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

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.

Comments

Oatmeally goodness

[dlingman]

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

Re:Oatmeally goodness

[craigminah]

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

Truly looking forward to this

[Pecisk]

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.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Pyrotech7]

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.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[cognoscentus]

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

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Pecisk]

"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.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Nerdfest]

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

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Forty Two Tenfold]

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.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

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.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Forty Two Tenfold]

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

You're USAn, aren't you.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Anonymous Coward]

So Woz would be Tesla then?

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[hackertourist]

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.

Re:Truly looking forward to this

[Urza9814]

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.

Punctuation Please

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

A few Nikola Tesla links..

[SternisheFan]

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

Lets raise money for an Oatmeal museum

[badford]

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

Tesla ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla this, Tesla that.

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

Fun with Tesla

[Clueless Moron]

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).

Re:Fun with Tesla

[TimHunter]

Watch the sparks fly.

I see what you did there.

Follow-on: Crowd Source Construction and Curation?

[fygment]

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?