𝘿𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙝 𝘽𝙚𝙖𝙢 - 𝖭𝗂𝗄𝗈𝗅𝖺 𝖳𝖾𝗌𝗅𝖺

 Tesla’s creative mind continued to spark new visions even late in his life. On his 78th birthday, he told The New York Times that he had come up with this most important invention, one that would “cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks.” The invention? A military weapon that would accelerate mercury particles at 48 times the speed of sound inside a vacuum chamber and shoot a high-velocity beam “through the free air, of such tremendous energy that [it] will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles.” Although the press dubbed it a “death beam,” Tesla believed it a “peace beam” that would foil attacks by airplanes and invading armies and save lives by acting “like an invisible Chinese wall, only a million times more impenetrable.” Tesla offered his particle-beam weapon to numerous governments, including the United States, but the only country to show interest was the Soviet Union, which conducted a partial test in 1939

But Tesla’s high-minded dreams were limited by a serious problem: no one was interested in funding the project. He approached the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, among others, but none offered any money for it. And of course, it’s hard to build a massive death ray without some cash, which Tesla was now chronically short of.

But one night in 1937, at a meeting at the Yugoslavian Embassy, Tesla told the room that not only was his invention possible but he had already built one. In fact, he would be unveiling it to the world in a matter of months.

However, if Tesla had built a death ray, the world would never see it. Later that same year, Tesla was struck by a car while crossing the street and never really recovered. In 1943, he died in the New Yorker Hotel where he had been living.

Upon news of the inventor’s death, the U.S. military quickly showed up at the hotel and searched the room for any inventions they didn’t want other countries to get their hands on. But officially, they found nothing. So, the question is, what happened to it?

It’s possible, if unlikely, that the Government secretly took the Tesla death ray. Similar devices were experimented with during the Cold War, which might imply they used Tesla’s invention to develop further technologies. But if Tesla did create a death ray, and no one took it, then there’s no clue as to where he might have put it. Nor was there an obvious reason why he’d never displayed it publicly.

The more likely explanation is that Tesla never actually built it. Tesla had suffered from mental illness for most of his life. In his later years, the same time he claimed to have built a death ray, his condition was rapidly growing worse. In fact, the death ray wasn’t the only invention he claimed to have created but never produced for the public.

By the 1930s, he began making frequent claims of major inventions, like a machine that ran on cosmic radiation. But like the death ray, if any existed then no one but Tesla ever saw them. So, while Tesla was undoubtedly a brilliant scientist, the Tesla death ray is probably just one more invention that only existed in his head.