DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 1901 · LONG ISLAND
The tower that lit the coast
1901, Long Island. J.P. Morgan's money is raising Nikola Tesla a tower meant to send words and power through the earth to all of it at once. In our timeline the checks stopped, the tower was dynamited for scrap, and Tesla died in a rented room. This is the timeline where Morgan signs one more check, and one winter night the copper dome answers.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
WINTER 1903 · SHOREHAM
In March 1901 the financier J.P. Morgan gave Nikola Tesla one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to raise a wireless station on Long Island. Near Shoreham the tower climbed to one hundred and eighty seven feet. On top sat a copper dome the size of a house, and beneath it an iron root reached a hundred and twenty feet into the ground. Tesla had sold Morgan a faster telegraph to London. What he was quietly building was a machine to send words, pictures, and power through the earth to all of it at once. In December 1901 Marconi flung the letter S across the Atlantic on cheap equipment, and Morgan began to wonder what he was paying for. The money slowed, and the letters from Shoreham turned desperate. In our timeline Morgan closed his hand, and the tower at Wardenclyffe never truly spoke.
In the timeline recorded here, Morgan reads the same desperate letters. Instead of closing his hand, he signs one more check. That winter the great copper dome wears a crown of blue fire. Half of Shoreham stands in the road to watch it burn.
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