Nikola Tesla had a dream.  Well, I'm sure that he had many dreams, but the dream to which I am referring occurred on the night of September 7, 1899.  How do we know he had a dream that night?  Because while he slept, a young Jewish photographer named Gavrel Herxheimer endeavored to photograph Tesla’s dreams.  In the morning, Herxheimer did indeed produce several dozen exposures made during the night, though, exactly how he made them was never explained, nor was the experiment ever repeated.  The photographic prints in this exhibition were made from Herxheimer's original negatives, recently uncovered in the Tesla Archive, which purport to show the mysterious world of his dreams.

            The photographs are stereographic, made with a two-color camera, and portray Tesla's inner vision of what would have surely been his greatest invention.  At the time that these images were made, Tesla was in the process of securing the location and funding for his most ambitious project, the wireless transmission of electric power.  A few years later, his prototype would rise from the ground at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island, New York—a few years after that, the project would be abandoned for lack of resources.  This brief experiment was dubbed "Tesla's million-dollar folly" and it contributed to his already declining mental state.

            The initial investor was the Westinghouse Company, which foresaw the vast potential of wireless power transmission.  But when it became clear that they could only meter the power at the transmitting tower and not at the receiving end (which meant that you couldn't charge the individual customer a per kilowatt-hour rate for the energy they used) the stockholders balked.  They figured that there was no profit in a system where everyone pays the same amount regardless of the energy that they consume.  Adding insult to injury, the Edison Company, Westinghouse's biggest rival, began a campaign of misinformation and propaganda portraying Tesla as a mad scientist, a communist, and a boogeyman.  Strategically placed news articles suggested that Tesla’s plans to send high voltage electricity through the air were liable "to effect the weather, to cause birds to tumble from the sky, and to steal dreams from the minds of our sleeping children."

            While none of the accusations were ever proved, the cultivation of public mistrust dried up fresh funding and the project was abandoned by 1909.  What was left of the transmitting tower, which had never been completed, was sold for scrap during the First World War, and the rest of the structure has fallen into ruin.  Tesla’s dream has gone unrealized, as to date, no one has perfected the wireless transmission of electrical power.  Nonetheless, the myths about Tesla's discovery of "free electricity” permeate the subculture to this day.

           The photographs show various parts of Tesla’s wireless power plant.  In several images we see the operating floor, with electrical conduits rising from the generators below to the transmitting towers protruding from the insulated glass roof overhead; in other images, we see Tesla’s design for the receiving ‘halos’ enclosed in massive glass domes.  The photographs are dynamic, unique, and spectacular, bringing us a brief glimpse into the very private mind of this misunderstood visionary.