Saving TeslaÂ’s Monument

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Saving Tesla’s Monument

Posted on 07 October 2010

By Karl Grossman

It’s the most preservation-worthy but not-yet-saved historic site in Suffolk County.

In Shoreham, it is the location of the only remaining laboratory of the great inventor, Nikola Tesla. Next to the laboratory, an elegant red brick building designed by Tesla’s friend, famed architect Stanford White, is the base of what had been the giant tower with which Tesla hoped to transmit electric power through the air to anywhere in the world.

Nikola Tesla was himself a giant—the man behind the establishment of alternating current, the system through which the world is electrified. He invented much of how radio signals are transmitted. (Guglielmo Marconi is credited with originating radio, but the U.S. Supreme Court, after Tesla’s death, determined his work was based on 17 Tesla patents.) Tesla invented fluorescent lighting, remote control, the bladeless turbine, and on and on.

The son of Serbian parents, Tesla arrived in the United States in 1884 with four cents in his pocket. But, notes Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center, he was a “visionary” with ideas that would revolutionize the world.

It was in Shoreham in the early years of the 20th Century that Tesla did some of his major work—notably working on the wireless transmission of power.

Alongside the lab, with its ornate windows and graceful grillwork, is the place where Tesla built a 187-foot high tower, which was visible from Connecticut. There are granite slabs in an octagonal shape, and steel posts, and a large mound marking the location. Below is said to be – radiating like spokes on a wheel—copper-lined tunnels, each high enough for a person to walk through, and a shaft connecting 120 feet to the aquifer below. The tower, sadly, was torn down in 1917.

Tesla had been a pioneer in exploring and utilizing the phenomenon of electrical resonance—through which radio signals are transmitted. He envisioned that not only radio signals but electricity could be sent far distances by linking into the resonance of the earth.

In a TV program on Tesla’s laboratory that I wrote and host, airing this month on WVVH-TV and up on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H-UBvdPtag, Dr. Christopher Wesselborg of the American Physical Society explains that if one thinks of “the earth as a giant cello,” Tesla sought to “pluck the strings.” The “resonating theory makes sense,” and indeed research based on Tesla’s work is now being pursued by scientists, says physicist Wesselborg.

Tesla Science Center, a non-profit organization (http://www.teslasciencecenter.org, Box 552, Shoreham, NY 11786), is attempting to raise $1.5 million to acquire the laboratory and the almost 16 acres on which it stands, and turn it into a museum and science center.

State Assemblyman Marc Alessi, in whose district the former laboratory and land is situated, has obtained $850,000 in state funds to go toward the preservation. The Tesla Science Center is seeking private funds to supplement this. Belgium-based Agfa Corp., the owner of the site, is actively seeking to sell it for commercial development.

Although never as well known in the U.S. as his arch-competitor, Thomas Edison, Tesla is a national hero in Serbia and Croatia, despite having left to come to the U.S. as a young man. Mr. Alessi has visited Serbia and tells of landing at Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade, going to the Nikola Tesla Museum there and using Serbian currency with Tesla’s portrait on it.

Still, Tesla “honored and appreciated his U.S. citizenship,” notes Mr. Alessi. We must, he says, save his laboratory and make it a museum and science center to show where the U.S. has “come” in making “innovations”—and how this must continue. “What can be imagined can be accomplished—he is a testament to that.”

“Everyone recognizes that it is a historic site—but somehow it is not registered as an historic site,” says Ms. Alcorn “This is a site that deserves saving. It has worldwide significance.”