Wednesday, July 11, 1934

Daddy went fishing. Went down to Joe's. Ruby came back with me and spent the night. Rita Mae was up and bit and Gladys's were here.

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943)

Nikola Tesla, father of modern methods of generation and distribution of electrical energy, announced a new invention, or inventions, which he said, he considered the most important of the 700 made by him so far.


He has perfected a method and apparatus, Dr. Tesla said, which will 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 250 miles from a defending nation's border and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks.

This "death-beam," Dr. Tesla said, will operate silently but effectively at distances "as far as a telescope could see an object on the ground and as far as the curvature of the earth would permit it." It will be invisible and will leave no marks behind it beyond its evidence of destruction.

An army of 1,000,000 dead, annihilated in an instant, he said, would not reveal even under the most powerful microscope just what catastrophe had caused its destruction.

But while it will make every nation safe against any attack by a would-be invader, Dr. Tesla added, the death-beam by its nature could not be employed similarly as a weapon for offense. For this death-beam, he explained, could be generated only from large, stationary and immovable power plants, stationed in the manner of oldtime forts at various strategic distances from each country's border. An exception, however, he added, must be made in the case of battleships, which, he said, would be able to equip themselves with smaller plants for generating the death-beam, with enough power to destroy any airplane approaching for attack from the air.

The production of the death-beam, Dr. Tesla said, involves four new inventions, which have not been announced by him. The scientific details of these inventions are to be given out by him before the proper scientific bodies in the near future.