[Non-fiction]
I’m standing in the hifi section, wondering if I should buy this clock radio. My eyes flick from the price tag, back to the bullet point specs, back to the price tag again. I take in the sleek wooden exterior, the extra port for your iPod, the retro feel of it. Enticing.
I imagine the cost it would have taken to build, I try to gauge it. I mean, after all it’s not real wooden inlay is it? It’s a plastic veneer. Inside, the circuitry is brand spanking new, sheathed in plastic – sealed in amid Taiwanese air. The circuitry is old though, in another way.
But it’s digital. That must cost something… mustn’t it? How can it be so damn cheap?
How many of these things are there, anyway? I imagine a warehouse stuffed to the girders with thousands of sleek white boxes, exactly the same as the one under the counter where this one lives. Each little radio nestled within, waiting for someone to switch them on. In my mind, modern-day chrysalides of music bloom, polystyrene shells fractured, into a thousand prefab homes.
Marconi invented the radio, I think… and immediately I’m kicking myself. A saleswoman casts me a wary eye from across the aisle where she is serving someone else. I must have made a sudden movement. I look around. No one else in the crowded store seems to have seen.
I look back down at the light brown plastic box with knobs on it. Nikola Tesla invented radio, I correct myself. All Marconi did was put twelve of Tesla’s patents together into a box like this.
Marconi got all the glory… but in 1943 a supreme court found that Marconi’s invention was no significant improvement on patents already lodged by Tesla, effectively handing over the credit to him. Sadly, by that time Tesla was already dead, and his tower, Wardenclyffe, in Long Island, New York, was rubble. Tesla had dreamed of creating a global network of power stations without the need for wires. It was a dream that ruined him.
Since his death Tesla has been a mysterious pop-culture figure. He is the object of just about every conspiracy theory worth it’s salt, features in many comics as the archetypal mad inventor wielding death rays and lightning bolts, and wanders through a cornucopia of geeky novels.
I’m no different. I nearly visited Wardenclyffe in 2009 when I went to the States on a working holiday. I say ‘nearly’ because I told a friend my plans once I’d arrived in New York but the conversation didn’t go well:
“Where?”
“Wardenclyffe.”
“Oh no, man…”
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing there. I went out to Long Island in ’06 and it looked like… well, nothing… there was just a big sign out the front… barbed wire… all fenced off… there’s nothing to see. Go to the Empire State. You need light.”
“Mate, it’s part of the reason I came to New York. I want to see the site.”
“Sorry to tell you. It’s just depressing. There’s so many bushes you can’t even see the building.”
“There must be tours… or something.”
“It’s like a… a bomb site. Nobody goes there.”
So I went to the Empire State, and added a raft of picturesque photos to my SD card instead. At least it was another Tesla site, after all: the Empire State building had been built over the old Waldorf Astoria where Tesla had once lived.
Years later, another friend sends me an email about a comic book artist called The Oatmeal. His eye for comic detail, particularly when it comes to the natural world, is impressive. Over time, I return again and again to check out his latest offerings.
Finally one day, I see that The Oatmeal is raising money, of all things, to fund a Tesla Museum. Off his own back. At Wardenclyffe. Matthew Inman, aka ‘The Oatmeal’, wants to buy the entire estate where Wardenclyffe had been situated – lock, stock, and barrel. Reading that, I feel a self-righteous surge of vindication in a long-held belief.
I look up. My reverie has delayed me too long. I’ve just been standing here staring at the clock radio. The saleswoman (tongue pierced, I notice, the glint of steel in her mouth suggestive of an electronic lozenge) asks me if I need help. I say, no thanks.
I mean, all the fine circuitry held in each box, surely they must cost more than that? The incredible expense that Tesla went to, just to send his first signal, all busted down to this little box, completely ignored by most customers in the shop, the bulk of them congregated around the iPad table. Perhaps weighing their pay packets against 3G functionality.
Few people really need technology, I think… unless you’re William Kamkwamba – the guy from Malawi who built a windmill out of scrap metal and an old bike frame. It was 2007 when he got his family out of the Middle Ages of Africa and into the 20th Century. Now a minor celebrity, he does TED talks.
He built a windmill from scrap and… he got a light – a single tiny bulb suspended from the ceiling by a bit of old wire – to see by at night. While other men took up arms to defend their little patch of scorched earth, Kamkwamba was sifting through junkyards for scrap to reinvent a windmill.
Another of Tesla’s failed projects was a bladeless turbine that paved the way for modern day wind power – great grandfather of the same diagrams that Kamkwamba would have studied in his little library in Masitala. Tesla’s aim was to emancipate the common man from his daily toil, but could he have ever suspected that his hopeless turbine would achieve that?
I run my hand across the faux-retro dials and buttons. I can’t help liking them – I don’t want to, but I do. They remind me of the TV set we used to have in the 80’s with a coat hanger for an aerial and channels that would only change if someone could be bothered to get up out of their seat to turn the knob.
He had his own troubles, Tesla did. He had always tried to fund future projects from the fruit of his current ones, but ran afoul of his primary investor: JP Morgan. Morgan was pretty much your consummate cigar-chewing industrialist; a turn-of-the-century Gina Reinhardt with a beard. Morgan discovered that Tesla was planning on giving away the power for free to the William Kamkwambas of the world, unmetered.
As promptly as it had begun to flow, the river of funding dried up.
Tesla’s life work at Wardenclyffe was scrapped. He went into receivership. After long years of ignominy, he developed a preference for pigeons rather than humans for company.
It takes an entire century… William Kamkwamba opens a library book, and learns how to improve his life from designs derived from Tesla’s work.
I have never decided which was more significant, that he reinvented the windmill out of scrap, or that he became a celebrity for doing so.
Even further into the future The Oatmeal struggles to get funding, resorts to crowdfunding in order to honour Tesla’s legacy. Not many people, it seems, think that his story is worth preserving. I can understand that – after all, there are starving children in Africa who could use the money, right?
The initial sum is only to buy the land. More will be needed.
The Oatmeal himself is no stranger to controversy. A website by the name of FunnyJunk is replicating his work (which he gives away for free at his own site, by the way) on their commercial site. He asks them to desist. There is a long dispute. FunnyJunk threatens to sue The Oatmeal for $20,000…
FunnyJunk, I think, would have gotten on with Marconi.
The Oatmeal agrees to pay damages, but not to FunnyJunk. Instead of handing over the tidy sum of over $20,000 he’s raised in crowdfunding, he goes to the bank, takes out the money, takes it home, arranges all that cash into a big FUCK YOU across the floor of his studio, takes a photo of it, uploads it to FunnyJunk, stuffs it into an old tote bag and hands the lot of it over to the National Wildlife Federation.
The move makes him an instant internet legend. Inman goes one step further and publishes an appeal to Elon Musk (billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors), asking for aid with the Tesla museum.
“I’d be happy to help,” Musk tweets back @TheOatmeal. The promise of a further million for the project and a Tesla charging station out the front of the museum is secured.
I eye the little box on the shelf before me. Something bothers me about its neatness and utility contained within those trim lines and chunky 80’s design.
But what’s the real cost? I ask myself.
Before living in a giant warehouse these machines have been mass-produced. Before that, they would have been assembled on a factory line by hands more deft than Charlie Chaplin’s, for a wage that their owners were ‘lucky to get’.
In that moment, with the saleswoman loitering nearby, I feel Tesla’s noble dreams once more run aground on the shores of commerce.
I realise that the cost of the thing was not in its ridiculously low price, but rather in the spectacular blindness that it would take to enjoy. Wrapped up in that tidy package is a quotient of human suffering that, on this particular day, I’m reluctant to pay.
The saleswoman catches my eye with expectation. She smiles. The lozenge gleams from within its hollow recess. I blink.
My hands stay in my pockets.
Whats On My Mind? 
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