This trip has been 3 years in the making. Nikola Tesla. Mad Scientist. Master of Electricity. The guy who has pictures of him both HOLDING an illuminated lightbulb, and sitting reading the paper between two tesla coils with electricity wiring out every which way. He was doing things a hundred years ago that top electrical engineers of today still scratch their heads over. And he was doing some of it within a 20 mile radius of where I live. And I have lived here for OVER 3 years and still haven't taken the 20 minute drive out to this monumentally historic location. I wonder if he did any of those insanely cool photo ops at Wardenclyffe.
I wonder how many people knew what WiFi was even 15 years ago. The idea of having wireless internet hotspots in 2000 was crazy. Wirelessly transmit information from the kitchen to your bedroom!?!? This guy wanted to do it from Long Island to the United Kingdom. And he wanted to do it ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
Is it ironic that I put in my request for directions to Wardenclyffe Tower into Google Maps, which then used all kinds of wireless technology to plot out my route? There were a few of those little ironies on this journey. Google Maps was also able to map it out as Wardenclyffe Tower. There are some really great things about being alive in the modern day.
On my way out, I started thinking about the man himself, and what it must have been like to live out here a hundred years ago. My father-in-law says that it's not even the same place from thirty or forty years ago, where this far out east was pretty much farmland and woods. Now it's wildly overpopulated and seriously suburban. I wonder what Tesla's ride out to Wardenclyffe Towers must have been like. My musing was interrupted by Google Maps warning. We were getting pretty close.
It didn't look terribly impressive. The ride up that is. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I guess I was expecting a lot of forest, and ominous approach. What I got was driving down 25A, near Rocky Point/Shoreham, a lot of suburban houses, a firehouse, and a lot of strip malls. A small taste of what someone wanted to do to Wardenclyffe Tower. (see below in all it's "unadultered glory")
Nothing against the fine folks who run those businesses, of course. Everyone's got to make a living. And this far out east, they do it in a really classy way. They keep all of the strip malls, Subways, Walgreens, gas stations, etc. within these really tight restrictions to make the whole town look a lot nicer, to make everything look faux-historical. It does give the whole homogenization of community a much softer feeling. But I think most of us feel like maybe we could forego another round of it to preserve Mr. Tesla's legacy. Then I was finally there. It comes up very anticlimactically, it's across the street from a fire department. Next thing you know, I'm on Tesla St.
Tesla St. is actually a residential street from the looks of it. There's houses on it on the right side, and on the left, barbed wire fence protecting Wardenclyffe Tower. Then I get my first look at the facility itself. It is seriously cool and historic looking. It also has a monster chimney coming out of the top, which makes it not entirely hard to envisage where a 187-foot tower must have loomed a century earlier.
It's at this point that I start getting those spine tingles. It starts to hit me that Nikola Tesla himself had walked not far from where I was standing. He walked through the gates and into that building to do serious work. It's a really crazy vibe that I think most people can relate to. I think it has something to do with the mixing of stories that you have been told from early ages and the collision of that fantasy with standing somewhere where those things actually happened. It's a wonderful feeling that I haven't felt enough times in my life.
From this street I'm able to make it over to the side of the building. The people who are going to clean this up into a museum have a lot of work ahead of them. There's a lot of graffiti on the side of the building. On the one hand I want to stand up for Mr. Tesla's property, on the other hand, if I was a graffiti artist, this has to be a holy grail type place to lay your tag.
I then make my way to the main entrance, which is somewhat further west of Tesla St. Everything is of course closed, but I am able to see the new Tesla statue that has been put in place. It looks awesome. Apparently the President of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolic, came out to personally dedicate the statue. They were looking for a site worthy of its dedication. Wardenclyffe fits the bill, no question. Engraved on the statue is his equation for magnetic flux density. In yellow or gold. It looks awesome.
I drove around the other side of the facility. Apparently it's like 16 acres of land. It seems very small, and it's totally surrounded by single family homes. Around the back of the land are huge power lines which carry multi phase alternating current which Tesla helped design, through the backyard of the Wardenclyffe Tower facility, to god knows where. Another one of those fitting ironies in this journey. I wonder how many people who live around here know what sacred ground is just around the corner.
