Tesla's Death Ray

In the early nineteen thirties, an aging inventor living alone in a New York City hotel room told the world he'd built a weapon capable of destroying ten thousand enemy aircraft at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. The press called it a death ray. He called it a peace beam. And the man making the claim wasn't some fringe eccentric chasing headlines.

 It was Nikola Tesla, the same mind behind the alternating current electrical system that powers the modern world, the same inventor who held over three hundred patents and whose work laid the foundation f...