Death mask of Tesla commissioned by Hugo Gernsback

Tesla spent his final years from 1934 as a sort of dandified Howard Hughes in room 3327, Hotel New Yorker with a permanent Do Not Disturb sign tacked to his door.  The room number was very important, because Tesla insisted that it be divisible by three.  Afflicted by an increasingly morbid fear of germs, he washed compulsively, ate only boiled food, and would be conspicuous in the restaurant where he always dined by the stack of eighteen napkins that he insisted on and by his compulsion to calculate the cubic volume of every dish before he tasted it.

He was also flat broke and his closest friend was a pigeon.  No wonder he kept pestering the Prime Minister about death rays.

On 7 January 1943 Tesla died alone in his hotel room.  On hearing the news, Hugo Gernsback, who had published much by and about Tesla in his magazines, commissioned a death mask of the late inventor, which graced the publisher's offices for many years. 

Since Tesla left no will, his belongings were eventually carted off to storage.  But the United States government took a bit of an interest in the old man's papers.  He was, after all, a brilliant man and, this being wartime, it was better to be safe than sorry, so the OSS sent a man to review the boxes of notes that notes Tesla had stowed in his room.  The OSS found a lot of scribblings about power broadcasting, cod philosophy, and no death rays.  What was there was concluded as being unsound and Washington quickly lost interest.  But that hasn't stopped generations of busy conspiracy theorists from spinning elaborate yarns about papers being spirited off into the night, secret government laboratories dedicated to weather control, Soviet death ray experiments in Siberia, and "discovered" accounts of Tesla's jaunts around the Solar System.

The old fakir would have been proud.

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