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Tesla's New York Laboratory Up For Sale
Ziest points us to NY Times piece on the battle over the site of Nicola Tesla's last failed experiment. Tesla's laboratory, called Wardenclyffe, located on Long Island, has been put up for sale by its current owner, Agfa Corp. Local residents and Tesla followers were alarmed by a real estate agent's promise that the land, listed at $1.6 million, could "be delivered fully cleared and level." Preservationists want to create a Tesla museum and education center at Wardenclyffe, anchored by the laboratory designed by Tesla's friend, Stanford White, a celebrated architect. "In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all. It was the inventor's biggest project, and his most audacious. The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. ... But the system failed for want of money, and at least partly for scientific viability. Tesla never finished his prototype tower and was forced to abandon its adjoining laboratory."
We'll level the place. We still can't figure out how some of his projects worked and much of his work was seized after his death, according to the History channel. Might as well level it and trash any chance at learning his knowledge while we're at it. Brilliant man.
BigNo goes here.
I wonder if.
Destroy it and we might never know.
How would these towers effectively transmit electricity? I'm having trouble seeing how this would work effectively given the inverse square law. Either the towers would only be able to cover a small amount of area or the area directly around the tower would be really unpleasant. Either way, this wouldn't be as efficient as wire transmission. Or am I missing something?
I read lavatory.
Just call it a lab, will you. It's half past one in the night over here.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
Subscription-free, minus the pictures and maps.
A Battle to Preserve a Visionary's Bold Failure
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: May 4, 2009
In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all.
It was the inventor's biggest project, and his most audacious.
The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. The blinding flashes, The New York Sun reported, "seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand."
But the system failed for want of money, and at least partly for scientific viability. Tesla never finished his prototype tower and was forced to abandon its adjoining laboratory.
Today, a fight is looming over the ghostly remains of that site, called Wardenclyffe - what Tesla authorities call the only surviving workplace of the eccentric genius who dreamed countless big dreams while pioneering wireless communication and alternating current. The disagreement began recently after the property went up for sale in Shoreham, N.Y.
A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company's real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can "be delivered fully cleared and level," a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.
The ruins of Wardenclyffe include the tower's foundation and the large brick laboratory, designed by Tesla's friend Stanford White, the celebrated architect.
"It's hugely important to protect this site," said Marc J. Seifer, author of "Wizard," a Tesla biography. "He's an icon. He stands for what humans are supposed to do - honor nature while using high technology to harness its powers."
Recently, New York State echoed that judgment. The commissioner of historic preservation wrote Dr. Seifer on behalf of Gov. David A. Paterson to back Wardenclyffe's preservation and listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
On Long Island, Tesla enthusiasts vow to obtain the land one way or another, saying that saving a symbol of Tesla's accomplishments would help restore the visionary to his rightful place as an architect of the modern age.
"A lot of his work was way ahead of his time," said Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center, a private group in Shoreham that is seeking to acquire Wardenclyffe.
Dr. Ljubo Vujovic, president of the Tesla Memorial Society of New York, said destroying the old lab "would be a terrible thing for the United States and the world. It's a piece of history."
Tesla, who lived from 1856 to 1943, made bitter enemies who dismissed some of his claims as exaggerated, helping tarnish his reputation in his lifetime. He was part recluse, part showman. He issued publicity photos (actually double exposures) showing him reading quietly in his laboratory amid deadly flashes.
Today, his work tends to be poorly known among scientists, though some call him an intuitive genius far ahead of his peers. Socially, his popularity has soared, elevating him to cult status.
Books and Web sites abound. Wikipedia says the inventor obtained at least 700 patents. YouTube has several Tesla videos, including one of a break-in at Wardenclyffe. A rock band calls itself Tesla. An electric car company backed by Google's founders calls itself Tesla Motors.
Larry Page, Google's co-founder, sees the creator's life as a cautionary tale. "It's a sad, sad story," Mr. Page told Fortune magazine last year. The inventor "couldn't commercialize anything. He could barely fund his own research."
Wardenclyffe epitomized that kind o
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I need to dig up a photo online. I keep getting the mental picture of the lab at the beginning of the ATHF episodes.
Seems like this would be right up his alley. He always said he wants scientists to be appreciated like sports stars. Here's his chance to enshrine one of the most famous and far thinking of them all.
It appears there's a circular spot that had something there...
Tesla's Laboratory?
and use it to figure out how to manufacture a pork samich without a bone in it. i will be rich.
Seriously... Blowing a couple of million bucks on the site, along with perhaps a reconstructed museum and tower, is honestly a good way to waste Federal money. There's a big war bill coming out of the House, and get the New York delegation to stuff some money in there for a national museum, and while we're at it, have the President declare it as a national heritage site.
There will be some dopes at the National Review that will bitch about it, but even hard righties like me love national parks and the story of American industrialization and research. It's a lot better than Woodstock. I'd plug it on my right wing site, for sure.
Come on libs, spend some money and save this place!
This is my sig.
I'd ride mine down to cash in my winning lottery ticket, buy the land, and endow part of the fund needed to launch a world-class museum. You can visit Edison's lab in Greenfield Villiage (Henry Ford Musuem, etc) in Dearborn, Michigan - which, if you ever get the chance, do it - you won't be disappointed, I guarantee.
It would be shame if Tesla doesn't become similarly remembered.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
He was basing this experiment on how radio works. Does the radio station see any difference in power if 10 people listen? How about 100,000 people? The station outputs the same power no matter who is receiving.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
How would these towers effectively transmit electricity? I'm having trouble seeing how this would work effectively given the inverse square law.
I'm not Tesla but I can take a guess.
I think the idea was to couple to the ionosphere - treating the conductive ground and one of the layers of the conductive ionosphere as the two walls of a resonant cavity and pumping one of its resonances. The energy would not propagate away into space but would stay in the cavity until removed by a load or resistive losses due to the imperfect conduction of the cavity walls and its contents (dirt, buildings, birds, people, ...). It would be an extremely high impedance - enormous voltage (because of a nontrivial voltage gradient - in the ballpark of the atmospheric DC bias - multiplied by an enormous height) combined with minuscule currents through the tiny (though physically large) apacitances.
At the relatively low (compared to radio) frequencies involved you wouldn't have appreciable currents in anything that wasn't also a resonator and strongly coupled to the cavity (by being tall and broad at the top), i.e. a "raised capacitance" (Tesla's term for that big sphere-ish conductive shape on the top of the structure) and a big coil between it and ground, forming a tank circuit tuned to the carrier frequency and cavity resonance.
Buildings and metal towers might have nontrivial unintentional currents. But they'd be reactive currents because of the low resistance of the buildings' structural members. So they wouldn't suck out much power - just shift the phase of the power carrier signal in the area near them.
But a resonant circuit between a big raised conductor and ground would be able to efficiently power out of the cavity and couple it to a secondary coil around the main coil - shifting the voltage/current ratio from the extraordinarily high impedance of the transmission system to a lower impedance more convenient for use (though still at the carrier frequency so probably in need of rectification or other frequency conversion).
At least I think that may be what he intended. Whether it would work or not is still "up in the air", pun intended.
One nice thing: At the frequency involved you shouldn't be interfering with any existing information services. If the losses are low enough for it to be practical for power transmission it would be constantly "ringing" from lighting excitation. (Or maybe that's the ELF band where the US is talking to submerged submarines...)
(Heh. Thinking about this I just recognized the details of the broadcast power that was a throwaway background item in Eric Frank Russel's novel _Wasp_. Cars were "dinos" with the car body for "raised capacitance" and a dynamotor for frequency conversion. Disconnecting the "intake lead" and striking it against an "earth terminal" would produce a thin thread of arc if the distant power transmitter was on. And the energy density necessary to operate an automobile on this was completely ignored, of course. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The building's dark interior was littered with beer cans and broken bottles. Flashlights revealed no trace of the original equipment, except for a surprise on the second floor. There in the darkness loomed four enormous tanks, each the size of a small car. Their sides were made of thick metal and their seams heavily riveted, like those of an old destroyer or battleship. The Agfa consultant leading the tour called them giant batteries.
"Look up there," said the consultant, Ralph Passantino, signaling with his flashlight. "There's a hatch up there. It was used to get into the tanks to service them."
Tesla authorities appear to know little of the big tanks, making them potential clues to the inventor's original plans.
Boy are they going to be surprised when they open them and find hundreds of hats, dead cats and human corpses with huge bone claws on their hands crammed in there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... should buy it. And start an east coast presence for Tesla.
Elon Musk's latest gig
SIGLOST && SIGUNUSED && SIGQUIT
I work across the street from his old lab (on Tesla st no less) The place is in serious disrepair, but it would be nice to see it preserved. His transmission towers are in wreckage all over the DEC property on the south side of 25a in rocky point.
Last I heard 1 week ago the museum was a go, guess things change.
The Lunatick, Carpe Corpus!
A thing to remember is that Tesla was working when the concept of an electromagnetic wave was just being developed. He did a lot of stuff with resonance phenomenon, transformers, and low-pressure gas plasmas and so was probably thinking in terms of circuit components even when he invented radio - ahead of Helmholtz/Hertz/Maxwell/etc. who had the theory of transverse electromagnetic waves in free space.
Then again he was a math whiz and he might have been quite aware of this work and trying to use longitudinal waves in a cavity or the ionospheric plasma rather than the transverse electromagnetic waves of free space. (These CAN exist in these places, though not in free space.)
Or he might have just been hacking, back when the theories were still being developed.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Thanks for the interesting summary. My question is, doesn't the charge that defines the ionosphere help protect us from solar radiation and who-knows-what-else? Even if this did work, I shudder to think what would happen if we started removing gigawatts from the ionosphere to power our doo-dads.
The CB App. What's your 20?
is scraping for 1.6 million, they might as well give it away, becasue there not going to be here in a year anyways.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It would be unfortunate if some material was still hidden there. Even more so because there was a hint of papers found, which may be an exchange between Einstein and Tesla. There was something about it here http://godparticle.net/
My question is, doesn't the charge that defines the ionosphere help protect us from solar radiation and who-knows-what-else?
I don't think so. It's more a byproduct of the processes that DO protect us (mainly the magnetic field deflecting and/or trapping the charged particles of the solar wind.)
Even if this did work, I shudder to think what would happen if we started removing gigawatts from the ionosphere to power our doo-dads.
Why not if we put the gigawatts up there first?
We're not talking about removing and eating the charge (DC) of the ionospheric layers. We're talking about using their conduction (or pressure waves within their sea of charged particles) to carry AC around without radiating it away into space - or having to string wires when there's already a planet-sized "wire" hanging up there in the sky.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, if the fans of that facility want to generate some sizzle and buzz, they can just become angry enough and recoil from the light of speed to the speed of light, put some copper and argon in the air, and zap the naysayers. Buzz and hype will drive the media into a shock frenzy.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This perhaps the single greatest opportunity ever to cross paths with Slashdot!
If we each pitch in a buck a piece...
Can you imagine the fun a few million /.ers can have with this stuff?
Projects/experiments can be decided democratically (!) via the moderating system and we can further fund the entire project from the click-throughs generated by poster signatures.
Methinks Tesla was 100+ years ahead of his peers, much like Pons and Fleishman were 20 years ahead of theirs. (Cold Fusion became legitimate again last month. Nuclear reactions at room temperature, oh my!)
The Orion Project mentioned Tesla in one of their mailings this spring. People like to scoff, but the ones who scoff the loudest eventually have to hide the crow feet hanging out the side of their mouth.
I'm certain that Tesla's vision of free wireless power will come to pass - probably even in the next few years. This would be a black swan that would prevent the economic collapse from developing into a new dark ages.
How much for the cloning machine from 'The Prestige'?
Rather shocking isn't it?
These were popular back when I was a kid. Listened to mine for like..dunno, hundreds if not thousands of hours probably, back in the 50s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
Thanks for the interesting summary. My question is, doesn't the charge that defines the ionosphere help protect us from solar radiation and who-knows-what-else? Even if this did work, I shudder to think what would happen if we started removing gigawatts from the ionosphere to power our doo-dads.
The siphoning off of the EM shield on the planet would have a number of changes. Chiefly, the decrease of deflection of "hot" particles. As a result, more "hot" particles would strike the earth, slightly increasing its temperature. Over time it would have resulted in a horrible climate change, leading to the melting of the ice caps, first in the North, then in the south.
Sort of like global warming, but without the extra plant growth from CO2 :p
Keep in mind, much like Republicans other than Ron Paul, I pulled those facts out of my ass.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
in the contract. Does it include rights to the underground tunnel between Wardenclyffe & the base at Montauk Point? That is where the alien collaborators traveled back and forth while helping the government distort time & torture young children.
Did J. Pierpont Morgan ruin Tesla? Also, on another note, is that the same person whose legacy is Chase bank? (The one which ate WaMu I think.)
Please correct me if I'm wrong. I may be.
Hells... YEAH!
The game.
RIP Nicola Tesla. Towards the end of his life, he seems to have descended into mental illness . Now our portrayals of him are doing the same - for example, the TV series 'Sanctuary' apparently shows him as a vampire.
Sure, $1.6m to buy the land.
Then what is your plan to pay property taxes, or upkeep to meet building codes?
You're talking a lot more than $1.6M even just to keep it as is, never mind building a museum...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
IN ALL CAPS.
Some of the posts here are hilarious, the ones from people who assume to "know" what Tesla had in mind 100 years ago when he did all these things, or how he felt about things, etc.
Others even go into lengths to diagnose Tesla with some mental illnesses or call him a "loon."
Time and time again I'm reminded that /. often gathers a pool of most close minded wikipedia (and similar sites) regurgitators who have no practical experience of their own.
This "select" group could not distinguish their head from their ass if their life depended on it, yet they play heroes here.
Kudos to all the posters who were inquisitive and kept their mind open to possibilities, just like Tesla ones did, through their ideas and posts.
If it wasn't for such people, we would still be squinting at the dim DC powered lights in some dark corner of one's room...
The tower was blown up in 1917. All that remains is a brick building which has been stripped and used as a factory.
http://www.teslasociety.com/wardenclyffe2.htm
You won't find any Tesla insight at Wardenclyffe. Better to spend your time reading his papers.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=rwekkS3oD0EC
I'm a huge Tesla fan! I even traveled to Belgrade to visit the Tesla museum. A while back Studio 360 on WNYC ran nearly a whole show about Tesla. It was amazing!
Here's the link: http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2008/01/25
It includes a discussion of a book about Tesla, a performance about Tesla's life and conflict with Edison, and even a bit about Tesla's friendship with Mark Twain. Check it out!
Such a loss. Has mankind totally lost its mind and cant appreciate the past?
Or are we just doomed to repeat it, again.
One of most brilliant men *ever* to exist. At least Davinchi gets credit for his work.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The feats that he performed with static electricity (Holding fireballs in his hands, etc) were nothing short of amazing and have never been recreated to this day as far as I know.
Anyone view the slideslide and explain why the lab doesn't look right?
"in it's prime" = white, 3 arches and sloped roof
"for sale" = brick, 4 arches and flat roof
He was the man who fell to Earth.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm no electrical genius, however I am a realist, and I do believe in progress. We live in a world today where everyone expects every product or technology to 'just work'. If its not perfect, or doesn't do what it was intended to do at 100% efficiency the first time around, the internet experts are the very first ones to run screaming. You talk about Tesla's inventions as if A) You could have done it better and B) the concepts and technologies would have never improved! Its a shame that many of his inventions came to a halt. Not because they were insanely awesome (for the time they were), or because they worked with such flawless efficiency (some did). But more because of what the rest of the world has missed out on, which is 'what those inventions COULD have become'. Take for example an early 1902-1910 V8 internal combustion engine, versus a modern day V8 internal combustion engine. Back then they created a whopping ~30hp from as much as 3500-7700cc (200-474cu) engines and the automobiles they were eventually on used massive copper piping that made the cars as heavy or heavier than a modern day F-450. Now with todays advances, a 281cu (4601cc) V8 can be built to produce thousands of horsepower somewhat reliably (and by reliable, I mean several track runs). So imagine a world where some of Tesla's more 'looney' inventions may have experienced similar advances? Maybe we (as internet experteers) don't understand electrical theory quite like he did. Maybe we're not smart enough to make wireless power transmission more efficient. But someone might be, or might have been. What would the world be like today? It would be a completely different place, thats for sure.
No need to make disbelieving remarks and mocking references to Homer Simpson and secret societies, Tesla simply ran out of money. If you owe people enough money, the courts allow their agents to seize your stuff. It's just unfortunate that some of Tesla's stuff seems to have been torn apart for the value of its materials before anyone had a chance to take a good look at it.
Eric Baird
Wardencliffe wasn't a conventional radio transmitter. Tesla's reported as saying that most of the cost associated with building the tower was actually the building of the underground infrastructure below it, and if that's true, then that underground network should still be down there. The people who currently own the site, and are trying to sell it, ought to try to get some idea of what's down there, otherwise the buyers might think that they'd buying a conventional piece of land. If there's a lot of ancient underground tunnelling down there, that might affect the cost of preparing the land for other use.
Incidentally, Tesla's idea of using an ultraviolet beam coupled with an ultra high tension source to "drill" an ionised conducting path from the top of a tower to the Earth's upper atmosphere has since been reinvented by lightning researchers.
They now use U-V lasers to create conducting ionised paths to direct lightning downwards towards their target sensors.
Eric Baird
How can you put down a man who enabled you to post your opinion. Why don't you move to the desert or country and try living without AC power?