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NY CULTURE January 7, 2013, 9:47 p.m. ET
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By GARY SHAPIRO
Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
A Serbian folk dance ensemble performs at the Tesla Spirit Award Benefit.
His face could really light up a room.
The life and work of Nikola Tesla, the immigrant scientist and prolific inventor, has been celebrated at an energetic gathering over the past two days. Though he invented alternating current (AC) and made carloads of other discoveries, the Serbian-
American electrical engineer Tesla has largely been an also-ran in history's fame game, edged out by boldface names like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.
Tesla's productive life ended sadly: He was spending time feeding pigeons in his last years, dying Jan. 7, 1943 in relative obscurity at the New Yorker Hotel. Now people, including the actor Nicolas Cage, have come to spend the night where Tesla had lived in his final decade. Others are working to preserve his laboratory in Long Island.
Upon entering the ballroom at the New
Yorker Hotel, there were tables featuring buttons and paper currency with Tesla's face on it, as well as colorful collages made from license plates spelling
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Tesla's name. There gathered a large audience, who shared the view that the achievements of Tesla have not been sufficiently recognized. A goal of their conclave, which had the feeling of part fan convention and part science fair, was to set the record straight.
Enlarge Image
Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
A painting of Nikola Tesla
"Can we even imagine a world without
Tesla?" asked Marina Schwabic, the chair of the Tesla Spirit Award Benefit, on Saturday evening. David Vujić and Nikola Lonchar, the chairman and president, respectively, of the Tesla Science Foundation, also offered welcoming remarks. The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Vuk Jeremić, said innovators and risk takers were the "true inheritors" of Tesla's legacy.
Cartoonist Matthew Inman was the rock star of the evening (no one from the rock band bearing the scientist's name made it to the event). In the fall, he launched a campaign on the funding site Indiegogo that raised roughly $1,370,000 dollars toward saving Wardenclyffe, Tesla's former laboratory in Shoreham, Long Island. Jane
Alcorn, a retired school librarian who is leading the charge to save the site, said,
"Science education is an area where we need to place more emphasis."
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Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
Phillip Baldwin, right, and another guest.
The conference brimmed with sessions like "Tesla and Robotics" and "Tesla and
Music." Phillip Baldwin, an associate professor at Stony Brook University, demonstrated how humans and computers can interface with each other beneficially, using head caps with neurosensors to read people's emotions.
"It works without a mouse and keyboard. The tyranny of the index finger is overrated," said Mr. Baldwin. This July, he is planning to bring this technology to Gdańsk, Poland, using Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" in order to help keep students from Stratford-upon-
Avon, England, interested in the Bard.
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Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
Vuk Jeremić, Mirjana Živković and Vladimir Bibic
At the benefit, Serbian folk dancers drew heavy applause, and Mano Divina of the
Divine Hand Ensemble used a Theremin to make electricity sing. Zoran Zelic, whose Stereoscopic 3-D Studio is called
"ZZ3D," distributed glasses with infrared receivers to look at screen images reacting to the sounds of music. Taking all this in was University of Baltimore student Stephan Kowalczyk.
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At the benefit, the Consul General of
Serbia, Mirjana Živković, and Vladimir Jelenković of the Tesla Museum of Belgrade were among the guests of honor. Dr. Ljubo Vujović of the Tesla Memorial Society won a lifetime award.
Tesla's visage was put on a U.S. postage stamp in 1983. All these supporters, however, want Tesla to gain a wider stamp of approval.
A version of this article appeared January 8, 2013, on page A23 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324391104578227860074415242.html
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Journal, with the headline: 'The Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived'.
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