It's important to keep in mind that near the end of his days, Tesla sure seemed to be experiencing some mental illness. He made wild claims that were never quite backed up by proof, claims that even now no one seems to believe were actually possible. It's a sad end to a brilliant mind. But then, when you're the FBI and WW2 is ongoing, you pay attention when a famous and brilliant inventor claims to have death rays an…
He made wild claims that were never quite backed up by proof, claims that even now no one seems to believe were actually possible ------- when Leonardo da vinci sketched out a parachute or a helicopter-looking self propelling device prototypes that took 500 years to actually build - what did contemporaries think of him? who are we to judge a great mind? we simply cant. yes he might have gone mad, but there is a very…
>At the 1932 occasion, Tesla claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays.[205] In 1933, at age 77, Tesla told reporters that, after thirty-five years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy. He claimed it was a theory of energy that was “violently opposed” to Einsteinian physics, and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years. He also told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.
We know that cosmic rays aren't prevalent enough to produce energy. It should be obvious that you can't record thought through a retina because the majority of thought in the brain occurs in areas obstructed by the retina. He was just an already-eccentric old man whose brain was breaking down, and in trying to cling onto his success from the past he might have developed delusions that to him seem perfectly logical. I don't see why we can't accept that the death ray idea was just as nonexistent/nonsensical as these other ones. Additionally, also from wikipedia:
>In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla's "death ray", Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box.