The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

But, alas, patronage for Tesla was not to be. Mr. Tesla, in a bid to impress his sponsors that his device was no mere quackery or hocus-pocusion, arranged a private demonstration for Mr. Dulles and Mr. Hoover. While posterity does not record the contents of what Tesla revealed, Mr. Dulles was said to have quipped to a young Senator John Kennedy that Mr. Hoover found enormous distaste for Tesla’s “sartorial speculations” about Mr. Hoover’s leisure hours.

Triumph and Death of Tesla, and the Disappearance of the Neurheographiton

Effectively indexed by the elites who could fund his research, Mr. Tesla embarked on a new odyssey: touring the United States with the smaller, more portable Electrical Neurheographiton, Mark 3, as part of “Genius Nikola Tesla’s Electric Circus,” announcing “electrical exorcism of various mental afflictions and neurological maladies.” Mr. Tesla eventually made enough money (and trade in chickens and illicit spirits) from his circus to fund his various researches for the remainder of his life, including into “electro-transdimensional portals.”

Finally tendering “exclusive” sales of the technical specifications of the Mark 4 to Warner Bros. Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and United Artists in 1939, Tesla departed from public life, offering occasional anti-Relativity screeds while devoting most of his time to developing a “teleforce projector,” or death ray.

On January 12, 1943, Mr. Tesla was claimed to have died, although reports were conflicting. Many in Hollywood conjectured immediately that assassins in the pay of Big Cinema had done in the Serbian genius for selling them “exclusive” rights to a device whose blueprints contained, in tiny print, the phrase “I have omitted an explanation only for the motive unit which makes the entire machine work, in fear that the alchemists of celluloid might enthrall their nation and the world with ludicrous tales of vacuous lives.” Others believed that Mr. Tesla’s madness finally claimed him, inflicting him with a Jovian “brain burst” that produced not Minerva but rather a puddle of bloodied grey matter upon Tesla’s hotel room floor. Among the modern-day Fraternal Society of Teslic Scientific Investigators, there remains the belief that Tesla’s “corpse” was an electrophantasmic discharge that had merged with organic materials in the hotel room to produce a permanent simulacrum of Tesla, while the “real” man departed from this world to explore the Universe, unhindered by the constraints of mortals.

Documentation released following the dissolution of Yugoslavia at least identifies the path that Mr. Tesla’s inventions took following their master’s putative death. Farmer and amateur inventor Mr. Rhett Greene tracked down every working or dysfunctional electrical neurheographiton and, by means of wagon train, transported their many parts back to his “robotorium” (barn) in the then Dominion of Newfoundland, where he, without success, laboured for several years to make them work. Then, on Christmas Day 1947, Yugoslavian agents forcibly entered Mr. Greene’s barn under cover of darkness and extracted all of Mr. Tesla’s creations they found there.

The Lambshead Imperative

Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, who had long enjoyed Mr. Tesla’s invectives against Dr. Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, in 1997 tracked the remains of Tesla’s most bizarre device (that had actually worked) to the Sub-Basement 6 of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito Museum of Yugoslavian Civilisation. Apparently long-forgotten, the neurheographiton had been used to produce an indiscernible, global, mental domination, viz., to effect the export and sale of the Yugo. Because the Bosnian-Herzegovinian state held no interest in the ravings of a Serbian “madman,” Lambshead was able to acquire the entirety of the Tesla collection for the sum of 100 marka (about US $66). By the conditions of Dr. Lambshead’s will, Lambshead’s estate lent Tesla’s materials to the Slovenian National Museum of Electrical Engineering (L2010.01), where they were nearly destroyed in a terrorist attack by members of the Church of Electrology.

St. Brendan’s Shank

Documented by Kelly Barnhill

Museum: The Museum of Medical Anomalies, Royal College of Surgeons, London

Exhibit: St. Brendan’s Shank

Medium: Copper, silver

Date: 1270s (?) (disputed)

Origin: The monks of the Isle of St. Brendan, also known as the Isle of the Blessed (disputed); the Faroe Islands (undisputed point of collection)