Customer Reviews

Nikola Tesla and the Taming of Electricity

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Nikola Tesla was one of the unsung heros of the early days of electricity. A contemporary of and sometimes associate of Edison, he held a great many pivital patents in the area. Largely ignored during his lifetime, many of his inventions were used by other companies (Westinghouse, Edison, GE, Marconi) without acknowledgement or payment to Tesla. As a result Tesla died alone and broke. Eight months after his death the Supreme Court reviewed his earlier radio patents and ruled that he had indeed been the basic inventer of radio, not Marconi as is still commonly believed.

Tesla is also remembered as a "way out" thinker. He worked for years on the transmission of power through the air rather than using wires - it didn't work. He was trying to build a death ray, the papers of which are held in a classified library at a U.S. defense research agency and are accessible only to members of the intelligence community - no one knows why they remain so closely guarded sixty years later.

Tesla is a person who should be remembered better. This book is a welcome addition to the bookshelf.

Being one of Tesla's great admirers because he enlightened 20th century and helped all mankind to get rid of hard work (machines now doing lots of work thanks to Tesla), I don't think this grossly inaccurate book makes him or us readers any favors. Factual error on almost every page is really little bit too much - so much that it becomes great fun to read and laugh if only it is not so sad that someone can actually produce such a book. In conclusion tragicomic, pity that it involves Tesla as he and his great work does not deserve such a cheap and illiterate approach. Maybe the author should try with some other characters where accuracy is not so important, like Donald Duck for example.