My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla [Paperback]

Nikola Tesla (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 9, 2007

"The progressive development of man is virtually dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain." Nikola Tesla, uncelebrated oracle of the electronic age without whom our telephone, radio, automobile ignition, and television would have been unrealized, was born in Croatia in 1856. He studied physics and mathematics at Graz Poly Tech, then philosophy at the University of Prague. He went on to work as an electrical engineer in Budapest, Hungary, then France, and Germany. During this time he invented the alternating induction motor which allowed the possibility of the universal transmission and distribution of electricity. Nikola Tesla came to the United States in 1884 and worked for Thomas Edison, becoming Edison's rival because Edison only believed in the merchandising of inferior DC electric power. However, Tesla was employed as the dynamo designer for the Edison Machine Works while he obtained more than 100 patents and designed 700 inventions. He made a power transmission which was an economic necessity, yet his inventions did not make him a wealthy man. When he died in 1943 in his room at the Hotel New Yorker, his notable research on wireless communication by fax machines, radar, and radio-guided missiles evidenced the validity of his theories. He said, "I am credited with being one of the hardest workers."

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Nikola Tesla (1856 –1943) was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. He was an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor. This work helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. Born an ethnic Serb in the village of Smiljan, in the Austrian Empire, Tesla was a subject of the Austrian Empire by birth and later became an American citizen. Because of his 1894 demonstration of wireless communication through radio and as the eventual victor in the "War of Currents", he was widely respected as one of the greatest electrical engineers who worked in America. He pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. In the United States during this time, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture. Tesla demonstrated wireless energy transfer to power electronic devices as early as 1893, and aspired to intercontinental wireless transmission of industrial power in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project. Because of his eccentric personality and his seemingly unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist by many late in his life. Tesla never put much focus on his finances and died with little funds at the age of 86, alone in the two room hotel suite in which he lived, in New York City. The International System of Units unit measuring magnetic field B. In addition to his work on electromagnetism and electromechanical engineering, Tesla contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar, and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: NuVision Publications, LLC (July 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159547871X
• ISBN-13: 978-1595478719
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,608,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( T ) > Tesla, Nikola

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

128 of 132 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars NOT Nikola Tesla's MY INVENTIONS, January 15, 2010

By 

Gary Peterson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Inventions:: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (Paperback)

This is NOT Nikola Tesla's MY INVENTIONS, published in the ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTER magazine, February-June and October, 1919 issues. It is a corrupted version of Tesla's autobiography titled THE STRANGE LIFE OF NIKOLA TESLA. The original document was published in booklet form a copy of which was found in a used bookstore in 1994, transcribed, and published on the Internet. The booklet was subsequently found to contain significant errors, omissions, revisions and also some additions that did not appear in the original 6-part serial text.

Buyer beware!

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A shoddy edition of a text deserving of better, October 13, 2008

By 

C. J. Kershner (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (Paperback)

The presentation of Nikola Tesla's fascinating life and work is manhandled in this edition of his autobiography, My Inventions.

The text is full of typographical errors; the letter "i" (referring to Tesla in the first-person) is rarely ever capitalized, and there are numerous misspellings of simple words. Paragraph breaks seem to have been inserted at random and, when compared to other editions, do not correspond with the others' layouts or chapters.

I do not know what Tesla's manuscript looked like or who is responsible for typesetting it for BNPublishing, but it is most telling that Amazon's link to look inside this book redirects to a different edition.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good quick life story, December 12, 2007

By 

The Lost One (Left Coast) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (Paperback)

I'm really a fan of Tesla and this book was a good view into him as a person. Although the exact same pages of this book can be found in the end portion of the book "The Nikola Tesla Treasury" and I highly suggest that book over this one.