Slashdot Mirror
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?
Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson
I disagree about Edison being like Jobs. Edison made more connections to folks in business - he, too, worked in the lab, and made a great invention - the light bulb. But then he realized that to get lightbulbs in every house, he had to get electricity in every house, too. Enter Westinghouse, and may others who invented the electricity distribution industry. Come on - who could be as big an a$$hole as Jobs...really???
Edison did not "invent" the light bulb. The first known attempt at an electrical arc lamp took place some 70 years before Edison.
As for Edison's contribution to the evolution of the light bulb, it was mostly his lab staff that did the work and had the ideas coupled with the work Swann did in parallel initially.
I understood the power transmission thing differently. I thought he wanted to resonate the capacitance of the Earth's atmosphere to transmit AC power. The reason that the idea didn't take off was that you can't meter the consumption. Anyone has access to siphon off the energy from the atmosphere. He had a solution that did not yield itself to a viable business model.
> 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.
I'm not sure where you're getting that from, but by looking through his writings I came to a completely different conclusion. You're right about his thinking that the ionosphere was a conductive layer, but he didn't intend to punch a current path through it. Instead he reasoned that the ground+atmosphere+ionosphere system was a huge resonant circuit. His idea was to excite it at its resonant frequency so that it would be able to store huge amounts of power which could then be tapped anywhere in the world.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
There is good engineering and engineering a successful product. Edison was much better at understanding the latter, he also understood and played the patents system. He was in the end by far the better capitalist / businessman, hence he won, financially, and winners write the history books.
Before writing Tesla down as always the great engineer who never got successful, it is worth remembering that he did make a fortune (tens of millions in today's money) from his AC patents before he gave up on the royalties, but he died a pauper because he blew his fortune self-funding research into ideas that were much less good - too confident in his own promised results, he sunk all his money into ideas that just didn't work.
Have lately been reading everything I can find on Tesla, hoping to find a rational scientific explanation of his "discoveries".
Unfortunately everything so far has been utter balderdash. Just an endless stream of hype.
I had hoped that "Man Out of Time would be better, but sadly it is not.
Cheney seems to be yet another author who has drunk the Tesla Cool Aid.
We hear repeatedly about "Powerful Vacuum Tubes" which turn out to be Geissler tubes,
and how Tesla would "let 100,000 volts harmlessly pass through his body" (no mention that it's high-impedance, and that nerves don't respond to H.F.)
And talk about his secret "High Power Oscillator", which was just a steam-driven linear generator.
Over and over we are told that "Scientists to this day don't know how this was done" when obviously most of it is third rate stage magic.
Hopefully one day a technically literate author will write a book which describes Telsa's work, but without all the hype and misdirection.