Web Cartoonist Raises $1 Million For Tesla Museum

[Karl W4KRL]

More about the Tesla museum project at Wardenclyffe with some pictures of
Tesla's lab I've never seen before.

 

 

http://tinyurl.com/wardenclyffe

 

August 24, 2012

The only remaining laboratory of one of the greatest American inventors may
soon be purchased so that it can be turned into a museum, thanks to
<http://www.indiegogo.com/teslamuseum> an Internet campaign that raised
nearly a million dollars in about a week.

The lab was called Wardenclyffe, and it was built by Nikola Tesla, a wizard
of electrical engineering whose power systems lit up the Chicago World's
Fair in 1893 and harnessed the mighty Niagara Falls.

"He is the developer of the alternating current system of electrical
transmission that we use throughout the world today," says Jane Alcorn,
president of a nonprofit group called  <http://www.teslasciencecenter.org/>
The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, which wants to buy the site and
preserve the lab by making it a museum.

In his time, Tesla was world famous. But today, his name is kind of obscure.
Alcorn, who is a retired teacher and librarian, says she had never heard of
him until her neighbors in Shoreham, N.Y., on Long Island explained what the
old industrial site was, just down the street.

Tesla's old brick building is now behind a six-foot-high chain link fence
topped with barbed wire. There's No Trespassing and For Sale signs. The
windows are boarded up, and there are vines and weeds all around.

"It looks lost and neglected," says Alcorn. "It looks abandoned. Its
appearance right now is very derelict."

Wardenclyffe was supposed to be Tesla's crowning achievement. Behind the lab
was a 180-foot tall tower that reportedly shot sparks into the night sky.

"Tesla dreamed of having this site be a place where he could transmit
messages and pictures wirelessly," explains Alcorn. "This is over a hundred
years ago, something we're doing now but that he envisioned way back then."
Tesla also hoped to wirelessly transmit electric power, free to everyone in
the world.

Tesla's downfall began when Guglielmo Marconi beat him in the race for
wireless communication. Marconi sent the first radio signals across the
Atlantic in 1901. Tesla's funding disappeared. The tower was torn down.
Tesla lived out his last years as a recluse in a New York hotel, tending to
pigeons and getting a reputation as a mad scientist.

"I think, had he just invented the hydroelectric power system, we might have
still known his name. But because he went on to get involved in wireless and
lost in that race, his name disappeared from the history books," says
<http://www.marcseifer.com/home.htm> Marc Seifer, author of the book Wizard:
The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla.

Wardenclyffe became a processing facility for a photography company and
eventually, it turned into a Superfund hazardous waste site that took years
to clean up. Sometimes Tesla fans would make a pilgrimage. Seifer says on
his first visit, he snuck onto the property and got chased off.

====more on the link====

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