He had a death ray.
Source: Gizmodo
To put it a bit more accurately, Tesla possessed an intricate design plan for a death ray – a particle beam/directed-energy weapon he named “Teleforce” —that was meant to be used during World War One to wipe out whole armies.
He described the invention thusly: “[The nozzle would] send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.” Tesla worked to bring Teleforce to fruition until the day he died.
He had a strange relationship with pigeons.
Source: PBS
While Tesla appears to have been unable to foster feelings for humans and has thus been described as asocial, perhaps his aversion to people had less to do with his lack of emotion and more to do with the fact that they lacked feathers.
Like many people do, Tesla would feed the populous gray colored birds at the park. Even after he was too ill to do it himself, he hired others to do it for him. He would often bring sick or injured pigeons back to the hotel where he lived in his later years, and nurse them back to health.
He grew especially fond of one little bird, and said this about her; “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”
He died broke and alone.
Source: Business Insider
A sad, empty ending for a man filled to the brim with brilliance, Tesla died on January 7th, 1943 from coronary thrombosis in the New Yorker hotel room that had served as his home for a decade. The hotel maid discovered his body two days later, after she chose to ignore a “do not disturb” sign placed on his door.
Though he sold his AC electrical patents, Tesla died in debt because he self-funded many of his own projects that never ended up seeing the light of day.
Many of his inventions remain classified.
Source: Wikipedia
Upon his death, most of Tesla’s belongings were taken by the Office of Alien Property – even though he was legal citizen of the United States. And by “most”, we mean what has been described as a “railroad boxcar” full of Tesla’s materials. After a time, some items were released to his family, while others ended up in the Tesla museum, located in Belgrade, Serbia (where his ashes are also kept).
Some of Tesla’s documents and papers still remain classified, and while people have requested items via the Freedom of Information Act, those items are heavily redacted before their release. As a result, people tend to wonder what else Nikola Tesla had up his sleeve—like a device that would lead to free energy— before his death.
