Online fund-raising drive raises $900,000 for Tesla Museum

Nikola Tesla, the eccentric Serbian inventor who never quite got the credit he deserved for the R&D work he did in the early 20th century in the development of an astounding array of electrical technologies that included fluorescent lighting, wireless ...
Aug. 22, 2012
2 min read
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Nikola Tesla, the eccentric Serbian inventor who never quite got the credit he deserved for the R&D work he did in the early 20th century in the development of an astounding array of electrical technologies that included fluorescent lighting, wireless communications, robotics, and AC current, has a friend in Matthew Inman, creator of theoatmeal.com cartoon.

The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe wants to save one Tesla's most famous laboratories in Shoreham, N.Y., and Inman enlisted the help and generosity of his 700,000 friends on Facebook; 300,000 followers on Twitter; and 1 million followers on Google+ to mount a massive online fundraising drive, called, “Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum." Inman is using the IndieGoGo crowdfunding website to raise money to purchase the Tesla lab and developit into a museum, and to date has raised more than $900,000 for that purpose. You can learn more about the plans for the museum at www.teslasciencecenter.org, and can make a donation at www.indiegogo.com/teslamuseum. And if you are a Tesla fan, you simply have to check out Inman's comic strip on Tesla at www.theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla. Hilarious, if a bit raunchy.

Our thanks to Anthony Capkun, editor of Canada's Electrical Business magazine for giving us a heads-up on this project.

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Jim Lucy Blog

Chief Editor

Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.