Dear friends and fellow Tesla enthusiasts,

This morning I received the following disturbing email from Marc Seifer, the author of Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla, indicating that in spite of the efforts of the Wardenclyffe Project, the only remaining Tesla laboratory and the property it is located upon are now up for sale.

As Marc states below, this is a crisis situation. Please take a few minutes of your time to join us in a letter campaign to the governor of New York to urge him to save this priceless landmark. The link to the contact information for the governor can be found in the email from Marc below.

It's difficult for me to believe that this situation has yet to be resolved after so many years. In this day and age, even with the economic slump, one to two million dollars is not a huge investment. If the governor is unable or unwilling to help, I can't help but think that there would have to be companies or individuals out there that would understand the value of this property and be willing to help save it. I am certainly not a person that follows or has knowledge of corporate grants, but I do know that Microsoft and many of the Fortune 500 companies have foundations that issue grants for research and other humanitarian causes. If anyone has contacts or knows how we might inform the proper people of this desperate situation so that they might intervene, please let us know.


Thank you,
Cameron B. Prince
Webmaster/Director

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EMAIL FROM MARC SEIFER

Cameron,

I was wondering if you would consider writing to the Governor of New York to ask him to save Nikola Tesla’s great lab at Wardenclyffe, Shoreham Long Island.

Governor David A Paterson:

http://www.ny.gov/governor/contact/index.html

The Wardenclyffe property is up for sale and a private concern is thinking of buying it for about a million dollars and possibly destroying the lab which was designed by the great architect Stanford White and putting up condos.

This is a crisis situation. My suggestion is that you ask Governor Paterson to allocate one or two million dollars of the stimulus package to secure the property and make it a Museum to honor both the inventor Nikola Tesla and also the architect Stanford White. Such a move would not only serve to honor the one man most responsible for slowing down global warming with his invention of the the AC hydroelectric power system, which is clean energy and renewable, it would also stimulate jobs and commerce to that part of Long Island. Tesla, of course is also an international figure also responsible for most of the fundamentals behind cell phone technology and our age of wireless.

Please write the governor and also send this email to five friends who would also petition the governor.

Thank you.

Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D.
Author:
Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla

I sent him a note.............

Capper

Cameron:

Great idea! I used your link to send the following email to Governor Paterson.

To The Honorable Governor Paterson:

I am writing to request that you and the residents of the great Empire State of New York take action to save the Wardenclyffe property near Shoreham, Long Island. The site of interest is what is left of the laboratory of one Nikola Tesla designed by Stanford White. The historic events of interest occurred from about 1900 to 1914. During this period the inventor Nikola Tesla conducted experiments at the site to develop "wireless power transmission". This is the same inventor whose patents were used by Westinghouse and General Electric to construct the great Niagara Falls Power Plant in 1896, which launched the modern electric power grid.

I feel this site deserves to be placed on either a state or national registry of historic places and what is left preserved for the future. At present it is in private hands and what remains at the site will soon be destroyed. Please look into this matter and take appropriate action to ensure future generations will have something left to appreciate.

Sincerely,

Mitch Tilbury

Thank you for the link.  I sent the following email to the Governor.  I'm hoping there may be something they can do to turn this into a museum/historic site, generate revenue, highlight the virtues of Tesla as a forerunner of the "Green" movement, and make the state look good as a publicity event - everybody can win.

TEXT OF EMAIL:

As I understand it, the property that houses the historic lab used by Nikola Tesla is up for sale and may possibly be destroyed.  I am writing to ask you to consider ways in which this property may be preserved and enhanced in such a way as to generate revenue for the state, possibly as a tourist destination/museum.  I myself have driven to the location, although it is closed off.  Had it been open as a museum, even with a small ($5.00?) donation per person, I would have loved to go inside to look around.

Nikola Tesla was awarded the patent for Radio after it was determined by USPTO and the US Congress that Marconi's radio transmission was accomplished on the basis of 17 of Nikola Tesla's patents.  Nikola Tesla is also responsible for the global use of Alternating Current (AC) which allows tremendously more efficient power distribution than the Direct Current (DC) power that was popular before Tesla's work.  Nikola Tesla was also a visionary in that he forsaw the problems with the increasing energy demands of humanity and was looking for ways to utilize hydro-, wind- and solar-power to generate clean, virtually unlimited power, long before such searches became politically en vogue.

Please consider finding a way to make this historic lab into a memorial to a man who was a century ahead of his time, and whose work continues even now to surprise us with startling possibilities we will not fully understand for decades.  I and many others would gladly do our part to support such an enterprise.

Thank you very much for taking a moment from your busy schedule to consider how this may be made possible and work well for all parties involved.

Finest regards,

David Julian Xanatos

I sent a letter to Paterson today.
I live 5 minutes away from the site.
I would do anything I can to help save that site. The realty co that is listing it
told me $ 1,650,000 ( 15+ acres ) new zoning to residential A-2 and they want
to put condo's on the site......The killer thing is that they will sell the site for
$ 800,000 if they dont have to demo the buildings.
I think if we contacted the right people we could even get the company "AFGA"
to just donate the cemically contaminated property to Science as a write off.
I also think that with the right exposure worldwide we could raise enough funds
to save the original brownstone building and tear down the rest and make it a
beautiful park and science learning center. I have only started to look into this as a Long Island
resident and am finding that there are some internet preservation sites that are trying to raise
money to do exactly that. What I do not understand is that they all seem to be OUT OF STATE?
I feel that as a resident of 47 years that I could do more to help from here than afar.
Please contact me with any ideas and helpfull phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
Thanks for listening.
Dave Schultz
P.S.
If anyone has helpfull info on the " Tesla Power Box" or where the car "Pierce Arrow " might be
Please contact me.

Hi Cameron,

I'm a University of Bradford (UK) graduate (1975) with a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical & Electronic Engineering and have been a member of the IET (formerly the IEE) since my student days. The IET (Institution of Engineering & Technology) is in the UK roughly equivalent to what the IEEE is in the US.  My late professor, Prof. G.N. Patchett had very close links with the Baird Television Company (yes, THAT Baird ie. John Logie - http://www.bairdtelevision.com/) based in Bradford. His work with PAL colour television was clearly heavily contingent on Tesla's & Marconi's prior radio work and of course the Baird company was in competition with the Marconi company for many years. Were the Prof. alive today I'm certain he would be appalled at the prospect of Tesla's legacy once again being ignored not to mention destroyed.

I have been, and remain a lifelong fan of Tesla, believing his ideas to be vastly more beneficial and far-reaching potentially than any of Sir Michael Faraday's own immense achievements. Faraday was consumed more with the detail and research of DC generation & usage whereas Tesla, as has already been stated in this thread was an AC man and enamoured of all that that technology held. I think that the over attention & lauding of Sir Michael Faraday has more than a somewhat xenophobic kink to it (his being English an' all!).

I also believe personally that Tesla's genius has both been grossly misunderstood and much maligned for far too long, with many (then and now) considering him to have been a member of the lunatic fringe over some of his ideas and experiments - such is the price of genius I suppose. At least his phenomenal work has now been partially recognised by the rejection of Marconi's wireless patent in favour of Tesla.

I am disgusted to discover that this building that contained his lab (or one of them) may be destroyed so imminently. I have therefore emailed Robin McGill who is the Chief Executive and Secretary of the IET outlining the situation, suggesting he contact you directly and giving him the details of this website. I trust & hope something appropriate may come of it.

Might I suggest that independently you contact the IEEE since I am sure that they too would be horrified at the thought of such an obviously suitable legacy to Tesla being allowed to be destroyed in such a way. Unfortunately I have no direct contacts in the IEEE myself, but presuming my email gets the attention I hope within the IET, perhaps Robin McGill and/or someone else at the IET will be able to help in that regard. In the meantime to save you having to research them, contact details for the IEEE are:

website: http://www.ieee.org

IEEE Corporate Office
3 Park Avenue, 17th Floor
New York, NY 10016-5997 USA
Phone: +1 212 419 7900
Fax: +1 212 752 4929

I shall also be Tweeting about this to (I hope) some suitable people to help further. I should also like to thank Christopher Jorgensen (Twitter.com/jackassletters) for highlighting this via Twitter.

Here's to a successful final outcome.

Best regards, Bob Lewis. BTech MIET
http://twitter.com/boblewis

I have personally contacted the senator as well and given my words about saving Wardenclyffe. I am positive that if this building were deemed a historical monument it could be saved. Good luck to us all!

I, too, plan to write to the NY officials on this. I visited the site (well got to peek at it as it was gaurded) last year and would love to see it restored.

My question is - is there any kind of effort to fundraise to buy the place ourselves? I would think that raising 80,000 through donations of famous scientists, university physics departments and Tesla fans would not be an impossible task.

Can anyone point me towards fundraising efforts or share your thoughts?

Thank you,

Carla Companioncarlajean@gmail.com

I just joined this forum today.  Hello everyone.   :)

Can anyone tell me what has happened to Wardenclyffe since this was posted almost a year ago?  Is the property still for sale?

seriously? They want to zone it for condos? What a waste of a historical piece of history. Please tell me the saved it?

The webmaster / site admin should make some some "Save Wardenclyffe" bumper stickers. Heck i joined just to suggest some stickers that said "Rebuild Wardenclyffe" and then i saw this post.

i can probably have some ordered up if anyone would be interested.