In 1901, Nikola Tesla began construction of the Wardenclyffe Tower, a massive 187-foot-tall wireless transmission station at Shoreham on Long Island, New York. Funded by J.P. Morgan, the project aimed to demonstrate Tesla's vision of wireless transmission of electrical power and messages across the Atlantic without wires. The tower's distinctive mushroom-shaped dome and its imposing presence on the Long Island shore made it one of the most striking structures of the early twentieth century, though the project was abandoned unfinished in 1905 when Morgan withdrew funding.

Wardenclyffe Tower, standing unfinished and gradually decaying on the Long Island shore, became one of the great architectural symbols of frustrated genius in American literature and popular culture. The tower's grand ambition to transmit power freely to the entire world, defeated by financial interests, provided a narrative of idealism versus capitalism that resonates through twentieth-century American literature. The tower appears as a symbolic structure in works by contemporary American poets and novelists, and its silhouette on the Long Island coast, near the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," connects it to the broader literary mythology of Long Island as a place of dreams built and destroyed.