I had posted about the amazingly successful Indiegogo drive to fund the purchase of Nikola Tesla's last laboratory.
A major member of the high-voltage community is Jeff Behary. He specializes in electrotherapy machines - the "quack medicine" of the 1800's but also, early X-Ray machines, alternatives to Tesla Coils as well as early scientific and physics equipment.
He has been graciously showing his collection in his house but is trying to develop a small, separate museum.
He is running his own Indiegogo drive and you seriously need to go there and chip in some cash - I just did. From Jeff's website:
Nikola Tesla Archive & Electrotherapy Museum
My name is Jeff Behary and I am curator of the Electrotherapy Museum (www.electrotherapymuseum.com). What started off as an eccentric antique collection of medical and scientific oddities quickly grew into a large archive of obscure knowledge regarding the origins of electrical technologies, electricity in medicine, and rare historical pieces stemming from the researches of famed inventor Nikola Tesla. For 18 years I've opened my home to visitors from around the world... but now I have a family and my house outgrew my collection in a hurry.
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- Our website currently gets over 7.5 million hits per year worldwide
- If it looks ancient and makes arcs, sparks, shocks, vibrates, irradiates, lights up, cures, kills, or interferes with your neighbors TV and radios: we have it.
You can help keep the sparks alive!
We are not trying to compete with million dollar museums. We just need a small building to safely preserve 200 years of rare books, machines, and documents. In most museums things are behind glass cases. Those cases cost more than we are asking for. In this museum, everything is out in the open. You can pick up a priceless piece of history, or read a 200 year old book. Turn the crank on a machine from the 1800s and see sparks... Everything is functional and able to be demonstrated in an up-close and personal manner. And I can talk for hours about any of it if you really want to listen...
A warehouse would be a dream come true...but honestly it can be a large air-conditioned shed. It doesn't have to be fancy. It just needs to protect what is really important: the contents.
It is altogether too easy to dismiss these works as a 'lesser' science when, in fact, they are the bedrock on which all current technology rests.