The Army Took Copies of Tesla’s Papers in 1945 and Never Gave Them Back

If Tesla’s papers were worthless, why did the Army need copies for national defense and why didn’t they give them back?

Nov 06, 2026

One full set of copies of Nikola Tesla’s papers went to an Army Air Forces lab in Ohio in 1945, and the lab never sent it back. Thirty-five years later, the Air Force wrote that it had concluded the papers were destroyed when the lab shut down.

I know a lot of you love Tesla. I do too. So let’s follow what happened to Tesla’s papers, letter by letter, from the hotel where he died to the base where one set of them disappeared, because what happened to them is what can happen to anyone’s work once the government takes it “for safekeeping.”

What happened to Tesla’s belongings when he died?

Tesla died on January 7, 1943, in his room at the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan. Two days later, representatives of the Office of Alien Property went to that room and seized his possessions. The Office of Alien Property was the wartime federal office that took control of property the government considered foreign, and from that point on, the government had custody of everything he left behind, including his notes.

Then the government brought in an expert. John G. Trump was an electrical engineer working for the National Defense Research Committee, the wartime group that organized scientists for military research, and he spent about three days going through Tesla’s papers. His letter is in the FBI files. He wrote that Tesla’s work over roughly the last fifteen years of his life was “of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character,” and that it didn’t include “new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

So according to the government’s own expert, there was nothing much there. (Move along, folks. Nothing to see.)

Who took copies of Tesla’s papers to Wright Field?

The paper trail I’m about to walk you through comes from letters that Tesla’s biographers have quoted, starting with Margaret Cheney in her 1981 book, Tesla: Man Out of Time, and reprinted by later Tesla writers. I haven’t held the originals in my own hands, so I’m telling you what those letters say as they’ve been quoted....

On September 5, 1945, a Colonel Holliday of the Equipment Laboratory at Wright Field, the Army Air Forces base in Dayton, Ohio, wrote to Lloyd L. Shaulis at the Office of Alien Property. He asked for photostatic copies of Tesla’s notes and papers. A photostat was a photographic copy of a document, the 1940s version of a photocopy. The material, he wrote, would be used “in connection with projects for national defense by this department.” Shaulis sent them. According to the account, these were full copies of the papers, not just the summaries, and there’s no record of how many sets went out.

Four months after the copies went to Wright Field, the chief of Military Intelligence in Washington, Colonel Ralph Doty, wrote to the Office of Alien Property asking where Tesla’s files were, on behalf of the headquarters at Wright Field. He said the files “may contain data of great value.” (Umm. NTK called. The left hand would like to meet the right hand now.)

On October 24, 1947, David L. Bazelon, the director of the Office of Alien Property, wrote to the Air Technical Service Command and asked for the copies back. A month later, on November 25, 1947, a Colonel Duffy of the Electronic Subdivision at Wright Field answered him: “These reports are now in the possession of the Electronic Subdivision and are being evaluated.” He said the evaluation should be done by January 1, 1948, and that the office would be contacted then about what to do with the papers, and as far as anyone has been able to find, those copies never came back.

So… let me get this straight…. In 1943 the government’s own expert spends about three days with Tesla’s papers and writes them off as “speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional.” In 1945, the military wants copies of those same papers “in connection with projects for national defense.” A few months later Military Intelligence is asking where the files went, because they “may contain data of great value.” And in November 1947, more than two years after the war ended, the copies are still “being evaluated” in Dayton.

Well… which the hell is it, gentlemen? Were the last fifteen years of Tesla’s notes a waste of paper, or were they too important to hand back to the office that had custody of them?

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What happened to the copies at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base?

In 1980, somebody filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, and asked what had happened to the papers. (None of the accounts I’ve found say who filed it, and I’d love to know. If you’ve seen the original letter, point me to it in the comments.)

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is what Wright Field had become, answered: “The organization (Equipment Laboratory) that performed the evaluation of Tesla’s papers was deactivated several years ago.” The base said it had searched the lists of records the lab had retired, found no mention of Tesla’s papers, and concluded that the papers were destroyed when the lab was shut down.

So nobody at the base said anyone destroyed the papers. The base said it couldn’t find a record of them and assumed they’d been destroyed, thirty-two years after a colonel promised to be in touch about them by New Year’s Day.

What happened to Tesla’s original papers?

Somehow, the original documents had a better time of it. In 1952, Tesla’s remaining papers and belongings were released to his nephew, Sava Kosanović, and sent to Belgrade, where a museum was set up in Tesla’s honor. They’re in the Nikola Tesla Museum now. Even that transfer has a gap in it, though. Tesla’s biographer Marc Seifer says only about 60 of the roughly 80 trunks the FBI recorded ever arrived in Belgrade.

And this wasn’t the first time Tesla’s work disappeared in front of everybody. His Wardenclyffe tower on Long Island, a 187-foot tower he built for wireless power, was dynamited starting July 4, 1917. Why it came down depends on who you ask. The American Physical Society says it was destroyed “as ordered by the U.S. government,” and wartime rumors said German spies were using the Wardenclyffe tower as a radio transmitter. Other accounts say George Boldt, who held the mortgage and foreclosed on it, had it scrapped, and that the scrap brought in $1,750. (That’s $1,750 for a 187-foot tower, if you’re keeping score at home.)

Tesla didn’t stop when he lost Wardenclyffe. In 1933, he moved into the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan, into rooms 3327 and 3328 on the 33rd floor, and he lived there for the last ten years of his life. (One of those two rooms is said to have been his lab.) The New Yorker had its own power plant in the basement, installed in 1929, with direct current generators big enough to power a city of about 35,000 people, and the hotel ran completely off the grid for thirty years. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers lists it as the largest DC generating plant in the United States at the time it was built. Joe Kinney, the hotel’s senior project engineer and the man who built its archives and museum, told Untapped New York he believes Tesla chose to live there “precisely for its technological advancements.”

In 2018, the History Channel’s series The Tesla Files took that a whole lot further. Tesla biographer Marc Seifer, astrophysicist Travis Taylor, and investigative journalist Jason Stapleton went into the New Yorker in an episode called “Tesla’s Tower,” and in the next episode they tied the hotel to Wardenclyffe. As the show’s fans lay it out, the theory is that the New Yorker was Wardenclyffe, take two, hiding in the middle of Manhattan. The generators in the basement were way more than a hotel needed, a big round shaft runs up from the basement to carry that power to the top of the building, two massive towers were proposed for the roof, and Tesla may have kept a lab up on the 42nd floor. (Untapped New York also describes a hidden air shaft next to the power plant that goes “way, way up.” Just saying.)

One fan on the r/NikolaTesla forum adds that the hotel was designed at 400 feet and redesigned during construction to stand 600 feet, the same height as Wardenclyffe. The 400 feet checks out, from a 1928 New York Times report, but I can’t find the 600 feet anywhere outside the show’s fans. The New Yorker is 43 stories, and the hotel’s own 1938 brochure put its sky terraces “a tenth of a mile above the street,” which works out to about 528 feet. The Wardenclyffe tower Tesla built was 187 feet, but another commenter says a rebuilt tower was planned at somewhere between 300 and 600 feet when his funding got cut, so the fans’ math depends on which tower you’re measuring.

And the basement had a private tunnel to Penn Station. An early ad for the hotel told guests their room was “only three minutes from your train through your own private entrance.” The tunnel was closed in the late 1960s, and it dropped out of history so completely that a lot of people decided it was an urban legend. The show’s fans say the basement also had an underground elevator and its own switchboard room, and that the Penn Station tunnel connected to more tunnels running out under the hotel. The tunnel to the trains is documented.

Here’s how I read it: the project moved. Tesla lost a tower and a power station on Long Island, and he spent his last decade on the 33rd floor of a building with a power station underneath it, towers drawn up for the roof, and a private tunnel to the trains. (Total coincidence, I’m sure.) That’s also the building where the Office of Alien Property walked into his rooms two days after he died and took everything.

The longest comment on that forum thread goes a whole lot further, and I’m giving it to you the way the commenter told it, along with what I could and couldn’t check. They say the men who did Tesla wrong felt guilty about it and kept paying his way: George Westinghouse gave him a lifetime rail pass and covered his hotel rooms, John Jacob Astor covered his rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria with a few floors for labs, and J.P. Morgan kept picking up the tab for Tesla’s dinners with his literary friends, all while Morgan was working with Edison to erase Tesla from history. They also say Morgan bought The New York Times specifically to make Tesla look like a laughable, eccentric crank.

Here’s what the record says. Morgan did put $150,000 into Wardenclyffe, and then he stopped. Astor died on the Titanic in 1912, and Westinghouse died in 1914, so the commenter’s dates are a little off, but the rail pass is documented. And the Times part is closer to the truth than you’d think. Adolph Ochs bought the Times in 1896, when it was facing bankruptcy, with $70,000 and a letter from Grover Cleveland, and J.P. Morgan provided key financial backing and influence that let Ochs take control of the paper and rescue it. That’s the deal that started the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which still runs The New York Times today. Whether Morgan backed the Times so it would make Tesla look like a crank is the commenter’s claim, and I haven’t found anything that says so either way. Jury is still out on those dinners.

The same commenter says the FBI files show that President Franklin Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover all knew exactly who Tesla was, and that the FBI, the OSS, the Nazis, and Stalin’s spies were all trying to get close enough to find out what was in his safe. They point out that Tesla had a personal courier and a personal secretary when he died, and they ask, “How and why does a ‘penniless eccentric old man’ have assistants, in the early days of World War II?” The FBI’s own Tesla files are where you’d check that list, and they’re public now in the FBI Vault if you want to read them yourself. They also tie the whole thing to MK-Ultra, which they describe as “media manipulation mind control” that Eisenhower started in 1953. For the record, MK-Ultra was the CIA’s mind control program, approved by CIA Director Allen Dulles in April 1953 while Eisenhower was president, and it ran on drugs, hypnosis, and experiments on people. The CIA’s work with reporters usually gets pinned on a different program, the one people call Operation Mockingbird.

And another commenter dropped this into the thread: Otis T. Carr, the man who promised the world a flying saucer in 1959, was supposedly a bellboy at the New Yorker. Carr claimed he met Tesla and studied under him in 1925, while he was working as a hotel clerk in Manhattan. The New Yorker didn’t open until January 2, 1930, so if Carr’s date is right, it wasn’t this hotel. Carr’s saucer, the OTC-X1, was scheduled to fly on Sunday, April 19, 1959, and it never left the ground. A month later he was arrested for violating state securities regulations, and he was fined $5,000.

I’ve been researching what I call the forgetting, how knowledge and memory get lost, for about seven years, and Tesla’s story has two of the patterns I run into over and over. When somebody tears a thing down, you usually end up with two competing stories about why, and nobody alive can tell you which one is true. And when a person’s work goes into government custody “for safekeeping,” that’s very often the last place anybody can trace it to.

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How do you keep your own work from disappearing?

Keep copies of your own work in at least four places you control, and make at least one of them a copy that doesn’t depend on an internet connection.

Keep a written record of who has your work. The only reason anyone can trace Tesla’s copies to Wright Field is that Holliday, Doty, Bazelon, and Duffy all put their requests and answers in dated letters. When you hand your work to anybody, put it in writing: what you gave them, the date, and who has it now.

If you’ve ever handed your work to somebody else to hold onto, whether that’s a publisher, a platform, an old employer, or a cloud account you don’t log into anymore, write down what’s there and ask for your copy back while you still can.

What do you think happened to the Army’s copies of Tesla’s papers? Tell me your theory in the comments.

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The Army Took Copies of Tesla’s Papers in 1945 and Never Gave Them Back

If Tesla’s papers were worthless, why did the Army need copies for national defense and why didn’t they give them back?

What happened to Tesla’s belongings when he died?

Who took copies of Tesla’s papers to Wright Field?

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:

What happened to the copies at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base?

What happened to Tesla’s original papers?

How do you keep your own work from disappearing?

Further Reading

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