Operation “Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum”

If you made your way to our little site here, you are most likely a bit of a geek, meaning you probably have at least passing familiarity with Nikola Tesla. If not, you may know him as David Bowie in The Prestige, the namesake behind an electric roadster and a crappy 90’s band, the Russian scientist from Command and Conquer: Red Alert, the awesome comic miniseries The Light and Darkness War, or from the Tesla Coil. Our friends over at TheOatmeal explain it more in depth, but basically, Tesla was the greatest geek ever, and pretty much invented all the best stuff in the history of ever, like modern electricity and the light bulb. “But I thought Edison did alot of that” I can hear you saying. No, you would be wrong. Edison was an asshole. And this is coming from someone who went to T.A. Edison elementary school.

Edison basically stole everything he ever did. He wasn’t so much an inventor as a marketer, who knew how to sell a good idea once he found someone else doing it. He paid off several other researchers in the field to use all their data to make his lightbulb. When he saw George Méliès’ film A Trip to the Moon (you may know it as the basis for the Smashing Pumpkins video for “Tonight, Tonight”) in Paris, he had the film duplicated so he could show it in America to promote his cameras, and never paid Méliès a dime. He electrocuted dozens of cats, dogs, and even elephants to death to malign Tesla because he didn’t think Tesla’s AC current was the way to go, preferring his own DC current even though it required a power plant every mile because it couldn’t travel long distance over wire. When Tesla tried to sell RADAR to the US military, Edison, who was in charge of their R&D at the time, told them it didn’t have any military applications. Basically any way he could fuck up and be an asshole, he did. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Edison’s asshattery.

But enough about that douchebag. Let’s get back to captain awesome, Nikola Tesla. He built an earthquake machine that almost toppled his apartment building as soon as he turned it on. He was known to have experimented with “death rays”, or a directed energy weapons, like a phaser from Star Trek, which is why he gets so much geek cred. Telsa was working with X-rays long before Rontgen, while Edison was shooting them into his own eyes and exposing his underlings to so many X-rays, they had to have their arms cut off from radiation sickness. He was preaching hydroelectric and wind power in the early 1900’s, while Edison said there was enough fossil fuels in South America to last 5000 years. Radio, remote control, transistors, electric motors, all the cool shit that makes your life so awesome that you take for granted, Tesla thought of it or influenced it first, and he did it over a hundred years ago. He’s pretty much Tony Stark.

Also, he had a bitchin mustache

You know how it’s totally awesome that you never have to charge your cell phone (let alone the very idea of a wireless phone. Telsa had the idea first!) no matter where you are because there is free electricity beamed all over the world from a giant tower located just outside New York City? Oh wait that’s right, that’s just one of the awesome ideas Tesla had he never got to finish. Tesla built Wardenclyffe Tower with the intention of trans-Atlantic wireless telephony and as a base to demonstrate wireless power transmission. Once his financial backers learned the power would be unmetered, with no way for them to regulate who used it, much less make any money off it, they all pulled out. Construction on the tower was nearly finished, but the money ran dry before the tower was ever operational. Then during WWI (probably at Edison’s request because he held a grudge like that), the tower was blown up by the military, as they were supposedly afraid the Germans might be somehow using it to spy on us, or that it would be used as a navigation landmark for u-boats. Telsa mortgaged the property mutiple times to try to pay for the tower to be rebuilt and completed (Because he was a nice guy and never really patented anything, or when he did he let other people use his patents for free or low cost so as to not stifle innovation, he never really had a great deal of money. Unlike some pricks whose sole purpose in life was stealing from others to make a quick buck and be a fame whore). He eventually lost the property, and through a series of sales it ended up under the auspices of the AGFA film company.

That’s a bit of the long setup, but here’s the deal. AGFA is ready to offload the Wardenclyffe Tower property. They are currently seeking $1.7 million from a developer, and are advertising they can deliver the grounds “cleared and level”. If they manage to do this, they will be destroying an important piece of not just nerd and geek history, but history in general. Tesla is a man who was far ahead the times. He was a revolutionary who never gets his due because he was too busy innovating to worry about such things as fame, or even sex (he was celibate his entire life, afraid sex would get in the way of all his science). There isn’t a single museum to Tesla here in America, even though he did most of his scientific work here, at either Wardenclyffe Tower or his earlier lab in Colorado Springs. He had a small museum in his native Serbia in Belgrade, and some statues at Niagra Falls (where he built one of the first hydroelectric power plants), but nothing here in America.

TheOatmeal is trying to help a non profit organization buy the land outright and turn it into the Nikola Tesla Science Center, and get it placed on the National List of Historic Sites and permanently protected. If they can raise $850,000, they have managed to get the state of New York to provide a matching grant. Last night when I heard about this and threw in my $50, it was at $225,000. As of this writing, they are already at $400,000, in less than a day. Anything over will go towards more than just buying the land, it will go towards constructing the actual museum and upkeep. So do the right thing here. Donate to keep a vital part of history from being destroyed. You can read more about the campaign on The Oatmeal, the non-profit behind the idea, or just go straight to the donate page. And if you can’t get it the first time, give it a few tries, apparently this campaign is hitting their servers something hard.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook