Wardenclyffe Tower

Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917), also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early wireless transmission station designed and built by Nikola Tesla in Shoreham, New York in 1901-1902. Tesla intended to transmit messages, telephony, and even facsimile images across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals. His decision to scale up the facility and add his ideas of wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi’s radio based telegraph system was met with the project’s primary backer, financier J. P. Morgan, refusing to fund the changes. Additional investment could not be found and the project was abandoned in 1906 and never became operational. In an attempt to satisfy Tesla’s debts, the tower was demolished for scrap in 1917 and the property taken in foreclosure in 1922. For 50 years, Wardenclyffe was a processing facility producing photography supplies. Many buildings were added to the site and the land it occupies has been trimmed down to but the original Stanford White designed brick building remains standing to this day. In the 1980s and 2000s, hazardous waste from the photographic era was cleaned up, and the site was sold and cleared for new development. A grassroots campaign to save the site succeeded in purchasing the property in 2013, with plans to build a future museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla.