Birds on the Brain

Photo 24 Aug 112 notes

theatlantic:

What Does the Internet’s Nikola Tesla Obsession Mean for the Future of Museums?

Nikola Tesla, a flamboyantly weird, underdog scientist, is a made-to-order Internet hero. With his flashy electrical machinery (artificial lightning!), mystical views, eccentric personal style, and productive career, Tesla has become a symbol of the power of nerds. He’s the inventor as showman, the unjustly sidelined scientist being finally given a fair shake by his fans on the web. Tesla mythmaking has been taken to extremes, toward an ahistorical caricature of Tesla and Thomas Edison as gladiatorial opponents fighting over electrical transmission in the (actually-far-more-complex-and-interesting-and-involving-far-more-than-two-people) current wars of the 1880s. Tesla’s very eccentricities have made him much less neglected, at least by historians, than his partisans claim.
No one has stoked this Tesla interest more than Matthew Inman of the satirical web comic The Oatmeal, whose usual subjects for comics include the annoying people on airplanes and the annoying ways people use email. His Tesla vs. Edison comic was a popular recapitulation of the Tesla apotheosis, and he has continued to advocate for Tesla’s reputation.
Despite the historical inaccuracies, I find it impossible to be cynical about the way Inman has spurred his fans to donate more than a million dollars in less than two weeks to buy land for a Tesla museum at Wardenclyffe, Tesla’s old estate on Long Island.

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

What Does the Internet’s Nikola Tesla Obsession Mean for the Future of Museums?

Nikola Tesla, a flamboyantly weird, underdog scientist, is a made-to-order Internet hero. With his flashy electrical machinery (artificial lightning!), mystical views, eccentric personal style, and productive career, Tesla has become a symbol of the power of nerds. He’s the inventor as showman, the unjustly sidelined scientist being finally given a fair shake by his fans on the web. Tesla mythmaking has been taken to extremes, toward an ahistorical caricature of Tesla and Thomas Edison as gladiatorial opponents fighting over electrical transmission in the (actually-far-more-complex-and-interesting-and-involving-far-more-than-two-people) current wars of the 1880s. Tesla’s very eccentricities have made him much less neglected, at least by historians, than his partisans claim.

No one has stoked this Tesla interest more than Matthew Inman of the satirical web comic The Oatmeal, whose usual subjects for comics include the annoying people on airplanes and the annoying ways people use email. His Tesla vs. Edison comic was a popular recapitulation of the Tesla apotheosis, and he has continued to advocate for Tesla’s reputation.

Despite the historical inaccuracies, I find it impossible to be cynical about the way Inman has spurred his fans to donate more than a million dollars in less than two weeks to buy land for a Tesla museum at Wardenclyffe, Tesla’s old estate on Long Island.

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]