Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has pledged to donate $1 million in funding to a museum dedicated to famed inventor Nikola Tesla on what would have been Tesla’s 158th birthday.
Musk, the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors and rocket company SpaceX, announced Thursday that the new museum will be built on the grounds of the inventor’s laboratory at Wardenclyffe in Long Island, New York. The laboratory is where Tesla once built a 57-metre transmitter tower to experiment with sending messages and distributing electricity.
The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe will allow visitors access to a display of the Serbian-American’s inventions and their effect on people’s lives today. The Museum will also feature a hacker lab where people can build prototypes of their own inventions and an invention station where entrepreneurs can turn their ideas into real products.
Musk’s $1-million funding donation came at the heels of an online comic strip, The Oatmeal, created by Matthew Inman. The comic argues that Tesla was “the greatest geek whoever lived” and launched a 45-day campaign to raise $850,000 to save the Wardenclyffe site from being sold to the developers. Over $1 million was raised in nine days.
During a phone meeting between Musk, Inman and Gene Genova, the vice president of the Tesla Museum, earlier this week, Musk pledged the money and a promise to build a supercharging station for the Tesla Motors’ electric cars on the museum grounds.
Tesla Motors has been pushing the boundaries of electric development and is even the subject of an advanced hacking competition to take place next week in Beijing.