Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe
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| Location | Randall Road, East Shoreham, NY 11786 |
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| Coordinates | 40°56′54″N 72°53′54″W / 40.948401°N 72.898248°W |
| Director | Jane Alcorn |
| Website | teslasciencecenter.org |
The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe is a nonprofit organization established to develop a regional science and technology center at the site of Nikola Tesla's former Wardenclyffe laboratory on Long Island, New York. The center raised money through crowdfunding to purchase the property.
Tesla's design for Wardenclyffe grew out of his experiments begun in the early 1890s up through his large scale experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899. After Tesla returned to New York City from Colorado Springs in 1900 he sought venture capitalists to fund what he thought was revolutionary wireless communication and electric power delivery system using the Earth as the conductor. At the end of 1900 he gained the attention of financier J. P. Morgan who agreed to fund a pilot project based on Tesla's theories capable of transmitting messages, telephony, and even facsimile images across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea. Morgan was to receive a controlling share in the company as well as half of all the patent income. Tesla's decision in July 1901 to scale up the facility and add his ideas of wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's new radio based telegraph system was met with Morgan's refusal to fund the changes. Wardenclyffe construction started towards the end of 1901 and continued for the next 3 years.
Tesla built his "wireless plant" on a cleared section of land outside Shoreham on Long Island Sound, part of a 200 acres (81 ha) plot purchased from land developer James S. Warden who was building a resort community known as Wardenclyffe-On-Sound. The plant included a Stanford White designed 94 by 94 ft (29 by 29 m) brick building, a wood-framed tower 186 feet (57 m) tall with a 68 feet (21 m) in diameter "cupola" on top, and a 120 feet (37 m) shaft sunk into the ground with sixteen iron pipes driven "one length after another" 300 feet (94.4 m) below the shaft in order for the machine, in Tesla's words, "to have a grip on the earth so the whole of this globe can quiver."
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