Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog Home
Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog

That’s Tesla The Serbian Inventor, Not Tesla The Sacramento-Based Heavy Metal Band

Add Nikola Tesla tourism to the ever-expanding list of reasons people want to visit New York:

According to Joseph Kinney, the chief engineer and unofficial archivist of the New Yorker Hotel (an ancillary enterprise not of this magazine but of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), three types of inquisitive visitors regularly make pilgrimages there: (1) electrical engineers and technology enthusiasts; (2) people interested in U.F.O.s, anti-gravity airships, death-ray weapons, time travel, and telepathic pigeons; (3) Serbs and Croats. (A guest last year, Bozidar Djelic, the deputy prime minister of Serbia, inscribed for Kinney a copy of his book “Serbia: Things Will Get Better.”)

What these callers have in common is a wish to pay homage to Nikola Tesla, the tragically underappreciated Croatian-born ethnic-Serb immigrant visionary who lived at the hotel, at Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, for ten years and, in 1943, died there, at the age of eighty-six. Despite having conceived — but, inconveniently, not necessarily having perfected patents for — dozens of revolutionary devices, Tesla during his lifetime failed to receive proper credit, or royalties, for theoretical work that made possible wireless power transmission and X-rays. It’s generally agreed that Tesla was an earlier inventor of radio than Guglielmo Marconi, who won the patent and a Nobel Prize. At the time of his death, Tesla was nearly destitute, having been bamboozled by, among others, Thomas Edison. He was undone as well by his own impracticality, deficient business acumen, and a predilection toward delusion.

Nikola Tesla Plaque, West 34th Street at Eighth Avenue, Midtown Manhattan

Posted: January 7th, 2008 | Filed under: New York, New York, It's A Wonderful Town!
Merciless Jackbooted Greenshirts! »
« But At Least You’re Not In France, Where You Would Likely Be Eaten

Recent Posts

  • “Friends And Allies Literally Roll Their Eyes When They Hear The New York City Mayor Is Trying To Go National Again”
  • You Don’t Achieve All Those Things Without Managing The Hell Out Of The Situation
  • “Less Than Six Months After Bill De Blasio Became Mayor Of New York City, A Campaign Donor Buttonholed Him At An Event In Manhattan”
  • Nothing Hamburger
  • On Cheap Symbolism

Categories

Bookmarks

  • 1010 WINS
  • 7online.com (WABC 7)
  • AM New York
  • Aramica
  • Bronx Times Reporter
  • Brooklyn Eagle
  • Brooklyn View
  • Canarsie Courier
  • Catholic New York
  • Chelsea Now
  • City Hall News
  • City Limits
  • Columbia Spectator
  • Courier-Life Publications
  • CW11 New York (WPIX 11)
  • Downtown Express
  • Gay City News
  • Gotham Gazette
  • Haitian Times
  • Highbridge Horizon
  • Inner City Press
  • Metro New York
  • Mount Hope Monitor
  • My 9 (WWOR 9)
  • MyFox New York (WNYW 5)
  • New York Amsterdam News
  • New York Beacon
  • New York Carib News
  • New York Daily News
  • New York Magazine
  • New York Observer
  • New York Post
  • New York Press
  • New York Sun
  • New York Times City Room
  • New Yorker
  • Newsday
  • Norwood News
  • NY1
  • NY1 In The Papers
  • Our Time Press
  • Pat’s Papers
  • Queens Chronicle
  • Queens Courier
  • Queens Gazette
  • Queens Ledger
  • Queens Tribune
  • Riverdale Press
  • SoHo Journal
  • Southeast Queens Press
  • Staten Island Advance
  • The Blue and White (Columbia)
  • The Brooklyn Paper
  • The Columbia Journalist
  • The Commentator (Yeshiva University)
  • The Excelsior (Brooklyn College)
  • The Graduate Voice (Baruch College)
  • The Greenwich Village Gazette
  • The Hunter Word
  • The Jewish Daily Forward
  • The Jewish Week
  • The Knight News (Queens College)
  • The New York Blade
  • The New York Times
  • The Pace Press
  • The Ticker (Baruch College)
  • The Torch (St. John’s University)
  • The Tribeca Trib
  • The Villager
  • The Wave of Long Island
  • Thirteen/WNET
  • ThriveNYC
  • Time Out New York
  • Times Ledger
  • Times Newsweekly of Queens and Brooklyn
  • Village Voice
  • Washington Square News
  • WCBS880
  • WCBSTV.com (WCBS 2)
  • WNBC 4
  • WNYC
  • Yeshiva University Observer

Archives

RSS Feed

  • Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog RSS Feed

@batclub

Tweets by @batclub

Contact

  • Back To Bridge and Tunnel Club Home
    info -at- bridgeandtunnelclub.com

BATC Main Page

  • Bridge and Tunnel Club

2025 | Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog