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414 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
incident which fueled this suspicion. He had given a speech at the University
of Toronto, Canada, for the 1981 conference on Non-Conventional
Energy. Afterward, an older gentleman with a heavy New York accent
came up to Trombly and said he had been a detective at the time Nikola
Tesla was found dead, and had been involved in the investigation. The old
man had produced vintage credentials to show Trombly that he had indeed
been a detective. The man appeared to be old enough to have been an
adult in 1943.
In a soft voice Trombly said that the old man had said that "for national
security reasons no one was to know that the coroner's report showed
that Tesla was poisoned."
A shocked silence descended on the Colorado Springs meeting room
when the Tesla Society heard this, coming from a physicist who would not
lightly risk his reputation by relating such a story. The silence lifted as the
audience honored Trombly with applause at the end of his speech.
To understand why Tesla's story—the life of a dead inventor—can so
grip the emotions of yet another generation of technophiles, we need to
look at some highlights.
TESLA'S LEGACY
Tesla was a witty, elegantly-dressed loner, at the height of his fame in the
late 1800s when the world knew he had invented the whole system of
alternating current (AC) electrical generation and distribution which lit up
the cities. But that was barely the beginning of his productivity.
Born in 1856 in the rural village of Smiljan in what became Yugoslavia,
Nikola Tesla in his boyhood went from the highs of mystical communion
with nature to the lows of suffering with cholera and the loss of his
older brother. His father was a minister who wrote poetry and his mother
a storyteller with a photographic memory. She was also an inventor of domestic
laborsaving devices.
Nikola showed his true direction from an early age; at the age of five
he invented a unique bladeless waterwheel and placed the little model in
a creek. The child also built a motor powered by sixteen live June bugs.
His father was not impressed. He insisted that Nikola would follow family
tradition and be a clergyman, so he began his son's education at a
young age with rigorous mental exercises.
When he was of legal age, Nikola managed to get his father's permission
to study engineering instead of the ministry. After he completed his
studies at the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz and then in 1880 at the
University of Prague, he worked for a European telephone company and
upgraded their technology.
Meanwhile, a more difficult challenge which he had shouldered in his