# The Wardenclyffe tower is demolished for scrap

Date: 1917

## The fact

In 1917 the Wardenclyffe tower was demolished for scrap. Site history dates salvage from Independence Day through the summer. Smithsonian calls the relic [Tesla](/people/nikola-tesla)’s ‘million dollar folly.’ The brick laboratory survived.

## Context

Tesla had mortgaged the property against hotel bills. A wartime spy-tower story circulated; the independent site history treats scrap-for-debt as the mechanism. This is not [Edison](/people/thomas-edison)’s 1914 West Orange fire.

Nikola Tesla is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Tesla Science Center’s tower page and Smithsonian Magazine independently date the 1917 demolition.

Official or archival record: Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe — The Tower (https://teslasciencecenter.org/history/tower/; Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe).

## Significance

Failed-plant path. High confidence on the demolition year.

Scrap is not a miracle suppressed. Keep the brick lab as surviving fabric, not as a working grid.

## What is established and what is not

Established: Wardenclyffe tower demolished in 1917. Not established: that the U.S. Army uniquely dynamited a working free-energy station, or a complete scrap-dollar series.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Nikola Tesla: https://factrail.ai/people/nikola-tesla

## Drivers

- Income Inequality: https://factrail.ai/drivers/income-inequality

## Sources

- https://teslasciencecenter.org/history/tower/
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nikola-tesla-tower-that-became-million-dollar-folly-11074324/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/us-tesla-tower-demolition-1917