The Tesla Memorial Society of New York built the kind of website that does not merely have a page about Nikola Tesla. It has enough Tesla pages to start feeling like somebody digitized a filing cabinet and then kept going.
Visit the Tesla Memorial Society’s Tesla-Westinghouse page
The page centers on Tesla, George Westinghouse and the great Niagara Falls power project of the 1890s. It mixes photographs, generator nameplates, monuments, maps, quotations, exhibition material and images connected with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The site’s historical language is enthusiastic enough that modern readers should treat some of its sweeping claims cautiously. It repeatedly describes Niagara as the point where Tesla and Westinghouse “started the electrification of the world.” A more precise description is that the Niagara project became one of the landmark demonstrations of large-scale polyphase alternating-current generation and transmission.
That distinction does not make the archive less interesting.
It makes the archive more useful as a record of how Tesla preservation groups told the story in the early Web era.
A website built like an exhibition wall
The page is intensely visual. It includes photographs of the Adams Power Station, a generator nameplate listing patents, Tesla and Westinghouse together, the Goat Island Tesla monument, Tesla’s restored birthplace in Smiljan, and material from the Chicago exposition where Westinghouse’s alternating-current system famously powered the fair.
Elsewhere on the same site, the Society campaigned for preservation of the surviving Adams station and documented Tesla monuments, Smithsonian displays, anniversaries and commemorations. The pages also preserve the names of the people maintaining the archive itself, including Society president Dr. Ljubo Vujovic and web designer Marko Vujovic.
This is classic independent-web historical work: repetitive, deeply opinionated, image-heavy and full of material that would never survive being reduced to a polished ten-slide institutional presentation.
The page also shows why old websites can remain valuable even when their historical framing needs checking. They preserve photographs, captions, advocacy campaigns and the language used by enthusiasts at a particular moment in time.
For CacheRat’s Ancient Web project, that is part of the point. A surviving website can be both a research source and an artifact of the people who assembled it.
Tesla inspired plenty of mythology.
At least this version came with generator nameplates.