Saturday Night Radio Drama - Butch D'Ambrosio - Annihilators of Distance An Intimate Evening With Tesla And Twain

An Intimate Evening With Tesla And Twain 

The time is October 1900 and Mark Twain has just returned from Europe and has moved into the Earlington Hotel (formerly the Gerlach Hotel, where Tesla once lived in the late 1890s and is now the Radio Waves Building) while his family is looking for a new home.
    
On this night Twain is spending an evening with his friend Nikola Tesla at the as they discuss the latest inventions which will lead to, and, revolutionize communications.
     
This performance, featuring P.J. Ochlan as Tesla, Robert Alvey as Twain, with Radio World Edior Paul McLane as the hotel manager, and was produced and directed by Sue Zizza, explores the unique relationship between these two great thinkers.
     
According to the science blog It’s "Okay to be Smart," Tesla had a bout of cholera in the 1870s before his emigration to the U.S. His condition was serious enough that his doctors thought he might not survive. Since there was relatively little else he could do during that period of time, he read all the books he could from the local library. Among those books were several volumes of Twain’s earlier works, which Tesla described as “so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state.” He went on to say that those books may have been the reason for his recovery.
     
It would be 25 years before the men met, but meet they did in NYC — and when Tesla told Twain about his illness and the role Twain’s writing played in his recovery, Twain was moved to tears.

     
The Irish Times reports that the writer and the inventor became friends in the 1890s. Tesla was living in New York, and even though Twain and his family lived in Europe at the time, Twain was a frequent traveler to New York.

Note:  The tab to listen to the MP3 of the play is a bit hard to find on the page.

Again, this is a semi-fictitious dramatization using real historical figures, though it's more based in reality than most of that or any of the crap you'll get from Hollywood.   I'm tempted to use it to violate the pop-culture cult of Tesla who is one of the weirder figures of ignorant pop-kulcha veneration these days.   He was interesting and a genius inventor but he was hardly infallible as heroes of pop-culture are insisted to be.  

But it's hot and I'm way behind in my weeding.  It's a bit of fun that has some actual information about the two men.