Around the turn of the last century Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current electricity transmission and father of radio, built a laboratory on the Wardenclyffe estate in Shoreham, NY, just a few miles from the Wading River beach. The lab was designed by Stanford White and largely paid for by J. P. Morgan as a radio transmission facility. Secretly though, Tesla was working on a method to wirelessly transmit electricity around the world. This gets to be a complicated story so I'm going to skip the details and say that Tesla ran out of money and was forced to abandon his project and sell the facility. Behind the building was a 187-foot high transmitting tower. The tower was torn down in 1917 for fear that the Germans might use it to send signals back across the Atlantic.
The building changed hands over the years and currently Agfa, the photographic film company, is trying to sell it. A non-profit group would like to purchase the site and turn it into the Tesla science center. Agfa won't lower their price because the company wants to cut their losses after spending millions cleaning the land of toxic chemicals. Thus, the building sits in real estate purgatory today.
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