Type of bind: Hardcover
EAN num: 9780880294195
Format: Special Edition
ISBN number: 0880294191
Label: Barnes & Noble
Manufacturer: Barnes & Noble
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: 1993
Publishing house: Barnes & Noble
Sale Popularity Level: 557399
Studio: Barnes & Noble
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Rated by buyers 
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Pond: "Looks like Marconi got the jump on you."
Tesla: "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents." (161)
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I'm not sure we will ever understand Tesla. First, he was head and shoulders above everyone else, we are like puppy dogs trying to keep up with his great strides. One biographer suggested that Tesla was the avatar of an alien from Venus (p. xiii). The problem with that theory is that it is almost believable!
The second problem is that Tesla was a classic introvert. (The very first observation is the cause of the second.) As a classic introvert, he had a chronic case of the Da Vinci Syndrome. He was so smart, his internal world was far more exciting than the humdrum external world--the world of politics, back-stabbing, no finaces, and the ever-cascading trifles and trivia.
The difference is that we can read Da Vinci's notebooks and try to reconstruct his mind, much as we can read all of the Lost Tales of Middle-Earth (Tolkien also had Da Vinci syndrome) and think about what could have been. However, with Tesla he was not a note keeper. On top of that we have the problem of the missing Tesla papers. Thirdly, if we even had the papers, could we make sense of them?
Cheney's masterwork is worthy of her subject. It is readable, balances the hard science with the human-interest, and when you are done, you know you have read a beautiful tragicomedy. This book has converted me to Tesla, and I suspect it will do the same for you.
Rated by buyers 
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Nikola Tesla, for the uninitiated, made wireless transmission (radio) a reality. He also perfected alternating current which was, up until then, merely a concept. During W.W.I he proposed using radio waves to find German U-boats in a method we now call 'triangulation'. He also envisioned a time when electricity and radio waves would be used to transmit data and images between various persons or agencies, ie; the wireless internet. This was at a time when the telephone was still viewed as a novelty. I haven't even gotten to his envisioning of geo-synchronous satellites. Oh yeah, this man died in 1942.
Any one of these accomplishments would merit the highest of accolades from the scientific community yet the name Nikola Tesla is greeted, more often than not, with questions. "Who? I thought Marconi invented the radio..."
Nikola Tesla was, quite simply, the most important figure of the twentieth century but he made the mistake of angering Thomas Edison by doing what Edison said couldn't be done (perfecting alternating current) and thus a Stalin-esque media campaign championed by Edison was born to impune the imperious Serb (Tesla). The inertia of the campaign continues to this day - The People's Almanac Vol. 2 credits Marconi with inventing radio...
The chapters detailing Tesla's interaction with Edison are alone worth the price of the book. Sadly, it reads like a soap opera as Edison was a spiteful old man. It's a pity that Mr. Edison's ego prevented him from seeing the importance of Mr. Tesla.
This is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. Like so many others, I was taught that Marconi invented the radio but this book addresses that issue in a chapter entitled 'The Great Radio Controversy'. This book also describes the many expirements with electricity conducted by Mr. Tesla. How different life would have been for Henry Ford if he'd been unable to build and operate his assembly lines due to a lack of sustainable power. Tesla's research into mechanical resonance still leaves me in awe - he generated earthquakes with a little gizmo he cooked up in his lab.
The implications are numerous. Maybe someone would have come along to invent these devices but I can find no one person who had such a wide field of vision for the potential of electricity. Tesla proposed ways to use electric impulses as a weapon of war before W.W.II. In the 1970's computer designers were surprised to learn that some of their patent applications were denied because such devices had already existed for decades. Guess who?!
I have only scratched the surface here. Nikola Tesla is one of the most important figures of the last five hundred years. Margaret Cheney has written a superb book that reads like a science fiction novel - surely no one man could have been so brilliant but Nikola Tesla was truly that brilliant.
BUY THIS BOOK.
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