Tesla intended to transmit messages, telephony, and even facsimile images across the Atlantic Ocean to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals.

His decision to increase the scale of the facility and implement his ideas of wireless power transfer to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's radio-based telegraph system was met with refusal to fund the changes by the project's primary backer, financier J. P. Morgan.

A grassroots campaign to save the site succeeded in purchasing the property in 2013, with plans to build a future museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla.

[6] Tesla's design used a concept of a charged conductive upper layer in the atmosphere,[6] a theory dating back to an 1872 idea for a proposed wireless power system by Mahlon Loomis.

[7] Tesla not only believed that he could use this layer as his return path in his electrical conduction system, but that the power flowing through it would make it glow, providing night time lighting for cities and shipping lanes.

[7] In February 1901, in a Collier's Weekly article titled "Talking With Planets", Tesla described his "system of energy transmission and of telegraphy without the use of wires" as: (using) the Earth itself as the medium for conducting the currents, thus dispensing with wires and all other artificial conductors ... a machine which, to explain its operation in plain language, resembled a pump in its action, drawing electricity from the Earth and driving it back into the same at an enormous rate, thus creating ripples or disturbances which, spreading through the Earth as through a wire, could be detected at great distances by carefully attuned receiving circuits.

The article written by Tesla, titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy", appeared in the June 1900 edition of Century Magazine.

Tesla made the rounds in New York trying to find investors for his system of wireless transmission, wining and dining them at the Waldorf-Astoria's Palm Garden (the hotel where he was living at the time), The Players Club and Delmonico's.

Tesla asked Westinghouse to "meet me on some fair terms in furnishing me the machinery, retaining the ownership of the same and interesting yourself to a certain extent".

Tesla talked to John Jacob Astor, Thomas Fortune Ryan, and even sent a cabochon sapphire ring as a gift to Henry O. Havemeyer.

Morgan was impressed by Guglielmo Marconi's feat of sending reports from the America's Cup yacht races off Long Island back to New York City via radio-based wireless the previous year, and he was dubious about the feasibility and patent priority of Tesla's system.

[15][16] In several discussions, Tesla assured Morgan his system was superior to, and based on patents that superseded, that of Marconi and of other wireless inventors, and that it would far outpace the performance of its main competitor, the transatlantic telegraph cable.

Tesla's plans changed radically after he read a June 1901 Electrical Review article by Marconi titled "Syntonic Wireless Telegraph".

[16][19] Tesla, believing a small pilot system capable of sending Morse code yacht race results to Morgan in Europe would not be able to capture the attention of potential investors, decided to scale up his designs with a much more powerful transmitter, incorporating his ideas of advanced telephone and image transmission[citation needed] as well as his ideas of wireless power delivery.

With Tesla basically proposing a breach of contract, Morgan refused to lend additional funds and demanded an account of money already spent.

His friend, architect Stanford White, who was working on designing structures for the project, calculated that a 600-foot tower would cost $450,000 ($16.5 million in 2023) and the idea had to be canceled.

At the end of July 1901 Tesla closed a contract for the building of the wireless telegraph plant and electrical laboratory at Wardenclyffe.

There was a great deal of construction under the tower to establish some form of ground connection but Tesla and his workers kept the public and the press away from the project so little is known.

The descriptions (some from Tesla's 1923 testimony in foreclosure proceedings on the property) include that the facility had a ten by twelve foot wood and steel lined shaft sunk into the ground 120 feet (37 m) beneath the tower with a stairway inside it.

[26] Power for the entire system was to be provided by a coal fired 200 kilowatt Westinghouse alternating current industrial generator.

"[27] Tesla continued to write to Morgan asking the investor to reconsider his position on the contract and invest the additional funds the project needed.

Investor money on Wall Street was continuing to flow to Marconi's system, which was making regular transmissions, and doing it with equipment far less expensive than the "wireless plant" Tesla was attempting to build.

Some in the press began turning against Tesla's project claiming it was a hoax[28] and the "rich man's panic" of late 1903 on Wall Street reduced investment further.

[12] Tesla continued to write Morgan trying to get extra funding stating his "knowledge and ability [...] if applied effectively would advance the world a century".

In May 1905, Tesla's patents on alternating current motors and other methods of power transmission expired, halting royalty payments and causing a further severe reduction of funding to the Wardenclyffe Tower.

The March 1, 1916 edition of the publication Export American Industries ran a story titled "Tesla's Million Dollar Folly" describing the abandoned Wardenclyffe site: There everything seemed left as for a day — chairs, desks, and papers in businesslike array.

Its mission is the preservation and adaptive reuse of Wardenclyffe, the century-old laboratory of electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla located in Shoreham, Long Island, New York.

They initiated the Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum fund-raising campaign on the Indiegogo crowdfunding site, to raise funding to buy the Wardenclyffe property and restore the facility.

[48] On May 13, 2014, The Oatmeal published a comic called "What It's Like to Own a Model S, Part 2", to request a further donation of $8 million from Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk.

Nikolić said that he had planned to push for the monument to be displayed at the United Nations, but chose Wardenclyffe once he learned it had been purchased for the center.