The Worst Failure of his Life
Between the night of January 5th and the morning of January 8th 1943, at the age of eighty-six, in room 3327 in the New Yorker Hotel, Nikola Tesla died alone of heart failure. His funeral was held on January 12th 1943 at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. His body was cremated and placed in a special urn in the form of a golden ball (to the left is the actual urn that his ashes are in). The cremation took place and the urn was shipped to Belgrade, Yugoslavia both in 1957. Tesla worked until the very end in his studies. He was still working on the death beam when he died. Tesla was indeed the leader of lightning and the world sure does miss the next thing he would have invented.
No Legacy
Some would guess that Tesla of all people would have died a very rich man with a legacy to pass down to his children. However, Tesla never had children. He never even married due to his strange standards in women (for example, he did not like women who wore ear rings). In addition to that, he died in mounds of debt. As a result, all of his papers and properties were seized by the goernment's Alien Property Custodian Office even though he had a U.S. citezenship. Including the plans for the death beam Tesla was working on. The government could not seem to get a hold of all of Tesla's plans as it seemed that there were some "missing papers". So even in the face of his death Tesla seemed to be hiding a strange invention that most likely would have made another technological breahthrough. And with no heir who might have known where Nikola hid these papers, they are lost forever. No heir also means that their is no one to advance his research. There will always be those who try to advance his studies, but another mind like Nikola Tesla's will probably not be born for a long, long time.
