Bringing life to inventor Nikola Tesla

With metal coils, Nikola Tesla made electricity dance through the air in wild, hyperactive arcs, which led many in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to believe he was a magician, others to say he was a mad scientist.

Tesla invented the radio, but received no credit for it until after his death. And he patented a system of alternating current transformers and partnered with George Westinghouse — founder of the Westinghouse Electric Company — to market the system, making him rich and famous. But unlike Thomas Edison, his one-time boss, Tesla is virtually unknown today, largely because rival inventors, including Edison, constantly derided him.

Two Long Islanders say they are hoping to change all that with an independent film, “Fragments from Olympus: The Vision of Nikola Tesla.” Writer and director Joseph Sikorski, 43, of Babylon, and his close friend and producer Victor Elefante, 48, of Bellmore, are now working furiously to secure $3 million in financing to make the film.

Elefante said he feels a deep need to “bring attention to this man who has been vilified,” because, he said, “he created it all.”

Tesla, say Sikorski and Elefante, poured his heart and soul — and all of his money — into his inventions, which have helped power the modern world for a century. A Yugoslavian immigrant to the United States, Tesla held more than 100 patents and made breakthroughs in the development of radar, X-rays, robotics and even nuclear physics. He did much of his best work on Long Island, at Wardenclyffe Laboratory in Shoreham, where he courted millionaire financiers like John Jacob Astor and J.P. Morgan, but after a series of financial blunders, he died a pauper in room 3327 at the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan, raising pigeons in his bedroom, obsessed with the number three.

History labeled Tesla a penniless recluse.

Sikorski, who produces corporate promotional videos by day and independent plays and films by night, co-wrote “Fragments from Olympus” with author Michael Calomino. Sikorski spent nearly a decade researching Tesla before writing the screenplay about a man who was as adept at physics as he was at the eight languages he spoke fluently.