I have just finished the 3rd biography of Tesla’s life.  To say the man lived on the very edge of excitement would be under estimating his very existence.  He did things that even today no one has dared duplicate.  His shop was lit with bulbs that had no wires and no filaments.  He allowed millions of volts to travel across his body to light bulbs he held in his hand.  He invited friends and media on numerous occasions to visit his shop where he awed them at every moment with his tiny electric friends.  He even did these things in front of the very scientific community that spent so much time ignoring him. 

Tesla never married and to the best of anyone’s knowledge never even had a girlfriend.  He claimed that to have one would remove his very ability to think and create and he dare not meddle in such a sacred area of his life.  Tesla understood his abilities and worked as hard as possible his entire life, trying to get as much done as possible.  He socialized when possible, mainly for raising more funds for his experiments, and had only a handful of true friends.  Even with them however, he spent very little time. 

In every biography I’ve read, you don’t see him mention a single family member, nor do you read any letters written to them after the death of his mother.  He had what some would consider close friends in Robert and Katharine Johnson, yet he hardly ever spent time with them, despite numerous letters from her requesting he come and visit.  All of his spare time was spent in his workshops experimenting. 

As time went on, he grew more and more leery of everyone,  yet he never turned his back on the media.  Every year on his birthday, he’d hold a big press conference to describe his latest inventions.  Some of which were so far out, that one questioned why he uttered the words.  Death Rays, Talking to Marians, destroying planes and ships from hundreds of miles away and creating great barriers around the country to protect it from attack. Yet with all these claims, not a single mention of free electricity.  Even to his death he was trying to perfect the ability to delivery electricity to the masses without wires.  He made several attempts to do just this, but all failed due mainly to noone being interested enough to give him money.  Why he would spend so much time trying to build a monstrous device to send electricity to remote parts of the world without wires, when he knew how to dig it from the aeither itself would make one wonder. 

Yet, none of the talk of the electric car seems to have originated from Tesla, who everyone knew, spoke of wondrous inventions in all areas of science.  It is said that he became sick of everyone and didn’t want to share any more inventions with anyone, yet there is not a point in time this is true.  He did become tired of being used and never having funds to do his real experiments, but at no point did he stop talking about what he was doing.  Also, at no point did he talk of any communications with his immediate family. 

The story goes as such: Mr. Sava, Tesla’s nephew who reportedly lived in New York in 1931, was contacted by Tesla to participate in an experiment involving aetheric power.  He traveled to Buffalo with Tesla and Tesla would not speak to him during the trip.  That once arriving in Buffalo, Tesla had a Pierce Arrow waiting that’s engine was replaced with an 80HP electric motor. The car had no batteries and had its engine cables sitting freely in the air.  It should be noted that Tesla wrote thousands of letters to all sorts of people requesting funds and describing his creations.  There are no papers mentioned in any of his serious biographies that describe him requesting a Pierce Arrow, or an electric motor from GE.  In fact, they had all but cut him off from any further funds long before this time period. 

The story goes on to say, that a 6 foot antenna was positioned in the rear section of the car, and that Tesla went and purchased 12 special tubes and some wire and built a box of some 1ft x 2ft x 1/2ft high.  Another story says he brought the box with him and that he had simply assembled the tubes in it.  The two stories vary quite a bit between each other but the point is, he inserted this box, which had 12 tubes, and 2 metal contact rods that stuck out of it.  Once the rods were pushed in, the car had electric power and they traveled for days. Once finished, Tesla took the box out and they traveled back home, with not a word said and nothing ever reported of the tests again.  Only his loving nephew who was never mentioned in any letters or communications was allowed to participate.  And he himself kept his mouth shut until after Tesla’s death. 

Now, while I will leave a very small door open for this being true, here are a few things that I think show it to be absolutely false. 

1) Tesla never included people in his experiments that he did not absolutely trust.  The chances that he’d include a young man that he had no obvious connections to other than blood, seems very strange to me. 

2) There are absolutely no records of Tesla ever going to Buffalo during the time mentioned, nor him purchasing an electric motor and car.  Tesla had very little money most of his life, so any experiment that would have been this expensive would have required financing.  Therefore, it would have been accompanied by some sort of letter requesting the funds, the car and the motor. 

3) Tesla was very much in with the press.  If the man spoke of death rays and building protective barriers around the country, why on earth would he hide the possibility of free electricity? 

4) Tesla spoke constantly about his ability to provide electricity to the masses without cable, but he never once mentioned that he could do it without a power plant. The facts seem overwhelming to me that what really happened here, is that Tesla was a genius, his nephew was not.  His nephew perhaps made the story up to get attention, or more likely had nothing at all to do with the story and it was manufactured by someone else.  I find it very interesting that his nephew’s name is never mentioned in any of the reports.  He’s always referred to as Mr. Savo throughout the stories. 

So in my opinion after a good bit of studying the man named Tesla, I conclude that this story about the electric car is fiction, but I leave a small door open for the possibility nonetheless… 

–glenn hancock