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.
