Customer Reviews

EXPERIMENTS WITH ALTERNATE CURRENTS OF VERY HIGH FREQUENCY AND THEIR APPLICATION TO METHODS OF ARTIFICIAL ILLUMINATION

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Nikola Tesla was one of the most fascinating and gifted scientists and inventors from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. He had made numerous contributions to our understanding of electromagnetic interactions, and there is hardly an electrical appliance that is used today that is not based in one way or another on one of his inventions. To many people's dismay he had never been awarded the Nobel Prize, but his reputation has only increased over the years and today it eclipses many others scientists that had been deemed extraordinary in their time. As a recognition of the value of his achievements the modern physical unit for the magnetic field is called Tesla. He was also a very mysterious and colorful character, and in recent years several movies and novels featured a fictionalized portrayal of his life.

This short book is a transcript of a lecture that Tesla gave to the London society of electrical engineers on a topic of experiments with alternate currents of high potential and high frequency. The lecture is preceded with a short biographical sketch of Tesla, and it's an interesting read in its own right. It should give an incentive to the reader to read a full biography of Tesla's life. The lecture itself is delivered in very crisp and readable English, and it doesn't require any mathematical background. However, the lecture will probably be of interest primarily to people with a background in engineering or a physical science, as it deals with things like coils, high currents, vacuum tubes and other such marvelous contraption that are unfortunately bound to put most people to sleep. I would give this book four stars because of the clarity of presentation and the value it has for the history of science, but otherwise it is not the most interesting book out there.