106 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 106 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 106 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 201TUTU111
Mad about Tesla
74 years after his lonely death in a NY hotel room, the visionary
who promised us wireless power is hot stuff again
By SPENCER RUMSEY
On Independence Day, 100 years
ago this summer, scrap dealers
dynamited Nikola Tesla’s 187-foot
Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham,
marking the final chapter of the
Serbian-born scientist’s doomed
dream to “send the human voice
and likeness around the globe
through the instrumentality of the
earth.”
Today, still standing nearby –
remarkably – is Tesla’s red-bricked
laboratory, designed in 1901 by
famed architect Stanford White
and built with money from J.P.
Morgan, the Wall Street tycoon.
What’s left is in shambles and
infested with mold, but a statue of
Tesla, a beacon for the future as
some call it, has been erected near
where the tower once stood, a gift
of the Serbian Republic in 2013.
If all goes well over the next few
years, the non-profit Tesla Science
Center at Wardenclyffe will open to
the public with a visitors’ center, an
office, classrooms, and an exhibit
space to keep his spirit alive for
generations to come.
“We want to get it back to its original
glory,” said Jane Alcorn, president
of the Tesla Science Center. “It
can be a source of inspiration for
people who want to follow in Tesla’s
footsteps.”
Towering ambition
Tesla inventions include AC current,
robotics, fluorescent lighting
and the bladeless turbine, and yet
he died penniless at the New Yorker
Hotel in 1943. Most Americans
know him today only because
his last name is on the high-end
electric cars championed by Silicon
Valley billionaire Elon Musk.
Those innovative vehicles, which
run around $100,000, wouldn’t
go anywhere without a version of
Tesla’s induction motor operating
inside them.
Back at the beginning of the 20th
century, Tesla envisioned a huge
communications complex on his
200-acre property that he had
named Wardenclyffe after James
S. Warden, director of the Suffolk
County Land Co., who had handled
the real estate deal.
Since 1897, Tesla had been living in
style at the Waldorf-Astoria, thanks
to his friendship with John Jacob
Astor. The inventor would routinely
take the Long Island Rail Road out
to Shoreham Station to watch his
lab take shape, sometimes asking
an assistant to commute from the
city with a specially prepared picnic
lunch from the hotel.
Tesla had big plans for Wardenclyffe
as a transmission center of
just about everything, including
“press messages, stock quotations,
pictures for the press and these
reproductions of signatures, checks
and everything transmitted from
there throughout the world.”
The inventor also planned “to give a
demonstration in the transmission
of power which I have so perfected
that power can be transmitted clear
across the globe with a loss of not
more than 5 percent.”
Among the many devices and pieces
of equipment the lab building
contained were two 300-horsepower
boilers, pumps, injectors, two
galvanized steel water tanks capable
of holding 16,000 gallons, and
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