TRUMP'S UNCLE AND TESLA

NOT THE CAR

I don’t know if this is on the level of weird coincidence or ancestral precognition or what, but a very strange cat came out of the bag recently. Amid all the protests swirling around Elon Musk’s Tesla dealerships, the electric vehicle’s name has become a “household word.” But how many people take the Tesla connection back to perhaps the greatest inventor in American history? A curious revelation gives me a chance to offer readers a little historical perspective - on the amazing inventor Nikola Tesla, and maybe Donald J. Trump.

First a few salient facts: Even though Thomas Edison gave us DC current, Serbian immigrant Nikola Tesla - who came to the U.S. in 1884 at the age of 28 - is responsible for AC (Alternating Current), which changed the world of electricity. He designed the first hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls in 1895. Two decades before our military put it into practice, Tesla created remote control. His dream was to send free energy wirelessly around the earth, and among his 300 patents, some believe he would have achieved this.

During World War Two, Tesla sought to make such conflicts obsolete by creating a “death ray” that would take down fighter planes and stop a million-man army in its tracks. Needless to say, Nazi Germany as well as the Soviet Union and the Americans wanted to get ahold of Tesla’s plans for this if they existed.

On January 8, 1943, Tesla was found dead in the hotel room where he lived alone in New York City. The FBI moved in fast and is said to have trucked away thousands of Tesla’s documents. Others were microfilmed by the Navy but mysteriously disappeared. Then, a few weeks after Tesla’s death, the U.S. Office of Alien Property Custodian sent in a team of representatives to examine a warehouse full of Tesla’s notes, papers and artifacts. That office had been established in 1917 to manage enemy-owned property during wartime. Created by the Trading with the Enemy Act, its main function was to take control of, go through, and dispose of such materials. Alien Property got involved because otherwise the designs for Tesla’s high-voltage weapons might have become custody of his Serbian nephew, who could have spirited them away to German-occupied Yugoslavia.

The lead custodian in charge of the search was John J. Trump, brother of real estate baron and Donald’s father Fred Trump. During World War Two, he served as an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development based at MIT. He’d played an important role in the Anglo-American attempts to master radar, and was on a first-name basis with many military and civilian leaders of that era. Also a physicist, Trump worked on “atom smashers” that led to understanding of the atom, and was later a pioneer in applying the same science to treating cancer with radiation.

The fact that John Trump spent several days combing through Tesla’s technical papers for the Alien Property office came to the forefront recently at the close of an interview President Trump gave podcaster Glenn Beck. Asked about this at the very end of the interview, the president replied that “my uncle was a great brilliant man,” who his father “worked very hard” to put through MIT. When Uncle John graduated, “he was so brilliant” that he was asked to become a professor. Then the government “gave him the assignment to find out if Tesla was the real deal,” which the inventor had turned out to be.

So what did Uncle John Trump find among Tesla’s papers? His written conclusion was that “his [Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

To me, something smelled a bit fake-newsy about that ho-hum statement. Sure enough, an online search revealed that in August of 2000, the CIA released a 16-page document that included John Trump’s analysis dated January 30, 1943. The cover letter on the old file was now being dispatched to a number of recipients, because Trump’s chosen Exhibits A-to-Q “may have significant commercial and military value.” One of those recipients in 1992 was Jack Verona, a high-ranking official inside the Defense Intelligence Agency, who “oversaw the funding and tasking of Grill Flame” (later called Project Stargate) as well as another outfit “code-named Sleeping Beauty [which] dealt with researching microwaves and how they effect the human mind.”

John Trump’s analysis was headed: “TESLA, NIKOLA (Dr.) Research, Experiments, and Devices - U.S. Air Force Involvement.” Experts accompanying Trump numbered a half-dozen including men from Naval Intelligence, but he was clearly the team leader. I won’t pretend to understand the summaries of the exhibits. Here is the link to the CIA document for any scientifically-minded people who might be able to. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00789R002900420001-4.pd The 1943 exhibits were listed by Trump “in the random order in which they were found.” One was a 1940 Tesla letter proposing “a method for the transmission of large amounts of power over vast distances by means of mechanical vibrations of the earth's crust.” An undated document describes an “electrostatic method of producing very high voltages and capable of very great power.” In other words, potential free energy.

There were abstracts identifying several letters from the 1930s that Tesla exchanged with the British government, concerning “accelerating to high energies minute particles. Such beams would constitute a death ray capable of the protection of Great Britain from air attack.” Another letter referenced “a dynamic theory of gravity which is described as not yet completed.” An undated memorandum in Tesla's handwriting described “a new process of generating powerful rays or radiations.”

And - keep in mind this is the early 1940s - there is a memo about using “wind, tides, lightning and water power as a source of commercial energy.” Tesla states in conclusion: “With my wireless system, it is practicable to transmit electrical energy at a distance of twelve thousand miles with a loss not exceeding 5 per cent. I can conceive of no advances which would be more desirable at this time and more beneficial to the further progress of mankind.” John Trump concludes that “this memorandum constitutes an interesting generalized discussion of the various sources of power. It is qualitatively correct for the most part….”

Think about it. Might Tesla’s discoveries have been sayonara for fossil fuels? It certainly seems to belie what Uncle John Trump summed up as Tesla’s “speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character.” Trump obviously saw more than that. Soon copies of Tesla’s papers on particle beam weaponry were sent to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where a heavily funded operation set out to test the feasibility of the concept. Details of the experiments were never published, but work on beam weapons continued. In 1958 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Lawrence Livermore Lab began a top-secret project code-named “Seesaw” to develop a charge particle weapon, which was apparently abandoned as too costly after more than ten years, due to “formidable technical problems associated with propagating a beam through very long ranges in the atmosphere.” Tesla’s design, however, foreshadowed the eventual genesis of lasers and of President Reagan’s Star Wars initiative.

Donald Trump’s uncle had gone on to a long academic career at MIT and, according to one article I came across, “exhibited his concern for the environment by investigating the ways in which high tech could be useful, particularly in cleaning polluted waters.” If he was indeed a “genius uncle” as the president has proudly and rightly maintained (he died in 1985) - as well as someone with whom Donald has implied he shares smarts through blood (John is the president’s middle name) - might we contemplate for a moment that such a legacy also calls for consideration of the environment? Perhaps even following up on the “free energy” ideas that John Trump pointed out in the remarkable papers of Nikola Tesla?

[It would be much appreciated if free subscribers who find this post of particular interest would decide to take a paid subscription]