One of our favourite citizens of the internet, cartoonist The Oatmeal (whose real name is Matthew Inman), has what can easily be described as a man crush on Nikola Tesla, the so-called “father of electricity”.
Inman ran a crowdsourcing campaign back in 2012 to raise funds to help buy back Tesla’s old Wardenclyffe laboratory where a new museum dedicated to the inventor is planned. The campaign was aiming for $850 000 to match an equal contribution from the New York State government, and managed to raise $1 370 461 before closing. The only problem was that the money raised was just enough to purchase the land – an additional $8 million is needed to finish the project.
So Inman did what he does best. He created a comic imploring a donation from Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Motors, a company with a name in tribute to Nikola Tesla, the man who made the electric motors that powers its cars possible.
Inman, who owns and dotes over his own Tesla Model S, managed to illicit a response from Musk on Twitter who promised some assistance for the project.
@Oatmeal I would be happy to help
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2014
Yesterday (on Nikola Tesla’s 158th birthday) Inman revealed that Musk would be donating $1 million to the restoration efforts as well as a Tesla Supercharger station built-in the parking lot of the museum so that Tesla owners can recharge their cars while they tour the facility.
We can’t wait to see what The Oatmeal does next in his efforts to see a Nikola Tesla museum come to life.
