Donald Trump's 'Nuclear' Uncle (newyorker.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In 1936 a reporter watched Donald Trump's uncle John, an MIT professor of engineering, as he was struck by two high-voltage sparks while demonstrating the grounding of an new X-ray machine which could generate a million volts of power. And immediately after Nikola Tesla's death in 1943, the FBI called John G. Trump to review the scientific papers Tesla left behind, according to a new article in The New Yorker. They joke that now John's nephew Donald "seldom sounds as ungrounded as when he invokes Professor Trump, the younger brother of his father, Fred," while campaigning for president. But while comparing the candidate's statements to the historical record, they conclude that "John Trump really does seem to have been a brilliant scientist," noting that he performed both radar and short-wave research for the allies during World War II and helped design medical X-ray machines.