The Oatmeal's Fundraiser Tops $1M Toward Tesla Museum 63
The Oatmeal's call to raise funds for a museum celebrating Nikola Tesla seems to have electrified enough people. From Digital Trends: "The Oatmeal has raised over $1 million on IndieGoGo in an effort to secure Wardenclyffe, the site of Tesla's final laboratory, to build a museum dedicated to Tesla. ... [Oatmeal founder and artist Matthew] Inman’s original goal of $850,000 would buy just half of the cost of the property, but the state of New York has agreed to match contributions, bringing total funds up to $1.7 million. Raising the capital to build a museum from the property will be another cost, but from the looks of it, with 36 days left and having already surpassed the $1 million mark, there should be funds to spare."
Good thing Edison is not alive... (Score:5, Funny)
He would probably buy it and install a McDonald's...
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He would probably buy it and install a McDonald's...
Actually a developer offer to buy the property and turn half a dozen or so acres and the building over to be the museum FOR FREE if he were allowed to develop condos on most of the rest of the parcel. The property being sold through a commercial real estate agency, is already compatibly zoned.
Considering that the efforts for this museum have been underway since the late 90's (the wayback machine is revealing with some of the sources) and there have been offices in multiple cities including one in Colorado,
Excellent! This is worthwhile. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Your kids probably never played Red Alert so a lot of the coolness will be lost on them.
Re:Excellent! This is worthwhile. (Score:5, Insightful)
They should build a Maker Center there, it could support it self in no time.
Education and invention.
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That is a great idea. And i don't care if i'm behind someone one this post.
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I'm all for an interactive museum and maker center. How awesome would it be if they had a build your own Tesla coil workshop. Plus they could also offer 3d printing, small laser cutting, machine shop and various electronics and computing workshops. And Brookhaven lab is a few minutes drive south.
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What kid wouldn't be inspired by a live Tesla coil?
Particularly if it played a medley of popular sci-fi theme-tunes....
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If they are to build it, I would visit a Tesla museum with my children, especially if they can have hands-on attractions. What kid wouldn't be inspired by a live Tesla coil? I know I was when I was a child.
Take them to the Tesla Museum in Colorado.
http://teslamuseum.us/
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Never mind.
Apparently the Colorado museum I visited in 1996 doesn't exist anymore.
Very underestimated scientist (Score:4, Insightful)
If only he had gotten as much attention as the media now tend to spend on famous trash, the world would be a much better place.
He did (Score:5, Informative)
"If only he had gotten as much attention as the media now tend to spend on famous trash, the world would be a much better place."
Tesla was actually quite famous in his day. His fame might have fallen by the time he died, but Time magazine did feature him in its cover. See:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Nikola_Tesla_on_Time_Magazine_1931.jpg [wikimedia.org]
Surely, at a time where TV broadcasting was in its infancy at best, appearing on the cover of Time is as good a claim a fame as appearing on Fox News or American Idol.
Blame his failure to equal the status of Edison, not to mention Einstein, on his decision to withdraw from society in his later years.
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Indeed. And it's not so much that his fame has fallen, as the geeks of today have been somewhat mislead by a series of books written by various Tesla acolytes. Since the bias of those accounts ("up the lone inventor, down the evil corporation") largely fits the bias of the modern geek, they have been accepted pretty much uncritically.
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they have been accepted pretty much uncritically.
Sort of how you expect your post to be taken - you provide no cites or references, not even any details of the things their bias has prejudiced. Your making claims that you aren't substantiating, and are asking that they be taken on faith.
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Lets be more accurate here. The idea of Telsa was a challenge to the idea of a corporate dick being able to pay other to invent things and then for that corporate dick to be able to prance about the world stage feeding his ego by claiming he was a genius and invented all that stuff himself. Here's hoping they have an Edison display in the toilets, for the first corporate executive douche with a national PR team who worked hard and making the inventors and true genius's invisible so corporate executive ass
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Audience (Score:5, Insightful)
I superficially glanced at this but couldn't figure out if the museum audience is supposed to be:
1) 10 years old
2) -or- electrical engineers and fellow travelers
3) -or- homeopathic crystal therapy conspiracy theory vampire worshipers
Its pretty hard to appeal equally to all 3, so I'm curious which audience the museum is aimed at.
Obviously... (Score:4, Funny)
It's meant for the 10 year old electrical engineers working on homeopathic crystal therapies for vampires.
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yeah, look how the homeopathic therapy worked for Jobs.
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yeah, look how the homeopathic therapy worked for Jobs.
It just worked.
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It should be mostly 1 & 2, with adults who don't really know that much about science in general but think it might be an interesting museum to see being another category.
There should be plenty designed specifically for kids and school children in general, but the museum should ideally have artifacts and objects associated with tesla so that while the electrical engineer may have known just about everything about the exhibits information wise in advance, but still enjoy seeing the assorted artifacts in p
Re:Audience (Score:4, Insightful)
Being a physicist or a retired teacher/librarian is in no way inconsistent with being a "Tesla nutter".
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Given the guy from the Oatmeal basically worships Tesla I assume it's going to be a church.
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They're going to move these guys in [youtube.com].
Full disclosure: I'm already a member.
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This is great news (Score:2, Informative)
I very recently visited Zagreb, Croatia and went to the technical museum there. It holds a permanent Tesla exhibition with daily shows featuring some of his more prominant works in action.
Still, it was very lacking in both information and content. The exhibitioner was not able to perform the show in English (for a mostly non-croat audience), and did not have sufficient understanding of the technology to discuss it in his native language. They did not seem to understand how, exactly, the inventions work.
Re:This is great news (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems the museum in Belgrade [wikipedia.org] is vastly superior. He was Serbian after all, and it looks like they inherited a lot of his artifacts -- including him. (his urn is there).
I've been to BG a few times in the past, and never stopped at the museum. WTF is wrong with me?
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It really does look vastly superior, I'll have to visit Belgrade and that museum the next time I'm in the region.
Saying 'he was Serbian after all' is somewhat misleading, while it is true that he has half of his ancestry (paternal) tracing to Serbian origins, he was an Austrian, born from a Croat, in the middle of Croatia, got his inspirations in Croatian nature and learned the Lika dialect as young, I would be hesitant to sway his nationality to that of a Serb; no matter how The Truth Of Today says.
Still,
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I have nits, can you pick them too?
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They did not seem to understand how, exactly, the inventions work
Columbus. Great hair cut. Liked to sail. In 1492, he sailed, somewhere, not sure where. But look, we have an educational poster of him over here...
I'm thinking there must be an engineering college with work-study EEs and MEs who could talk about our modern polyphase AC power system pretty much exactly as Tesla designed it, and his boundary flow turbine mostly used at fish hatcheries AFAIK, and his very famous "coil" which is basically a air core RF transformer with big lumped constant resonant exterior
Now the first addition to it should be... (Score:2)
The first thing that should be added to this museum is the papers that the FBI snatched from his estate when he died. Of course if our crooked government holds true, these were probably handed out to Hoover's buddies to either make a profit off of, or just bury.
Another Tesla museum? (Score:5, Informative)
There's apparently one in Belgrade [wikipedia.org]. There is another small one in Colorado Springs [teslamuseum.us] - I've been there.
Re:Another Tesla museum? (Score:5, Interesting)
The one you have been to in Colorado Springs was almost certainly what has now been closed. The current one, which is extremely limited in scope by any measure, is actually basically in someone's basement and can be visited by appointment only.
The Belgrade one is the one really notable true museum, but the view of many is there should be one in the U.S. where his most significant scientific accomplishments occurred, especially since most people are not going to happen to go to Belgrade.
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since most people are not going to happen to go to Belgrade.
Which is good, because if most people were in Belgrade that would be slightly more than 10 people per square meter.
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Not even enough room to jump :(
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The one in Colorado looks like it's nothing more than a scam, the website is full of "Buy my books about DC vampires conspiring with UFOs to lower the efficiency of AC by systematically inserting high-resistance elephants [wikipedia.org] into the line!"
Have you been to the current one? (Score:1)
The current one, which is extremely limited in scope by any measure, is actually basically in someone's basement and can be visited by appointment only.
I have not been to it either yet, but I did talk to the guy on the phone.
It is appointment only, you have to come up with a group of four or more, but they have Telsa artifacts and they use some of them as part of a stage show. It sounds interesting enough I plan to go sometime if I can get a few friends together.
I still also donated money to the Oatmeal ef
Hope there's a better business model this time (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish him success, but he should be aware that there was a Tesla museum in Colorado Springs that was unable to make a go of it. It entered Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1998.
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The new museum could try zapping passers by with tesla coils.. that would draw a crowd quickly. Well until they realised it wasn't really bacon,,,
Dear "The Oatmeal" (Score:2)
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Wireless electricity for all :-)
Unfortunately, wireless signal for none...
Contaminated property, will require cleanup (Score:2)