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Ask Slashdot: Best Books On the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla?
An anonymous reader writes The internet is full of interesting nuggets of info about Nikola Tesla's life and scientific exploits: The time a young Tesla improved an electric motor for Edison, and Edison simply would not pay Tesla the monetary reward he had promised him earlier. The friction between Tesla and wealthy industrialist J.P. Morgan, and Tesla's friendship with (kinder) industrialist George Westinghouse. The 2 different times Tesla's main laboratory burned to the ground. The time a Tesla lab experiment reportedly caused a small earthquake to trigger in lower Manhattan. Tesla's (never quite fulfilled) dream of transmitting electricity across great distances without using wires or cables, etc. All this fascinating stuff, and more, about Tesla's life is out there, mostly in shortish snippets — and sometimes woven into outright conspiracy theories — on the internet for anyone to examine. Now to my question: What are the best books to read to get a fuller picture of Nikola Tesla's life and work? Preferably something well researched and factually accurate. Are there any good documentaries or movies (apart from David Bowie playing a wizard-like Tesla in "The Prestige")? Why is Thomas Edison so well known and covered in education/popular culture, and the equally prolific and ingenious Tesla a "mysterious and ghostly figure" by comparison?
Man Out of Time
"Tesla: Man Out of Time" by Margaret Cheney
Google/Amazon it.
If you want a non-bullshit view of Tesla, read his patents. His real achievement was that he figured out most of the kinds of modern AC motors. It's not at all obvious how you get an AC motor started and turning in the right direction. Clever tricks with bits of copper in the magnetic circuit are used to bias starting direction, and synchronous motors start up as induction motors. Tesla worked all that out. It's very elegant. AC machine design is hard, and, unlike DC machine design, requires calculus. That was a big jolt for engineering at the time. Nothing before had required that much math to make it work.
You can also read his thinking about the Wardenclyffe tower in his patents. He had RF propagation all wrong. He thought the ionosphere was a conductive layer. His plan was to punch through to the ionosphere by ionizing a path all the way up (!), and transmit power and signals conductively, using the ionosphere and the ground as a pair of conductors.
Every extant article he ever wrote, in a 1GB PDF. Download here: http://aetherforce.com/the-tesla-archives-are-here-every-single-article-ever-written-by-tesla-free/
in 2013 the new Tesla Biography "Tesla - Inventor of the Electric Age" by W. Bernard Carlson was published. This book dispels many of the popular myths surrounding Tesla and is extremely well researched. Recommended reading for Tesla fans.
Edison didn't invent a lot of his inventions. He hired others who had the ideas. He recognised the value of a brand, and made himself the brand - Edison, the genius inventor, pioneer of electricity, lighting, sound recording, moving photography, and many other fields. Taking credit for things wasn't just to fuel his ego, but for solid business reasons: Any product percieved to be the work of the great Edison would automatically be taken seriously.
Jobs didn't electrocute animals to show how bad Tesla's AC was.