Popular website The Oatmeal has had a tough time of it recently, having to fight off a slew of legal attacks from another rival site. Now, putting that messy affair behind them, The Oatmeal has turned its attention to a worthy goal: purchasing the land upon which rests Nicola Tesla’s old laboratory and not only preserving it, but turning it in to a museum.
The problem is that right now Wardenclyffe, Tesla’s laboratory, is for sale and the current leading bidder is a real-estate broker who wishes to demolish the history site to make way for housing. While housing is certainly a good thing, perhaps preserving the laboratory of one of the most important, if underappreciated, scientists in history should take preference in this case.
If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Nicola Tesla then firstly shame on you. Secondly, he’s the man who, amongst many other things, was crucial in bringing practical applications of alternating current (AC) to the world; the form of electric current that we all use today for long-distance power transfer. Without Tesla our modern electric world would be a sorry shadow of itself, relying on the vastly inferior direct current (DC) (inferior for long-distance; your smartphone and other electronics run on DC) originally put forward by Thomas Edison and his company General Electric.
As a testimony to Tesla, the website The Oatmeal is raising funds to purchase the site of Tesla’s laboratory with a mixture of public-donated funds and extra funds from New York State to the tune of $850 000.
The project hit its public funding goal of $850 000 (on top of the New York State grant) in just 6 days. Now the bidding war for the property is in full swing with 34 days left on The Oatmeal’s Indigogo campaign.
If you’d like to pay your respects, literally, to Tesla then head on over and join the cause. If not then you may want to help spread the message. Nikola Tesla was incredibly important in the development of the modern world and letting his laboratory be demolished would not only be an injustice to the man himself, but would also mean losing a part of history. Tesla’s work has touched almost every single person alive on the planet today, his legacy belongs to all of us. It’s the least we can do to preserve the place from whence that legacy sprang.