Nikola Tesla

Long overshadowed in public memory by his one-time employer, Thomas Edison, Tesla (1856-1943) was a brilliant scientist and engineer who earned more than 700 patents. He is most famous for developing alternating current, but his work also led to advances in wireless communications, lasers, x-rays, radar, lighting, robotics, and much more.

Tesla was born to Serbian parents in what is now Croatia, but he emigrated to the U.S. as a young man, where he eventually became a naturalized citizen. Besides Edison, who later became his bitter rival, Tesla often worked with inventor George Westinghouse. In 1893, the pair demonstrated their advances in lighting and motors in the "White City" at the Chicago World's Fair. In 1895, Tesla and Westinghouse developed the world's first hydroelectric power plant, at Niagara Falls.

At the turn of the century, Tesla set up a laboratory called Wardenclyffe in the small community of Shoreham, Long Island, where he conducted some of his most ambitious experiments. The building was financed by J. P. Morgan and designed by acclaimed architect Stanford White.

The most prominent feature was Wardenclyffe Tower, also called Tesla Tower, a 187-foot-tall (57-meter-tall) metal lattice tower topped with a big, bulbous antenna that was intended to beam communications and even energy across the Atlantic.

The tower is long gone, but the three-quarter-length statue of Tesla unveiled last week is a fitting memorial, said Alcorn. "This is the last remaining Tesla laboratory anywhere in the world," she said.

It took years for Alcorn's nonprofit to buy the property, with some help from an Internet cartoonist (see below).

Tesla ran out of money while building the tower and was foreclosed on twice. As with his previous Colorado Springs lab, assets were sold to pay down his debts. In 1917, the U.S. government blew up the tower, fearing that German spies were using it in World War I. The metal was sold for scrap, according to Alcorn. For decades, the building was used for photo processing.

Today, the octagonal concrete and granite base of the tower remains. There may be remnants of the giant tesla coil that was placed below ground, Alcorn said, although she hasn't yet raised the money to look for the remnants with ground-penetrating radar.