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A forgotten giant, remembered

Scientist Nikola Tesla's time has returned.

Some kids grow up with a portrait of the pope on their wall. Others, JFK. When Nick Lonchar was a kid in Serbia, it was Nikola Tesla. (Ed Hille / Staff)
Some kids grow up with a portrait of the pope on their wall. Others, JFK. When Nick Lonchar was a kid in Serbia, it was Nikola Tesla. (Ed Hille / Staff)Read more

Some kids grow up with a portrait of the pope on their wall. Others, JFK.

When Nick Lonchar was a kid in Serbia, it was Nikola Tesla.

"He's a Serbian hero - probably our equivalent to Benjamin Franklin," said Lonchar, now a private investigator who lives in Malvern. "His face is on Serbian money."

Perhaps he hasn't been a household name in the United States for some time, but the scientist and inventor best known for creating the first major hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls and introducing the world to radio is on his way back to cool-dom in Philadelphia.

In a convergence of computer-technology populism (hello, iPhone apps) and the search for renewable energy, it seems the climate is right to emulate a man whose inventions helped bring about the second industrial revolution.

Enter Philadelphia's Nikola Tesla Inventors Club. The group was founded by Lonchar with just six members in July 2004. But now the science club is hitting its stride.

It has 250 local regulars online, and its Facebook page is swamped with members worldwide. These days, every event attracts no fewer than 40 attendees. Lonchar says his ever-growing group has students in elementary school as well as adults who attended presentations by Tesla - now dead for 67 years - in their youth.

Their goal: finish what Tesla started and inspire others to develop new energy technologies.

"Tesla had ideas that have not yet come to fruition because they were so ahead of their time," said Lonchar, himself the inventor of a locking device that detects illegal entry.

The reason for the club's growth, Lonchar says, is that Tesla's inventions are finally more in tune with contemporary technologies and ideas ("the Tesla effect" describes how wireless energy transfers to wirelessly powered electronic devices) and a creeping presence of Tesla in popular culture.

Tesla is a character in a video game (Dark Void) and has had a PlayStation 2 weapon named for him. He appears in Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day. Jim Jarmusch's 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes features White Stripes' Jack and Meg White in a segment called "Jack shows Meg his Tesla Coil." (Tesla coils are transformers that produce high-voltage, high-frequency electricity.)

In between Batman films, Christopher Nolan directed The Prestige with David Bowie as Tesla. A California automotive company branded itself Tesla Motors and its new $100,000 electric sports car the Tesla Roadster, which uses a motor based on Tesla's original 1882 designs. Even Google cocreator Larry Page has talked publicly about how much Tesla has influenced his work.

Still, despite Tesla's unrivaled fame in the late 1800s, his name recognition eventually faded, especially in contrast to contemporaries such as Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.

People have their theories: Some of Tesla's predictions were considered mad. He was a terrible businessman. "There are blank checks in the Tesla Belgrade Museum from J.P. Morgan that went unsigned by Tesla," said Lonchar. He walked out on pricey projects because the timing wasn't right. He was notoriously reclusive despite his level of showmanship, and toward the end of his life, he had an almost crippling bout of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But the real reason that the high-profile Tesla - a theatrical inventor, a subject of a 1931 Time magazine cover, a friend to Mark Twain and J.P. Morgan - fell out of favor is a mystery to most.

"That's why I do all this - the club, my studies," says Lonchar. "I want to know why and how specifically Tesla was erased from history. Was it his rival Edison and his people or [radio inventor Guglielmo] Marconi and his ties to RCA that made sure Tesla was forgotten? Each had the power to see that such a thing happened."

Tatjana Miletic, a teacher at Rowan University who is giving a lecture on Tesla this weekend, said the inventor wasn't like other scientists at the time; he was more modest and spiritual.

"That he went unpublished at the end of his life lent to his mystery. He obviously had brilliant work but didn't have a support team or publicity."

In any event, Tesla missed significant mention in the textbooks, so the general public comes to learn about him incidentally on trips to Niagara Falls - and now locally through Lonchar's group and its work.

"It's not just adults, but hip kids interested in Tesla's views who can't believe that he's not taught about in school," Lonchar said.

It's for that reason the club is doing more outreach events. It has hosted a Valentine's Day concert and Tesla coil building sessions. The Sunday lecture by Miletic called "Nikola Tesla in Philadelphia, at Present and More Than a Century Ago," will mark the anniversary of his talk at the Franklin Institute in 1893.

Lonchar also will hold a three-day indoor-outdoor Tesla Energy Independence Celebration this summer, the highlight of which will be a display of 50 Tesla coils at Independence Mall. He plans in June to start hosting a Tesla Internet radio station. Based in Philadelphia with the same educational mission as the club, the station will broadcast in North America, Europe and Australia, Lonchar said.

Frankford Avenue's GERM Books + Gallery, a space dedicated to radical alternative theories, UFO groups, and avant-garde art, hosted a February exhibition featuring art inspired by Tesla.

"There's more romance to Tesla than there is musty old Edison," says David E. Williams, owner of GERM and an original member of the club. "Tesla represents a lot of things to a lot of people, from capitalist martyr to modern Prometheus."

At 21, David Immendorfer of Haddon Township is one of the club's younger members.

"My own research in metaphysics and my interest in free energy led me to Tesla," says Immendorfer, who formed his own group, the Spiritual Embodiment Collective, which examines spirituality, healing, and sustainability. Immendorfer is an assistant organizer of the Tesla club's events, and is planning a musical project to be displayed at the summer festival.

Tesla emphasized ethical and moral responsibility, and many of today's electronics would not exist without his contributions: the remote control, the field of robotics, computer science. Yet as innovative an inventor as he was, with great panache, he died nearly penniless in New York.

Devotees in Philadelphia say welcome back, Mr. Tesla.