108 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 108 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 108 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 201TUTU111
lyze Tesla’s papers was Dr. John
G. Trump, uncle of the current
president, who was an electrical
engineer with the National Defense
Research Committee of the Office
of Scientific Research and Development.
After a three-day investigation,
Trump concluded there was nothing
of significance among the Tesla
papers, although he later admitted
he hadn’t bothered to look at
everything gathered. Ultimately, all
of Tesla’s surviving material – that
the government admitted to, conspiracy
theorists remind us – was
packed off to the Tesla Museum in
Belgrade.
Saving the lab
In 2010, Wardenclyffe was in
danger of being bulldozed and
redeveloped. The Agfa Corp., which
acquired the property from Peerless
Photo Products in 1969, had spent
more than $5 million cleaning up
heavy metal contamination at the
site, and the state had given a final
OK for sale. Agfa’s asking price was
$1.65 million.
Wardenclyffe was about to be
sold to a housing developer when
Babylon-based film director Joseph
Sikorski used $33,000 he’d raised
for a movie on Tesla to establish
a last-ditch, save-the-lab effort,
while his partner, Vic Elefante, did
a separate documentary, “Tower to
the People,” that shed more light on
Tesla’s Long Island connection.
“People are more familiar with the
car than with Tesla,” Sikorski said.
“I’m trying to rehabilitate his image
so people might take a second
look.” He decried the TV shows
and websites that make Tesla look
“like a kook and a mad scientist.”
“By discrediting him like that, we
make it harder for serious scientists
to look at his work and continue his
research.”
In 2012, Matt Inman, the comic
creator of The Oatmeal, who
said he’d fallen in love with Tesla
because he was “a geek,” set up an
Indiegogo.com crowd-funding site
to raise money for what he called,
“Operation Let’s Build a Goddamn
Tesla Museum.” It raised nearly
$1.4 million in 45 days.
According to Alcorn, donations
came from more than 30,000
people around the world, followed
by a $1 million pledge from Musk’s
personal foundation.
(It’s a good start, but just that:
According to Alessi, who’s on the
science center’s board, rebuilding
Wardenclyffe could run more than
$17 million.)
“Tesla is someone we call, nowadays,
a disruptive person,” said
Alcorn, likening him to Bill Gates,
Steve Jobs and Musk. “What they
do disrupts the normal pace of
things and takes us in giant leaps.”
“He was definitely a futurist,” she
added. “In 1926, Tesla was talking
about how someday people would be
carrying a device with which they
would be able to transmit images,
words, actual voices and texts and so
on, and carry it in their vest pocket.
“And what are we carrying around
today?”
Atop the pedestal on which the
sculpture of Tesla stands facing his
former laboratory in Shoreham,
is engraved a quotation of his that
runs in English on one side and
Serbian on the other. It reads, in
part: “Were I to have the good fortune
to implement at least some of
my ideas, it would be for the benefit
of the entire humankind.”
That’s Tesla. Never a small thinker.