The latest crowdfunding campaign for the Nikola Tesla museum is closing in on its $200,000 goal, less than two days after it started.
The Oatmeal blogger Matthew Ingram created a campaign that allows people to pay for an engraved brick that will be used to construct a museum dedicated to the scientist and inventor. It launched on Wednesday and will run through November.
Ingram is largely responsible for the creation of the museum, having raised $1.3m in 2012. Elon Musk, the co-founder of the electric car company Tesla Motors, later contributed an additional $1m, and New York state gave an $850,000 grant.
On Friday morning, at least 1,215 people had contributed a total of more than $187,600 to the campaign.
The minimum donation is $125 for a 4in x 8in brick with three lines of text. The brick will be a part of the museum at Tesla’s former Wardenclyffe laboratory in Long Island, New York. For $1m, people can get “whatever the heck you want”. No one had claimed that offer as of Friday morning.
Inman created the campaign after receiving a plea in 2012 from the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, a state-owned non-profit that had hoped to build a science and technology center in Long Island.
The successful online campaign also drove renewed public interest in Tesla, who was born in Smiljan in 1856, in what is now Croatia. Tomislav Nikolic, the president of Serbia travelled to New York in September 2013 to unveil a monument to the inventor.
According to the project page, people who donate earlier will get their bricks put in better locations when the first bricks are installed in spring 2015.
“Because these bricks will physically take up space on the property, we can only sell a limited number of them, and the sooner you purchase a brick, the more likely your brick will receive a preferred placement such as near Tesla’s statue and the tower base,” the campaign page said.
The campaign also clarified that “discriminatory or inappropriate messages” will not be allowed on bricks.
