If you take William Floyd Parkway north to Route 25 and make a left, you will eventually reach a place called “Wardenclyffe,” which was once the laboratory of a man named Nikola Tesla. Tesla, an immigrant from what we now call Croatia, is responsible for our modern electrical system.
After a few false starts, he went to work for Thomas Edison, where he developed what is now our system of power transmission: AC current. He also pioneered research into what would eventually become X-ray technology. He was so bright that he hovered very closely to insanity. Tesla was said to have gone into some kind of year-long coma as a young man, and when he awoke, he had developed what would become his theories about electricity.
Tesla was deathly afraid of pearls. A lifelong bachelor, he developed a fixation on a white pigeon, which he believed contained the soul of his ideal love. He associated with Swami Vivekananda, whom he told he had developed a “death ray” which could split the planet in half. He also believed in what physicists now posit as “free field energy.”
My uncle Rudolph, who was exceptionally bright but also exceptionally lazy, used to discuss Tesla’s black box and that mysterious ray. My father’s eldest brother (the first male in an Italian family is raised like a little king), he built his own radio at a time when those devices were rare. Army Intelligence visited their home on the Lower East Side, terrifying my paternal grandparents. He once connected a mailbox to a remote detonator and, when the unfortunate postman got fairly close, badaBOOM! Up went the whole neighborhood’s bills and holiday cards. The postman was never seen on that route again.
Of course, my uncle also spent lots of time on the Hollow Earth Theory, the Lost Continent of Mu, and Fortean phenomena. Let that be a lesson to you.—Kathryn Nocerino