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Oatmeal Fundraiser a Success; Non-Profit Buys Land For Tesla Museum

Posted by timothy on from the visit-scenic-long-island dept.

Ars Technica reports that The Oatmeal's successful fund-raiser has borne fruit; on Friday the non-profit to which Oatmeal founder Matthew Inman's Indiegogo campaign's money was directed completed part of its goal to purchase and turn into a museum Nikola Tesla's former estate Wardenclyffe. There's plenty of work before the land can be a proper museum, but now it is in the hands of the non-profit organization Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe.

46 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Oatmeally goodness by dlingman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Awesome. I look forward to being able to visit this shrine when it is completed. Tesla Rocks.

    1. Re:Oatmeally goodness by craigminah · · Score: 4, Funny

      I hope you're referring to Tesla the engineer and not Tesla the rock band. If so I concur...

    2. Re:Oatmeally goodness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Wait a sec... I donated all that money to them for some old dead geek? I thought this was for my favorite band from the 80's. Little suzie is gonna be pissed... :D

    3. Re:Oatmeally goodness by circletimessquare · · Score: 1

      you have to admit that the very existence of a band paying homage by choosing that name is indisputable evidence that the engineer rocks

      --
      intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    4. Re:Oatmeally goodness by craigminah · · Score: 1

      Well if I "have to admit it" then I guess I will but Tesla the rock band was good to below average.

    5. Re:Oatmeally goodness by circletimessquare · · Score: 1

      obviously a Dio fan

      --
      intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    6. Re:Oatmeally goodness by craigminah · · Score: 1

      Funny, I did like Dio was liking Tesla and Dio mutually exclusive? I still have CDs from each but I never listen to Tesla.

    7. Re:Oatmeally goodness by craigminah · · Score: 1

      No...gave 'em to your mom when she left this morning.

      I listen to lots of music and never get assimilated into the style of the music itself. I think I liked Dio's stories though they're kind of cheesy by today's standards which is why I've mostly moved on. Still enjoy an occasional Dio song when listening in random via iTunes though.

  2. Truly looking forward to this by Pecisk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First, this is first such geek driven museum I know. While museums are all about preserving knowledge, not everyone in geekdom is fan of history, especially history of science. Hopefully it will drive more new geeks to know and study about history - again, especially history of great discoveries. History and understanding people within it could make geeks not only gurus in technologies, but also humans too. Trust me, not all social sciences are worthless :)

    Second, this is Tesla. No matter his personal demons (we all have them), he is underlooked in history of technology and science and needs popularity boost, especially after that "ubercapitalist" Edison pushed Tesla from spotlight - just because he got more money.

    And we really need to celebrate more such people as Tesla, and less Jobs or Gates.

    --
    user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
    1. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Pyrotech7 · · Score: 2

      First, this is first such geek driven museum I know. While museums are all about preserving knowledge, not everyone in geekdom is fan of history, especially history of science. Hopefully it will drive more new geeks to know and study about history - again, especially history of great discoveries. History and understanding people within it could make geeks not only gurus in technologies, but also humans too. Trust me, not all social sciences are worthless :)

      Second, this is Tesla. No matter his personal demons (we all have them), he is underlooked in history of technology and science and needs popularity boost, especially after that "ubercapitalist" Edison pushed Tesla from spotlight - just because he got more money.

      And we really need to celebrate more such people as Tesla, and less Jobs or Gates.

      Well said, Nickolai Tesla deserves a much greater part in history.

    2. Re:Truly looking forward to this by cognoscentus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      None of that was true even before the respective Apple products came onto the market.

    3. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Pecisk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "We would have not had personal computers as we know them today. We probably would be using 3270 terminals and paying time per hour to dial into a nearby mainframe."

      Biggest myth ever spelled about Apple and Jobs. Again, as Gates, he was very successful creating commercial product, BUT ideas was out there already. Xerox labs has been working on prototypes and ideas, there were lot of commercants interested in such kind of thing. Accorn was on the rise in UK, with it's RISC based computing platform. It was everywhere.

      So no, Jobs didn't bring us PC as we know them today. But he and Gates made sure that we remember them doing so. Again, this is what I am against. They have their place in history. But they didn't kickstarted this.

      "We would still be using CDs instead of MP3 players. Before the iPod, MP3 players were regarded as geek chic if best."

      Wow, this is actually Apple fanboism at it's best. iPod was nice step into mass market, but clearly there were better alternatives - they just didn't had that massive marketing machine behind Apple products. And this is in fact ignoring progress - if Apple wouldn't haven't done it, someone else would. Loss compression algorithms were already a reality for very long time at that moment.

      "We would still be buying music, for $19.00 an album, for that one good song, from crowded CD stores, as opposed to just tapping/clicking twice on iTMS."

      False, again. There were many shops already who has possibility to buy music online - Apple just used his muscle to get permissions from majority of main labels to sell them at one place. In fact, for very long time, ultra monopoly of online sales of iTMS slowed down improvements in this area. So no, haven't been there iTunes and iPod, there would be something in their places. Just cashing in on obvious.

      "We would still be using Motorola RAZR clones and saying that a phone that calls and texts is good enough. Apple invented the smartphone as we know it."

      Only American could said that, because well rest of the world were more lucky. Nokia had smartphones, even Linux had smartphones when Apple came and again cashed in.

      "We would still be using Motorola RAZR clones and saying that a phone that calls and texts is good enough. Apple invented the smartphone as we know it."

      Nevermind Nokia already had Internet tablet as experimental hardware, and they were working on useful commercial product when iPad came along.

      What can I give to Jobs and Apple that they know how to cash in. They were very convinced in what they were doing. But that's all. In the end, I think world would be better without current Apple strategy.

      --
      user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
    4. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Methinks thou hast been trollt.

    5. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Teancum · · Score: 1

      I can name a few museums or "centers" that are very geek driven. One of the best of them is the Exploratorium, which is a must visit location for any geek. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is another major geek-out site that is well worth the trip. Visiting any number of planetariums are also places that you will generally not regret ever visiting.

      That said, I think this museum is likely to become a rival to these other major geek museums and education centers.

    6. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Xerox Parc invented the mouse-based point-click-drag GUI. Jobs adapted it for personal computers after getting a demo of it from Xerox (http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=fJX8NiK2NZM), but it would have become the dominant GUI eventually even if he hadn't. It was simply too efficient as an O/S user interface not to. A number of your other statements similarly overreach. Jobs was indeed a visionary and deserves a great deal of credit for revolutionizing personal computing. Overstating his contributions, however, only serves to diminish his memory--not burnish it.

    7. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Jobs was an Edison, not a Tesla. As with Edison, the truth will catch up to the legend.

    8. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 2, Funny

      We would still be [...] saying that a phone that calls and texts is good enough.

      A phone with the ability to make and answer calls is good enough.

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    9. Re:Truly looking forward to this by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The entire jist of this rant is that a lot of people had prototypes and pre-Apple products that were on the market but the market never took off until someone with taste showed up and made the thing not suck.

      Seriously, I used pre-iPod MP3 players, I used pre-iPhone smart phones and i used pre-iOS tablets.

      They REALLY sucked. The OSes were difficult to use, the interfaces were unfriendly and for the price you paid, it was a goddamned joke.

      We can all give Nokia or Archos or whoever came before all the credit in the world for having stuff that looked promising but in the end it's Apple who's able to actually execute. Given how many years these devices were on the market before Apple strolled in, except say, the MP3 player market, the notion of what if apple wasn't there is actually inconceivable.

      Hell, USB was around for years and several of my motherboards from around 95-97 had USB headers but no one used them. It wasn't until the iMac came around that all changed.

      Am I not happy that Apple's being a litigious bully? Sure. Am I even more unhappy that there's a culture in the tech sector that good ideas are just merely a commodity? Damn right I am. A good lawyer and a judge can smack down Apple but no one's willing to fight against tastelessness in the tech industry. Except Apple. And now maybe Vizio? But the reviews of Vizio's gear isn't exactly promising, but it's progress.

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    10. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 2

      First, this is first such geek driven museum I know.

      You're USAn, aren't you.

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    11. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Lumpy · · Score: 1, Insightful

      "Seriously, I used pre-iPod MP3 players, I used pre-iPhone smart phones and i used pre-iOS tablets.

      They REALLY sucked. The OSes were difficult to use, the interfaces were unfriendly and for the price you paid, it was a goddamned joke."

      you know why? because the executives of those companies were complete and utter morons. They would have had a brilliant UI and OS if they made them opena nd invited the OSS community to work with them. But no. Diamond wanted to be raging assholes with their RIO and refused to share with the community. they COULD have owned the market if they did so.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    12. Re:Truly looking forward to this by frosty_tsm · · Score: 1

      Jobs was an Edison, not a Tesla. As with Edison, the truth will catch up to the legend.

      Beyond the marketing, Jobs never claimed to be a Tesla and always was labeled an Edison (but not evil enough to steal cats and electrocute them).

      Geeks hate this, but we need non-evil Edisons for our ideas to make it to market.

    13. Re:Truly looking forward to this by tdknox · · Score: 1

      "Seriously, I used pre-iPod MP3 players, I used pre-iPhone smart phones and i used pre-iOS tablets.

      They REALLY sucked. The OSes were difficult to use, the interfaces were unfriendly and for the price you paid, it was a goddamned joke."

      you know why? because the executives of those companies were complete and utter morons. They would have had a brilliant UI and OS if they made them opena nd invited the OSS community to work with them. But no. Diamond wanted to be raging assholes with their RIO and refused to share with the community. they COULD have owned the market if they did so.

      I'm not sure this is the case. I've used and contributed to a lot of open source software. For the most part, they have been very functional and have done the job well. I am not unhappy with how they worked. But, let's be honest here. The UI sucked. Sucked badly. I have yet to see any OSS that has a usable UI. That's fine for me, I'm an engineer. I can cope with arcane settings and the need to do some things through the command line. Engineers, by and large, cannot develop something that looks good, only something that performs well. For the non-engineering world, they are an unusable mess. This is the second biggest reason why OSS hasn't become the desktop replacement many hoped it would be.

      --
      Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?
    14. Re:Truly looking forward to this by xaxa · · Score: 1

      First, this is first such geek driven museum I know.

      Here you are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Science_museums . You can find my workplace, in a sub-sub category, and I work with staff from many other institutions, and most are very "geek" driven.

      Picking one out, Bletchley Park has been mentioned on /. before, and has some support from Google among others.

    15. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So Woz would be Tesla then?

    16. Re:Truly looking forward to this by hackertourist · · Score: 2

      First, this is first such geek driven museum I know.

      You must have never been to the UK. The place is full of geek-driven musea. From coal mines to aircraft factories to Bletchley Park, all can be visited and all are created and run by geeks of various flavours. The same goes for the rest of Europe, though to a lesser extent IMO.

    17. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Urza9814 · · Score: 2

      Seriously, I used pre-iPod MP3 players, I used pre-iPhone smart phones and i used pre-iOS tablets.

      They REALLY sucked. The OSes were difficult to use, the interfaces were unfriendly and for the price you paid, it was a goddamned joke.

      Can't say a think about the phones and tablets, as I never used them...but cleary you never used the RCA Lyra hard drive players. Pretty sure those were from around 2000, and I would STILL prefer an old one of those to an iPod Classic. Excellent devices. Had a very similar interface to the iPod (sort by album, artist, etc) except they had a better screen, they had a custom equilizer (I STILL don't think iPods have that, do they?), they had FM radio, you could record audio, and you didn't have to use any proprietary software to transfer music. You COULD, but you could also drop songs on it as a mass storage device and then create the actual music database from the device itself!

      Also, the even older Kodak MC3 was pretty nice. Used Compact Flash cards, which wouldn't beat a hard drive but I'm pretty sure that was before _any_ hard drive players. Had a pretty solid MP3 player, a decent digital camera for the time, could shoot video too...how long was it until Apple added a camera to their players?

      Oh, and you can't forget the CD MP3 players. Those were great. Back before anyone was using hard drives, when a large and expensive compact flash card was 64MB...you could toss 700MB of MP3s on your $0.10 CD and swap those out as needed. And yes, the cheap $30 ones had terrible interfaces, but some of the higher end RCA ones were absolutely brilliant. And they could create a database of your MP3s on the fly and sort by album/artist/genre or whatever.

    18. Re:Truly looking forward to this by Rexdude · · Score: 1

      And in a toss up between Jobs and Gates, I'll give the crown to Gates for truly bringing computing to the masses. DOS on the PC, and later Windows were what got computers into the mainstream. Apple remained a niche rich boy's toy from the very beginning. And even if you're talking about GUI and multimedia...Commodore 64/Amiga & ZX Sinclair anyone?

      --
      "..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
  3. Punctuation Please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Reading that run on sentence in the middle of the night made me have to read that run on sentence 3 times just to understand it.
    (mine was on purpose)

  4. A few Nikola Tesla links.. by SternisheFan · · Score: 3, Informative
    Tesla Society bio - http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm

    Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nikola_Tesla&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop

    Documentary video - http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/nikola-tesla-the-genius/

    PBS Nikol Tesla page - http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/index.html

  5. Tower? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I eagerly await the second fundraiser to rebuild the tower (twice!) and stick something like this on top.

  6. Lets raise money for an Oatmeal museum by badford · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Oatmeal is now my hero. This is friggin sweet!

    Remember, this is not his first act of Geek heroism. http://theoatmeal.com/sopa

    Oatmeal,

    I suspect you are a slashdotter and are reading this now. you have a special gift my friend, and I do not mean mitichlorians. You have the power to affect real nerd-wizard change in the world of muggles.

    Peace out, bro

    --
    -badford
  7. Tesla .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Tesla this, Tesla that.

    When will we have some recognition for the world's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison?

    1. Re:Tesla .... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 1

      Tesla this, Tesla that.

      When will we have some recognition for the world's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison?

      As I recall, from US school grades 4-8. Didn't hear about Tesla until much, much later.

      Whoosh.

      Nope. Just chose to answer it anyway.

  8. I'd like to know the numbers by blind+biker · · Score: 1

    I contributed to the charity, and remember quite well that it was expected that the land purchase could go through at a lower amount, because the charity could pay all the money up-front. So that would have left a big chunk of money available for the museum construction, and the tower re-building.

    The Arts Technica says nothing about the specifics, only the stuff everybody knows already.

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  9. Fun with Tesla by Clueless+Moron · · Score: 4, Funny

    If you meet a Croat, tell him Tesla was Serbian. If you meet a Serb, tell him Tesla was Croatian. Watch the sparks fly.

    (Tesla was born in what is now Croatia, but was ethnically Serbian).

    1. Re:Fun with Tesla by TimHunter · · Score: 4, Funny

      Watch the sparks fly.

      I see what you did there.

    2. Re:Fun with Tesla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Of course he was really Slovenian. Tell that to the Croats and Serbs and watch them hang their heads.

    3. Re:Fun with Tesla by Clueless+Moron · · Score: 1

      Actually I was hoping somebody would pipe up with "Tesla was American!". I leave disappointed.

    4. Re:Fun with Tesla by circletimessquare · · Score: 1

      hello, 1990s here. we've seen enough of those kind of sparks. thanks

      --
      intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    5. Re:Fun with Tesla by celle · · Score: 1

      "(Tesla was born in what is now Croatia, but was ethnically Serbian)."

          He did his work and died in the US. That makes him an American.

  10. Re:Self-abosorbed entitled petty bourgeois twits by couchslug · · Score: 1

    The proles are proles because they are not and have never been smart enough to run things.

    If your precious "DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT!" comes to pass, it requires enforcers to wipe out private property and opposing views.

    Since the only SOCIAL MOBILITY in DOTP is advancement via the State, you get Stalin and Mao.

    --
    "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
  11. Follow-on: Crowd Source Construction and Curation? by fygment · · Score: 2

    Could they/have they set up crowd sourcing of the planning and construction that must come next. I, for one, would happily give a week or two of my time to work on the site. I can bring carpentry, electrical, data management, and project management skills. Any others up for somethinng similar?

    --
    "Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
  12. Still curious by flimflammer · · Score: 1

    What exactly are they going to have at this museum? Seems the property is the only thing they really have, with Tesla's work resting soundly at his other museum abroad. Even then the photo development company covered over most of the original building.

    1. Re:Still curious by NixieBunny · · Score: 1

      For starters, Tesla came up with the three-phase AC power distribution system that has been in use everywhere in the world for the last hundred years. There's enough material there to fill a few rooms. I imagine we'll see some Tesla coils as well. Plus all the really exotic stuff, such as the proposed wireless power transmission scheme and the marvelous conspiracy theories about its suppression.

      --
      The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
  13. Oatmeal? by Stormwatch · · Score: 1

    Are you crazy?

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
  14. Another geek museum by xandroid · · Score: 1

    http://themade.org/
    Still in nascent phases, but a geek museum nonetheless.

    --
    $ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'