Most Long Islanders would be hard-pressed these days to know the name Nikola Tesla, much less what he did.
But Tesla, born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, proposed a scheme of “wireless communication,” such that people could talk to one another cross-country or overseas, decades before the idea became a reality. He persuaded the giant financier JP Morgan to provide him with $150,000 — the equivalent of about $3 million in today’s dollars — to carry out the plan. But funding dried up, and the proposal went no further.
Tesla was credited with dozens of other technological ideas, including ways to use alternating current and an induction motor. Westinghouse used Tesla’s alternating current to light the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. In 1891, he invented the Tesla coil, widely-used in radio today.
In 2003, two American businessmen founded Tesla Inc., an electric car company named in honor of Tesla. David Bowe played Tesla in a 2006 movie, “The Prestige.”
Yet the inventor’s spot on Long Island — the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, in Shoreham — has sat empty and badly damaged after a fire ripped through it just before Thanksgiving in 2023.
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Now, Long Island’s business and technology community are making a full-on effort to restore the center and to re-open it to visitors seven days a week in 2028, according to Marc Alessi, executive director of the nonprofit that is waging the campaign.
It is going to be yeoman’s work. Even before the fire, which was not suspicious, the project was going to cost about $20 million, said Alessi, who served in the New York State Assembly from 2005 to 2010.
The nonprofit took control of the 14-acre property in a wooded area of Shoreham in 2013. Alessi, who lives three houses from the property, said the nonprofit group came to him for help when he was still in the assembly in 2007.
Alessi, a tech guru, said he knew he had to help.
“He (Tesla) was here on Long Island,” Alessi said. “He changed the world. He changed everything.”
Alessi arranged for $850,000 in matching capital funding. Over several years, another $10 million was raised through grants and donations.
Now, Alessi said, another $14 million will be needed to complete work on the science center where Tesla did much of his work between 1901 and the mid-1910s.
Plans are to restore the center to much the way it looked when Tesla was there. There are also to be models of exhibits that Tesla conceived, and classrooms so school children can learn about science and Tesla’s work.
Jane Alcorn, a retired Comsewogue school teacher, has earned the moniker “the matriarch” of the restoration project for her unending effort to drum up interest, lobby support and keep the idea alive.
Years earlier, when she taught in the Shoreham-Wading River school district, she helped create a small science lab. That idea spread to other nearby districts.
She got a seat on the board of the Science Center at Wardenclyffe. Tesla, faced with financial problems, was forced to abandon the property in 2013. Two years later the property was foreclosed and the tower Tesla had built to transmit overseas was demolished.
Two companies that manufactured photographic paper — AGFA and Peerless /AAGFA — occupied the land until 1987. It has remained vacant since.
A lot of fancy footwork in fundraising has been going on. In 2001, a cartoonist named Matthew Inman, creator of a humor site known as “The Oatmeal,” led an online drive that raised over $1 million for a new museum to honor Tesla. Inman called Tesla “kind of a geek at heart.”
“He’s sort of the unsung hero,” Inman said in an interview with NPR. “He did all these wonderful things for us and really didn’t get much credit during his career.”
Alcorn was asked to contact Inman.
“He got in touch with me,” she told the Press. “He explained why Tesla was greater than Marconi,” who invented the first practical radio system.
There were “radio wars” between the two. Tesla had developed many of the underlying principles and technologies of radio. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized Tesla’s contribution and ultimately restored his patents.
Alessi said fundraising has already begun. The nonprofit holds an annual gala, which raises money, and he and others will be looking into other grants and donations.
Paul Trapini, president of the Plainview-based LISTnet, said his organization plans to promote the effort to restore the Tesla Center.
“We want to raise awareness,” Trapini told the Press. “We want people to know about it.”
Alcorn, the retired teacher, feels the effort is imperative.
“Most people don’t know who he was,” Alcorn told the Press. “We all like champions, but we look closely at underdogs. His work is fundamental to what we do today.
“He was someone with tenacity and imagination,” Alcorn added. “That’s what we want to spark in young people today.”
