Funds come rolling in to honor museum for eccentric inventor

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
8/22/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Project to honor the work of Nikola Tesla becomes well funded, thanks to fans

Nikola Tesla, an eccentric inventor who died in poverty in 1943, has a lot of far-reaching ideas. Chief among his theories was free electricity to the United States and wireless communication. This didn't endear him to people like Thomas Edison, who mined such ideas for profit. Now, fans from across the world have donated enough funds to build a museum to this "misfit of science," which has surprised even the creator of the fundraiser.

Nikola Tesla, an eccentric inventor who died in poverty in 1943, has a lot of far-reaching ideas. Chief among his theories was free electricity to the United States and wireless communication.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - A 94-by-94-foot building where Tesla hoped to develop wireless communications at the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York, in 1902 was lost a few years later due to debts Tesla racked up. The building and surrounding land are now up for sale.

Matthew Inman, the creator of Web cartoon "The Oatmeal," has joined forces with the nonprofit group, The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, to help preserve the facility as a museum honoring "the father of the electric age."

"Tesla is an unsung hero, and there are very few monuments to him in the United States. I feel like that's something we need to fix," Inman said.

"I made a comic about Tesla on my site. It got the most 'likes' on Facebook that I've ever seen in my career. Combine (the fact) that I've got this army of Tesla fans and the experience and success with my other fund-raiser, I felt like I was the ideal person to step in to control."

Posting the fundraiser on the IndieGoGo Web site, public response was overwhelming and raised more than $750,000 within five days, topping $792,000 this week.

The asking price for the building is $1.6 million. Inman's goal of $850,000 is to be matched by a New York state grant for the same amount, raising a total of $1.7 million.

"What I expected to happen was we'd raise 20 or 30 grand and trickle over for the next six weeks. I didn't expect to average $27,000 per hour (in the first few days)," Inman says. "That was insane."

Using the power of social media that drew from his 700,000 fans on Facebook, in addition to his 300,000 followers on Twitter and over one million followers on Google+, Inman has also asked the General Electric Company, co-founded by Edison, to contribute.

"Tesla, for the past year or two on the Internet, has risen as a cult hero to geek people," Inman said. "I think a lot of people are donating, not to say how noble they are, but are willing to support him."

Tesla was clearer a man ahead of his time. "Tesla foresaw the wireless transmissions we do with our cell phones and our laptops," Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center says. "He said there would come a day when people would send pictures, messages, words from one place to another without wires."

� 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

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Keywords: Nikola Tesla, electricity, fundraiser, wireless, museum

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1 - 2 of 2 Comments

Cindy
8 months ago
If you want to find out more about Tesla in an entertaining way, read the latest novel from good Catholic author Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse. I never knew all that cool stuff about Tesla!
Robert Burford
9 months ago
Truely a man like Da vinci who was ahead of his time in the electronic age. However I have to laugh at free electicity. It may be a thing of the future but as I look at my electric bill every month, I see it as pure fantasy. There was another thing very fastinating about the article. It was how they raised the money and ignited the electronic age to finance the museum using a medium that he envisioned. Fastinating.

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