U. S. Blows Up Tesla Radio Tower (1917).
Most visitors to this website are familiar with Nikola Tesla, and some may be familiar with his experiments at the turn of the century to transmit electrical power by wireless. Toward that end, Tesla built a spectacular tower on the shores of Wardenclyffe, now Shoreham Long Island, around 1900 or 1901, which remains one of the most fanciful icons of the early electrical era. I’ve always wondered whatever happened to that tower, and, surfing the web this morning on a related topic, I found out:
SUSPECTING that German spies were using the big wireless tower erected… about twenty years ago by Nikola Tesla, the Federal Government ordered the tower destroyed and it was recently demolished with dynamite. During the past month several strangers had been seen lurking about the place.
Tesla erected the tower, which was about 185 feet high, with a well about 100 feet deep, for use in experimenting with the transmission of electrical energy for power and lighting purposes by wireless. The equipment cost nearly $200,000.