[dchest]

I agree with many points of your comment. However, here are a few excerpts from the Wikipedia article on Tesla:

On weapons:

At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing his work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was imagined as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents.[102] One document stated that "[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]".

On health:

Tesla may have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder,[93] and had many unusual quirks and phobias. He did things in threes, and was adamant about staying in a hotel room with a number divisible by three.

[dejan]

I am aware of this story. However, if you were to take a look into what he was writing about (as mentioned in some of the left notes), you'd see such claims are just plain silly. If he were to build a weapon, the history would have taken a different shape.

The health, yes that is a fact, he was "weird", but show me a great mind that wasn't - Mozart, Beethoven? However, he didn't hurt anybody, unlike Edison, who invented the electric chair "just for fun."

Thus, I wouldn't trust anything US and War departments says. They knew he was capable of a lot of stuff, so they normally seized everything.

Thus, you have to understand that such claims that he was working on some kind of "weapon" were coming only from the government of the US. If I were Tesla, I would have been going crazy myself - everything stolen, no credit, no name, no money, no support and publicity of crazy scientist - this was of course a great plot to demoralize and ruin credibility of Tesla and takeover his patents, since no one would support or fund "a crazy guy". Edison was taking the credit for his work for years before.

You know the US govt credibility? The same guys who said that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, that socialism and communism were the same as witchcraft while adopting all the systems, that broke Yugoslavia apart, that Serbs were doing mass killing of Albanians in Kosovo, bombed Serbia, with depleted uranium and cassette bombs, schools and hospitals, passenger trains, biggest factory of cigarettes (later bought by Philip Morris for $1), and of course denied everything...The list is long, and this is only my perspective, there are many others.

Since the Kennedy assassination, US has been the most corrupted country and non-democratic in the world, so I wouldn't trust what they say about the greatest scientist of our time. For the name of God, they've named a corner after him, yet have done everything to "fight immigration" while they have become what they are because of the immigrants.

Sorry for the rant, the topic is just distasteful once you gather a lot of facts. Also, encyclopedias are not really based on facts, but on what majority agrees (public opinion), and you have to keep in mind he was left as a "mad scientist" in the public eyes.