From a page of obituaries about electrical genius Nikola Tesla, who died alone and in modest means in 1943 at the New Yorker Hotel:

“Tesla’s ideas bordered increasingly on what some considered the fantastic as he advanced in years. On his seventy-eighth birthday he announced in an interview that he had invented a ‘death beam’ powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles and annihilate an army of 1,000,000 soldiers instantaneously.

On his eighty-fourth birthday he declared he stood ready to divulge to the United States Government the secret of the ‘death beam’ that, he said, would build an invisible Chinese Wall of defense around the country against any attempted attack by an enemy air force, no matter how large.”

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David Bowie as Tesla, in The Prestige: