Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived!

ORIGINAL: The Oatmeal

*Wardenclyffe photo via DamnInteresting.com

FAQ (read this before emailing us)

• Why not Kickstarter?
  Two reasons: 1. Kickstarter doesn't allow charities 2. Indiegogo was wonderful to work with during my last fundraiser so I decided to stick with them.
• What happens if we don't raise the entire $850,000?
  The Indiegogo campaign is set up as a flexible funding campaign, so no matter how much we raise it will still go to the non-profit and toward making an offer on the property. $1.6M is the asking price, but we're hoping to buy it for less and then use the remainder of the money renovating the property.
• What happens if we raise more than we need, or if you make a lower bid on the property and there's money left over?
  Any money left over will be spent renovating the property and put toward turning it into a Tesla Museum.
• If this is a success, can you build a museum right away? What happens next?
  The property the laboratory is on is a bit of mess. It needs to be cleaned up, restored, and there's a ton of work to be done to actually turn this into something worthy of Tesla's legacy. The money we're raising is simply to secure the property so no one can ever mess with it and guarantee that it's a historic site. It opens up years and years of time to figure out how to build a proper Nikola Tesla museum.
  However, I would love to have some kind of Nikola Tesla festival on the property on July 10th of 2013 (Nikola Tesla Day), and have some kind of zany Tesla-coil-BBQ-cookout.
• Who is handling the money?
  The Indiegogo campaign is linked directly to the bank account of Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, formerly known as Friends of Science East, Inc. It is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization registered with the State of New York. You can read more about them and their board of directors here: Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe.
• I want to make a donation!
  You can donate on this Indiegogo page.
• I want to become a corporate sponsor of this project!
  Contact the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe
• I want to do an interview or I have a media inquiry about this campaign
  Contact us

Additional notes from the author:

• Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome.
• There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life.
• The drunk history of Tesla is quite awesome, too.
• History.com has a great article about Edison and how his douchebaggery had a chokehold on American cinema.
• X-rays: just to clarify, Tesla did not discover x-rays, but he was one of the early pioneers in its research.
• Cryogenic engineering: I'm referring to the cryogenic engineering that has to do with using liquified air to cool a coil and reduce its electrical resistance (Patent No. 11,865), not freezing people and waking them up in the future so they can fight Wesley Snipes.
• Transistor: Tesla's influence on the modern transistor can be found in patents 723,188 and 725,605. (a better explanation here)
• Radio: Tesla was the nicest geek ever until he decided to sue Marconi a few years later. 8 months after Tesla died, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patents on the invention of radio. So Tesla eventually won that battle, although he was dead by then.
• Tesla VS Edison: I could write a novel on the differences between Tesla and Edison, but seeing as how this comic is already huge I decided to leave many things out. For instance, Edison killed cats and dogs, but Tesla loved animals and had a cat as a child. Originally Tesla wanted to be a poet, but after getting zapped by static electricity from his kitty he was inspired to study the effects of electricity. One could vaguely construe that Tesla's cat was responsible for the second industrial revolution, which arguably makes it the most awesome cat who ever lived.
• Edison believed that fossil fuels were the future and that there were enough resources in South America to provide for the next 50,000 years. Tesla believed that renewable energy sources like hydroelectric, solar, and wind power were the future. This is remarkable because in the 1890s there was no such thing as "going green," so Tesla's ideas on conservation were very forward-thinking at the time.
• Lastly, a big thank you to Jane C. Daugherty for proofreading this article for me. If you want to learn things from the most awesome librarian this side of the North American tectonic plate, follow her on Twitter.