Wardenclyffe

This place is currently private property. The Tesla museum is not yet open, but it may still be of interest to Tesla fans. Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917) also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early wireless transmission tower designed by Nikola Tesla in Shoreham, New York and intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting, and proof-of-concept demonstrations of wireless power transmission. It was never fully operational, and the tower was demolished in 1917. The tower was named after James S. Warden, a western lawyer and banker who had purchased land for the endeavor in Shoreham, Long Island, about sixty miles from Manhattan. Here he built a resort community known as Wardenclyffe-On-Sound. Warden believed that with the implementation of Tesla's "world system" a "Radio City" would arise in the area. He offered Tesla 200 acres of land close to a railway line on which to build his wireless telecommunications tower and laboratory facility. Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility ca. 1898 and in 1901 construction began on the land near Long Island Sound. Architect Stanford White designed the Wardenclyffe facility main building. The tower was designed by W.D. Crow, an associate of White. Funding for Tesla's project was provided by influential industrialists and other venture capitalists. The project was initially backed by the wealthy J. P. Morgan who had invested $150,000 in the facility (more than $3 million in 2009 dollars). In June 1902 Tesla moved his laboratory operations from his Houston Street laboratory to Wardenclyffe. The project ran into many problems. Financiers began investing in Guglielmo Marconi's system which started regular transatlantic transmission in 1903 and seemed to be doing it with far less expensive equipment. By 1903 Tesla's project, still under construction due to numerous design changes, ran out of money and Morgan declined to fund it any further. Some in the press began turning against the project claiming it was a hoax.[6] Tesla tried to generate more interest in Wardenclyffe by revealing its ability to transmit wireless electricity, but Morgan was not interested, and the 1903 "rich man's panic" on Wall Street dried up any further investment. By July 1904 Morgan (and the other investors) finally decided they would not provide any additional financing. In May 1905 Tesla's patents on alternating current motors and other methods of power transmission expired, halting royalty payments and causing a severe reduction of funding to the Wardenclyffe Tower. In an attempt to find alternative funding Tesla advertised the services of the Wardenclyffe facility but he was met with little success. By this time Tesla had also designed the Tesla turbine at Wardenclyffe and produced Tesla coils for sale to various businesses.