The Oatmeal Begins a Fundraiser for a Nikola Tesla Museum

Quince alPillan writes "The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman is once again collecting money for a good cause. This time, he's collecting money for the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe to purchase the original location of the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York so that it can be rebuilt into a Tesla Museum. The fundraiser, titled Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum has already started."

Comments

Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as long as the museum isn't filled with as many inaccuracies as the Oatmeal piece was. Otherwise we're going to have a museum filled with "facts" that paint Tesla as a god who would have given the world free power, ended all wars, solved world hunger, and developed the ultimate recipe for apple pie, and Edison as a drooling idiot who couldn't have tied his shoes, let alone improve on the lightbulb, aid in the development of a system to deliver electrical current across long distances, and severely advance the technology of the basis of our modern medical imaging technology. (cue the rants about Clarence Dally, who had been victimized by Edison, despite the fact that Dally was a willing participant and we simply didn't know how dangerous X-rays were at the time. Look into every advance the science of radioactive materials in the first half of the 20th century, and you will find at least one Dally in each of them).

They both were geniuses. They both were flawed.
Without both of their contributions to science, I wouldn't be typing this (electricity is efficiently delivered to my house in the form of alternating current. A nifty little device translates that alternating current into direct current, which is what runs my computer).

maybe a Twain monument too?

[Penurious Penguin]

From what I've read, Tesla and ol' Sam were fair pals. I actually don't see how they couldn't have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twain_in_Tesla's_Lab.jpg

Re:Money goes straight to foundation...

[Trepidity]

People sometimes forget that this kind of piggyback marketing is his professional expertise, which he's done for longer than he's done the comic. Before he did The Oatmeal, he was an SEO consultant who would get people's domains ranked higher by making infographics to host there that he'd get to "go viral" on Reddit/etc. For example, you have some shady company selling penis-enlargement pills. You hire him, and draws you an infographic along the lines of FIVE CRAZY WACKY FACTS ABOUT PHALLUSES. That gets passed around a lot, and now your penis-enlargement domain has higher PageRank for a bunch of dong-related search terms.

Nowadays a bigger part of his deal is the actual content (since it's popular in its own right), but he's still really good at this kind of marketing.