Nearly 70 years after his death, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (1857-1943) is in the news again: his Long Island worksite is the subject of heated contention. Reports The New York Times:

Today, a fight is looming over the ghostly remains of that site, called Wardenclyffe — what Tesla authorities call the only surviving workplace of the eccentric genius who dreamed countless big dreams while pioneering wireless communication and alternating current. The disagreement began recently after the property went up for sale in Shoreham, N.Y.

A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company’s real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can “be delivered fully cleared and level,” a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.

(The Times also features an intriguing photoessay on Tesla’s work and on the Wardenclyffe site today.)

Tesla and his work remain of vital interest today because his revolutionary breakthroughs forever changed the fields of electricity and magnetism. Though he is now widely forgotten, Tesla’s greatest invention, AC current, powers almost all of the technological wonders in the world today, from home heating to computers to high-tech precision robotics. In Experiments With Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency, Tesla dazzles the reader with his keen insight and an array of experiments that pushed the boundaries of human knowledge. Adapted from a lecture given at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London, this volume continues to astound students and scholars of the history of science.

Tesla also demonstrated his breathtaking genius in The Problem of Increasing Human Energy: With Special Reference to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy. Part philosophical ponderings on humanity’s relationship to the universe, part scientific extrapolation on what technological advancement might bring to that understanding, this long essay, first published in Century Illustrated Magazine in June 1900, explores the possibilities presented by robotics, the “civilizing potency of aluminum,” one of the first proposals to use solar power to run industrial civilization, and much more.

The great inventor chronicled his own life in My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, an engaging, informative, and humorously eccentric biography. But the definitive biography of the man is John J. O’Neill’s Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, first published in 1944 and long a favorite of Tesla fans. Tesla was a close friend of Pulitzer Prize winner O’Neill, and here, O’Neill captures the man as a scientist and as a public figure, discussing how Tesla’s father inspired his life in engineering, why Tesla clung to his theories of electricity in the face of opposition, how the shy but newly popular Tesla navigated the social life of New York in the gay 1890s, Tesla’s friendship with Mark Twain, the story of Tesla’s lost Nobel Prize, Tesla’s dabblings in the paranormal, and much more.

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