Nikola Tesla - Shoreham, New York - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

On September 23rd, 2013, the president of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolic, unveiled a monument of Nikola Tesla in Shoreham, New York. Marking the latest milestone in a long-running campaign to raise the profile of the cult scientist and inventor around the world.

Tomislav Nikolic told the crowd at Tesla's former Wardenclyffe laboratory in Long Island that the scientist was a man whose "ideas were larger than his time", in a ceremony that also served as an opportunity for the Serbian president to remind the world of Tesla's nationality.

The unveiling of the three-quarter length statue of Tesla – showing him with arms outstretched, seemingly engaged in some sort of scientific endeavour – was not just a proud moment for the inventor's homeland, however. The Tesla Science Center had lobbied for 20 years to turn Wardenclyffe, in the tiny town of Shoreham, on the north shore of Long Island, into a museum. It finally managed to acquire the site, after a high profile Indiegogo campaign run by Matthew Inman, founder of the popular web-comic The Oatmeal and avid Tesla enthusiast.

Tesla was born in modern-day Croatia in 1856 to Serbian-Orthodox parents and went to university in Graz, Austria before becoming chief electrician for a Hungarian telephone company. He moved to Paris and then to New York in 1884, where he began to work for Thomas Edison.
The pair's relationship soon soured, however, eventually becoming a bitter rivalry. Notably, the inventors clashed over whose method of delivering electricity was more efficient and effective. Tesla's alternating current (AC) was widely adopted over Edison's direct current (DC), but Tesla never made significant money from this success and Edison remained the better-known inventor for most of the 20th century.

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