The record is unusually complete: Morgan's March 1901 contract for $150,000 with 51 percent of the wireless patents, Stanford White's brick laboratory, the 120-foot shaft with sixteen iron pipes driven three hundred feet into the earth, Tesla's own words that he wanted a grip on the earth so the whole globe can quiver. Marconi's letter S crossed the Atlantic in December 1901, Morgan's refusals followed, the plant was abandoned by 1906, and the Smiley Steel Company dynamited the tower for scrap in 1917, recovering $1,750.
The legend's version: Morgan asked where the meter would go, heard there would be none, and killed free energy to protect the copper industry. The documented version is duller: Morgan funded a telegraphy station, Tesla pivoted it toward power broadcast without approval, and the financier declined to fund the pivot. No free energy device was ever demonstrated at Wardenclyffe or anywhere else; the suppression story requires no device, only the tower's silhouette.
What the dead tower generated: the 1917 spy-demolition rumor (German agents, submarine landmark), Tesla's teleforce death ray claims of the 1930s, the missing-papers legend after his 1943 death, and Bearden's scalar canon, which retroactively made Wardenclyffe the first Tesla weapon. The site itself is now a science center, purchased in 2013 after a crowdfunding campaign that raised over a million dollars in a week.
When the inventor outgrows the contract, who suppressed the future, the financier or the ambition?