Online fund-raising drive raises over $1 million for Tesla Museum

Nikola Tesla, the eccentric Serbian inventor who never quite got the credit he deserved for the electrical research and development work he did in the early 20th century has a friend in Matthew Inman, creator of theoatmeal.com cartoon. Inman enlisted the help and generosity of his 700,000 friends on Facebook, 300,000 followers on Twitter and 1 million followers on Google+ to mount a massive online fundraising drive, called, “Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum.” Inman is using the IndieGoGo crowd-funding website to raise money to purchase the Tesla lab and develop it into a museum. At press time, he had raised more than $1 million for that purpose.

Tesla was pivotal in developing an astounding array of electrical technologies that included fluorescent lighting, wireless communications, robotics, and AC current. The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe wants to save one Tesla's most famous laboratories in Shoreham, N.Y. You can learn more about the plans for the museum at www.teslasciencecenter.org, and can make a donation at www.indiegogo.com/teslamuseum. And if you are a Tesla fan, you simply have to check out Inman's comic strip on Tesla at www.theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla. Hilarious, if a bit raunchy.

Our thanks to Anthony Capkun, editor of Canada's Electrical Business magazine for giving us a heads-up on this project.