Tesla Fundraiser Reaches Goal After Donation from Filmmakers

It took just about a week and a half to raise enough to preserve Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe lab in Shoreham thanks to a viral fundraiser on indiegogo.com.

The fundraiser surpassed the goal of $850,000 Tuesday evening after a $33,333 donation by the indie filmmakers of “Fragments From Olympus-The Vision of Nikola Tesla."

Indie filmmaker Joseph Sikorski used money from his filmʼs budget and raised some additional last minute funds to make the contribution to the cause. With the $850,000 goal reached, matching funds for the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe will be released, allowing the non-profit group led by Jane Alcorn to purchase the property for a new museum.

“Itʼs a sequence of priorities," Sikorski said in a release. "The first thing was to support all the efforts to preserve this valuable piece of history. Itʼs all part of the vindication of Tesla, who sacrificed so much and died penniless. Telling his story is the next part.”

There are still 39 days left in the fundraiser, started by web comic creator and noted Tesla fan Matt Inman, better known as The Oatmeal. As of early Wednesday morning, over $913,000 was raised, and Alcorn recently told Patch they plan to wait out the duration of the fundraiser to see how much can be raised to help cover future costs of the creation of the museum.

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"Not only do we need the matching funds but there will be certainly many other costs in this project," Alcorn told Patch. "Plus we want to make the site safe and secure, begin the cleanup of the vegetation and the buildings as soon as we could but it's going to take a lot of preparation to do that, and obviously that means money. We’ll see how high we can go with this."