.
In a frightening example of forced resonance, the pulsation of the Oscillator, matched the
natural structural frequency of the building's bricks, cracking plaster ceilings, breaking
windows and bursting water pipes.
Number 46 East Houston Street was shaken so vigorously, that it caused a local neighborhood
earthquake.
On the sound advice of Samuel Clemens to destroy the device before it was discovered by the
authorities, Tesla disconnected it with a sledge hammer, and requested that his guest
claim ignorance as to the cause of the tremors.
The Superintendent of New York City Schools in 1912 was William Maxwell.
Over dinner with Tesla he mentioned his difficulty educating the city's underachievers.
Three days later the inventive genius appeared in the doorway of Maxwell's office with a
solution to the problem.
"The next time you build a school," Tesla told him, "I recommend the installation of
special cable wires, to be hidden in the classroom walls, for the purpose of carrying high frequency
voltage.
This will convert your classrooms into baths of electromagnetism, vibrating at a rate which
stimulates the mental powers of the young."
He advised the Superintendent to make "every effort" to keep the experiment a secret.
Maxwell approved the plan, however its results never showed up in the newspapers.
It is said that a school which still operates in Brooklyn, which is now called the William
H. Maxwell High School, was the building equipped with Tesla's experimental cabling.
It was constructed in 1912.
Finally, the brilliant inventor told reporters in 1933 that he developed an apparatus to
record images directly from the human brain.
Thoughts were recorded by special motion photography of the retina of the human eye, where the
brain's innermost thoughts are reflected visually.
Tesla expected this new tool to replace the polygraph as the most accurate lie detector
on the market.
How were these inventions lost?
A year and one month after the United States entered World War II, Nikola Tesla died of
a heart attack, alone in his room on the top floor of the Hotel New Yorker.
His nephew, Sava Kosanovic immediately traveled from Yugoslavia to claim the estate.
Sadly at that time Yugoslavia was on the same side as the Axis powers of Japan and Germany.
Kosanovic was suspected of holding public office in a government under Nazi occupation.
In 2016 the FBI declassified its investigation into the death of Nikola Tesla.
Documents released through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that shortly after
his death, Sava Kosanovic was the first person to look for Tesla's research papers.
Kosanovic went to Tesla's hotel suite and he was accompanied by a locksmith.
Papers were removed from the safe.
97% percent of these documents have never been released, for his papers are now in the
overseas archives of the Nikola Tesla Museum, which are unavailable for viewing by the public,
even to the citizens of the museum's host city, Belgrade.