Tesla’s inventions transformed our world, and his visions have continued to inspire great minds for generations. Nikola Tesla invented the radio, robots, and remote control. His electric induction motors run our appliances and factories, yet he has been largely overlooked by history. In Tesla, Richard Munson presents a comprehensive portrait of this farsighted and underappreciated mastermind. … underappreciated mastermind.
When his first breakthrough–alternating current, the basis of the electric grid–pitted him against Thomas Edison’s direct-current empire, Tesla’s superior technology prevailed. Unfortunately, he had little business sense and could not capitalize on this success. His most advanced ideas went unrecognized for decades: forty years in the case of the radio patent, longer still for his ideas on laser beam technology. Although penniless during his later years, he never stopped imagining. In the early 1900s, he designed plans for cell phones, the Internet, death-ray weapons, and interstellar communications. His ideas have lived on to shape the modern economy.
Who was this genius? Drawing on letters, technical notebooks, and other primary sources, Munson pieces together the magnificently bizarre personal life and mental habits of the enigmatic inventor. Born during a lightning storm at midnight, Tesla died alone in a New York City hotel. He was an acute germaphobe who never shook hands and required nine napkins when he sat down to dinner. Strikingly handsome and impeccably dressed, he spoke eight languages and could recite entire books from memory. Yet Tesla’s most famous inventions were not the product of fastidiousness or linear thought but of a mind fueled by both the humanities and sciences: he conceived the induction motor while walking through a park and reciting Goethe’s Faust.
Tesla worked tirelessly to offer electric power to the world, to introduce automatons that would reduce life’s drudgery, and to develop machines that might one day abolish war. His story is a reminder that technology can transcend the marketplace and that profit is not the only motivation for invention. This clear, authoritative, and highly readable biography takes account of all phases of Tesla’s remarkable life.
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A good book about a brilliant man.
A fast moving and informative book that shed a light on a little known but highly significant historical scientist. Historically based and nicely linked to contemporary times.
I am so impressed by Elon Musk, his genius and energy and supreme confidence.
Loved to know more about Tesla now that electric cars are a thing!
Entertaining. Learned some things I did not know.
Nikola Tesla has become a Culture Icon known more for his reputation as a kind of magician and rogue inventor, thanks to the movie The Prestige, and as a visionary, his name recognized because of Tesla Motors. And yet few of us understand that everything we take for granted today–the electric grid, cell phones, satellite television, the Internet, the smartwatch, and even the remote control of warfare–first sprung from his imagination.
I knew Tesla from bits and pieces. I remember when my son and husband bantered about things looking like a ‘Tesla coil,’ a reference to a weapon in Command and Conquer Red Alert. The 2006 movie The Prestige showed Tesla’s Colorado laboratory and work in remote transmission of electricity.
In 2016 I read The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore, an exciting historical novel about the rivalry between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, with Tesla in the center. In The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson and The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City by Margaret Creighton I learned about the Chicago and Buffalo fairs lit by Tesla and George Westinghouse.
And then, in my mailbox, I found a gift from W. W. Norton– a copy of Richard Munson’s biography Tesla: Inventor of the Modern. I was pleased to have all these bits and pieces of knowledge integrated into an understanding and appreciation of Tesla’s life and work and legacy.
The more I learned about the man, the less I felt I ‘knew’ him. He was brilliant and flawed and complicated and chimerical. He worked out entire inventions in his mind before he built them. He was impeccably dressed and amazingly fit– and a charming germaphobe who could not be touched. His obsessive-compulsive disorder ruled his habits and he fought depression with self-administered electroshock therapy. He was a lousy businessman who signed away his rights to millions and later, deep in debt, lost his research facilities. He could be vain and he could be magnanimous. He was addicted to the pure science of discovery.
“The War of the Currents” refers to the rivalry between inventors vying for precedence. Thomas Edison clung to direct current, which could not be transmitted over long distances and relegated electric power to the rich few. Tesla invented alternating current capable of powering whole regions. With George Westinghouse using Tesla’s inventions, in 1893 they created the City of Lights at the Chicago Columbian Expedition.
The commission to harness the power of Niagara Falls attracted worldwide attention. Westinghouse and Tesla won the contract and in 1896 the hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls was opened, powering the Rainbow City at the 1901 Pan-American Expedition in Buffalo, NY. Tesla saw the feat as signifying “the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man” that would “relieve millions from want and suffering.”
Tesla had reached superstar status, but already he was envisioning the next big idea.
At the turn of the century, gas lamps still reigned, with only 8% of American homes wired for electricity. The question remained to be answered:”Was electricity for all or for the wealthy? Would power become a necessity or remain a luxury?” Tesla was obsessed with the idea of using the earth for the transference of wireless electric power.
He went on to invent remote control and multichannel broadcasting systems. Tesla had little interest in creating and marketing useful devices based on his discoveries. He rejected an offer to develop wireless communication for the US Lighthouse Board and other projects which would have financed his research.
Next up, he built a research center in Colorado, portrayed in the movie The Prestige in which David Bowie plays Tesla in Colorado puttering around with wireless energy. His last facility on Long Island, NY went far over budget. Tesla was broke. He lost backers who wanted practical applications, something they could make money on, and Tesla was only interested in pure research. It was heartbreaking to read about Tesla’s untethered last years, his increasing eccentricities in behavior, and poverty as he watched other smake millions on his ideas and inventions.
Munson offers Tesla as a role model, writing, “…we have great need today of Tesla’s example of selfless out-of-the-box thinking if we are to tackle our twenty-first-century challenges…particularly in the electric-power industry he helped create.” Munson continues, “he would lead a charge for sustainability and against the carbon pollution that is changing our climate.” Tesla knew that coal was a limited supply and imagined harnessing energy from the sun and geothermal energy.
In short, Tesla was one of the most interesting and remarkable men I have read about. I appreciate that Munson’s explanations of Tesla’s discoveries and inventions were written so the general reader could grasp them.