Declassified FBI files reveal what the great inventor Nikola Tesla had been working on in the final days before his death, while the new Discovery Channel show tries to answer all of the questions surrounding Tesla's death.
The series presents and explores Tesla's last invention - the Death Ray. It is believed that it was supposed to be the first weapon of mass destruction.
And from there originated the question of whether Tesla was murdered because of that weapon. It may be hard to believe that the man who invented radio, alternating current and the cell phone could have also worked on a weapon of death.
Widely known as "The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century", Tesla's writings contained schematics that were a far cry from his principles of humanism. These writings will be publicly revealed for the first time in "Tesla's Death Ray: A Murder Declassified" on Discovery Channel.
Tesla was found dead in 1943 in his hotel room. His safe was broken and his notes had disappeared.
The files reveal information about a weapon that Tesla himself called a "Death Ray". World powers such as the US, Germany and the USSR were interested in him and this could indeed have led to the inventor's demise.
In "Tesla's Death Ray: A Murder Declassified", hosts Jack Murphy and Cameron Prince interview one of Tesla's still-living relatives, travel to his native Serbia and try to collect the missing data.
While they investigate, they share their discoveries with engineer Aron Koscho, who has brought together an entire team to build and test a prototype of Tesla's weapon. If Aron can prove that building and activating the fatal weapon to be plausible, this would provide an understandable motive for Tesla's murder.
Tesla's Death Ray would have provided an undeniable advantage to the nation that obtained it, determining the outcome of World War II. As such, the superpowers are speculated to have raced to obtain his schematics for it, while also possibly making sure they didn't fall into the hands of their enemies.
