IEEE Spectrum November, 2014 - 30

nOv 2014

nORTh aMERICan

a teSla tribute: Following the loss of
his purpose-built lab [left], Nikola Tesla [far
left] lived the last 10 years of his life at the
New Yorker Hotel, a stay now marked by a
plaque outside the hotel [top]. His rooms
[below] are available to guests.

publicist. Kinney once described to The
New Yorker magazine the three types of
visitors he received: "Electrical engineers
and technology enthusiasts; people inter-
ested in UFOs, anti-gravity airships, death-
ray weapons, time travel, and telepathic
pigeons; [and] Serbs and Croats."
In Kinney's basement office, shelves are
crammed with Tesla memorabilia, includ-
ing a book signed by Božidar Đelić, who was
vice president of Serbia from 2007 to 2011.
Kinney's favorite hobby is photography, and
his hard drive contains hundreds of Tesla-
related shots, including archival portraits and
a photo that Kinney took in 2006 of the presi-
dents of Croatia and Serbia shaking hands in
front of the Tesla plaque. "Yes, I've collected
a lot of material, but I don't consider myself
as a resource," he says modestly. "Others
have studied the man in a much more sub-
stantial way. I'm just someone with the keys
to Tesla's house and who has kept the front
door open." (While Kinney may not consider

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himself a resource on Tesla, the producers of
a Travel Channel program thought differently
when they chose him to narrate Tesla's story
in a "Hotel Secrets & Legends" segment.)
Tesla's two rooms-which still accommo-
date paying guests-are often requested by
devotees from around the world. During a
tour, Kinney knocked before using a pass-
key to open one door, and a quick peek in
revealed an ordinary hotel room with two
Tesla posters hanging on the walls. Kinney
says Tesla used the rooms together and
points to a spot in the hallway where a door
once set off the rooms as a suite.
One request for a Tesla room came from
actor Nicolas Cage, who stayed for a night
in 2010 while preparing for his role as a
wizard who throws balls of electricity in
The Sorcerer's Apprentice. "Cage was
trying to 'call up the spirits' and believed
something hit the window, and he sug-
gested it may have been a pigeon," says
a bemused Kinney. -bill glovin

CloCKwiSe from top: rAndi Klett (2); nypl/SCienCe SourCe/getty imAgeS; photo retouCherS/getty imAgeS

from the royalty agreements that should have
made him a rich man. He received backing
from J.P. Morgan to build a laboratory and a
huge radio tower to pursue ideas for trans-
atlantic telecommunication and wireless
power transmission technologies. The prom-
ised results never materialized, and the tower
was scrapped. No longer able to afford a
laboratory, Tesla continued to privately pur-
sue his experiments in places like the New
Yorker Hotel. His death in 1943 was barely
acknowledged; World War II was consuming
the country, and his major accomplishments
had come more than four decades before.
But recognition for Tesla has been on the
rise in recent years, with, for example, the
unveiling of a statue in the heart of Silicon
Valley. The biggest grassroots effort is the
construction of the Tesla Science Center on
the 16-acre Wardenclyffe site, in Shoreham,
N.Y., where Tesla built the J.P. Morgan-
funded laboratory. One of the effort's leaders
is Matthew Inman, a cartoonist and Tesla fan
who runs the popular blog The Oatmeal and
who recently solicited a US $1 million dona-
tion from Elon Musk, the billionaire founder
of Tesla Motors.
Prior to this Tesla revival, however,
Kinney was one of the few people keep-
ing the inventor's memory alive. William
Terbo, Tesla's 84-year-old grandnephew-
who was one of the last people to see Tesla
alive, when he visited him at the hotel as a
9-year-old-says that before Kinney was
hired, Tesla proponents had been unable to
convince management to publicly recognize
that the inventor had spent the last 10 years
of his life there. Kinney convinced the hotel
to move a memorial plaque to the outside of
the building in 2001; to officially recognize
rooms 3327 and 3328, in which Tesla lived
and worked; and to put a Tesla poster in the
hall outside the rooms.
Kinney first heard about Tesla while
growing up in Memphis, Tenn. As a teenage
amateur radio enthusiast, he learned about
the Tesla coil, a transformer circuit used to
produce high-frequency, high-voltage AC.
Now Tesla enthusiasts contact Kinney
weekly, and he finds himself giving tours
and dispensing information like a de facto

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2014