So wise and insightful: I wanna give the book a ten-star rate.
(Sean Patrick, "Nikola Tesla," Kindle Ed., 2013, pp. 24-25)
“There is something within me that might be illusion as it is often the case with young delighted people, but if I would be fortunate to achieve some of my ideals, it would be on the behalf of the whole of humanity,” Tesla wrote...By the end of 1897, Westinghouse was nearly bankrupt, and it looked as though Morgan would usurp everything that Tesla and Westinghouse had built together. Westinghouse owed Tesla over $1 million in royalties, an amount that grew daily. When Westinghouse described to Tesla the desperate situation, Tesla replied with the following: “Mr. Westinghouse, you have been my friend, you believed in me when others had no faith; you were brave enough to go ahead when others lacked courage; you supported me when even your own engineers lacked vision. ... Here is your contract, and here is my contract. I will tear them both to pieces, and you will no longer have any troubles from my royalties.” In time, these royalties would’ve made Tesla the world’s first billionaire. Instead, they enabled Westinghouse to save his company. Tesla’s selflessness was a testament not only to his generosity and goodwill, but his belief in his ability to continue to create his future...
Sounds like "real" gen'iuses all share the same thought as the book witnesses the very mind'/ ment'ality in common.
(Ibid., p. 16)
...In every field of human endeavor, the more visionary the work, the less likely it is to be quickly understood and embraced by lesser minds. For one reason or another, many people just “don’t get it.” Tesla took this in stride. As he saw it, he was offering an opportunity not only to make an untold fortune, but to change the world forever. Instead of wasting time trying to convince ignorant naysayers to see the forest for the trees, Tesla chose to take his work to another extraordinary mind who would, he assumed, immediately recognize it for what it is.
And yes, the “marketing genius” Thomas Edison saw through the value correctly of the man and his ideas, so now.............he wanted to control them and take all the credit to himself...sigh.
(Ibid., p. 32)
After the outbreak of World War I, in 1917, the U.S. government was looking for a way to detect German U-boats and put Edison in charge of finding a workable method. It was Tesla, however, that proposed the use of radio waves to detect the ships—the first description of radar. Edison rejected the idea as ludicrous, and the world had to wait nearly two decades before Emile Girardeau would develop an obstacle-locating radio device “conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla,” as he put it...Tesla spent the 1920s working as an engineering consultant, regularly finding himself at odds with his employers due to the “impractical nature” of his plans and designs. In 1928, at the age of 72, he received his last patent, “Apparatus For Aerial Transportation.” This was an ingeniously designed flying machine that was a hybrid of a helicopter and airplane. The vehicle would weigh 800 pounds, ascend vertically, and then rotate its engines to fly like an airplane. This was the predecessor of what we now know as the tiltrotor, or VSTOL (Vertical Short Takeoff and Landing) plane. Unfortunately, Tesla lacked the funds to build a prototype. TIME Magazine featured Tesla on its cover for his 75th birthday, in 1931, and Einstein praised him as “an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents...”
The man was Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century, yet the world knows the author'ity-backed Thomas Edison much more than Nikola Tesla, but by "much more" I don't mean "correctly."
(Ibid., p. 20)
...He also immediately began research into what he termed “radiant energy.” His studies led him to discover what we now know as X-rays, and how to use them to produce radiographs. He didn’t make his discoveries widely known, however, which is why they would later be attributed to German physicist Willhelm Rontgen. X-rays were the first of several groundbreaking discoveries of Tesla’s that would wind up misattributed to others.
The book definitely tells things we don't learn at school.
(Ibid., pp. 30-31)
Only months later, in 1904, the U.S. Patent Office stripped Tesla of his radio patents and awarded them to the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, instead. Marconi had used radio technology pioneered by Tesla 11 years earlier to transmit the letter “s” in morse code over 2,000 miles, which gave him no claim to the patents, of course. What did give him claim, though? He had the financial backing of Morgan, Edison, and steel baron Andrew Carnegie, all of whom held sway in every level of government. By 1905, Tesla ran out of money and was forced to lay off the Wardenclyffe workers and shut down the facility. Newspapers decried it as his “million dollar folly,” to which Tesla responded, “It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive ... blind, faint-hearted doubting world.”
There are lots of things we don't really learn in our public education, so we don't “really” know the world unless we read or experience to learn it ourselves. Watching the people’s reaction to the COVID-19 vaccination today I've been recently thinking more about our public education.
Despite its short length for a quick and easy read the book is amazingly deep.
Oh, it is deep: It doesn't just talk about the man. But it is more like the book uses him to talk about us.
Seriously the book gives the readers such a great gift: No sugarcoating, but the bare truth.
This book really opens up the secret of our world to the readers. So, despite its sort of "unfamiliar" form'at (you will see what I'm talking about when you reach the half point of the read), the value of the book is priceless. And I don't see any need for editing: I found no such [pro-]grammatical errors or weird sentences.
And the book ends with a great con-clos'/ -clus'ion.
I recommend this book for literally any Human Being with a dream in your beating heart, and you won't be sorry.
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Reviews with images
Are We All Geniuses?
Sean Patrick writes an entertaining and interesting piece on genius and the genius, Nikolai Tesla. Briefly analyzing what it means to be a genius and how to make this attribute successful in terms of greatness, is the author’s introduction to Tesla, who being an exceptional genius endowed with a vivid imagination, was however, unsuccessful in his attempts to convert this ability into money or material gain in the long term. Patrick asks and raises many questions of his own and humanity’s’, which ultimately boil down to “what is the meaning of life”, but leaves the question unanswered, unfortunately and understandably for he is delving into the area of our human condition, that which drove Tesla and his companions, compatriots and competitors at the time: Edison, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Brown, Peck and Westinghouse.
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