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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?
Because Edison was a Jobs-like narcissist who used people to elevate his status and promote himself. Tesla was too busy working in the lab to revel in fame and build a populist legacy.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Man Out of Time
"Tesla: Man Out of Time" by Margaret Cheney
Google/Amazon it.
Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/t...
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.
While this book is not a Tesla biography, it does give a good picture of how Tesla fit in with the beginnings of the electric power industry. The book does give Tesla proper credit for the invention of poly-phase AC and the induction motor, but also points out that Stanley and Thomson were working on AC distribution before Tesla along with a lot of refinement on the induction motor being done by Benjamin Lamme.
It is the likes of Lamme and Steinmetz that are the unsung heroes of the electrical age.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Other people talk about the self-promotional nature of Edison, and how Tesla wasn't as interested in that. That's true, and that's a piece of the answer. But there's another more basic difference in what they invented. Edison invented end products that people came into contact with every day, like the electric light or the phonograph. Tesla invented the infra-structure necessary for modern life like AC power generation, and the AC motor. Those are hugely important, but the average person doesn't come into contact with them directly, only the effect of it.
So it's much easier for the average person to see what Edison did for them, but harder for them to see what Tesla did for them. It shouldn't be any wonder that Tesla isn't well known.
AccountKiller
I didn't check if anyone recommended this yet, but pbs made a documentary "Tesla - The Master of Lightening". I thought it was amazing, and it's available on US Netflix.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Why was he so inept at business - how the hell did Westinghouse screw him over?! Tesla was a genius but got screwed over by a business guy? Really? Was he THAT gullible?!
Typically, you trust the people you are working with the first one or two times, with the expectation that they will also trust you. Then your trust gets violated, and you either learn caution (e.g. "Get everything in writing"), or you continue to get screwed. If you've ever read the book "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod, a perfectly logical player in the mutual security game will operate for mutual long term overall benefit, rather than short term benefit for themselves. Sadly, not everyone is entirely logical, and for many of those persons, it's not enough that they have more as a result of your mutual efforts, for them to feel good about it, *you* must have less.
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.
Ridiculous - by the middle of his career, Tesla was a huge showman. By the end of his career that's all he was. He hanged out with celbrities and gave light shows demonstrating electrical effects just because they looked cool. He made grandiose claims like death-rays, without any actual invention or theory to back them up.
Even Tesla needed to eat.
The parlor demonstrations Tesla would perform were to fund his theoretical research. Consequently, that research demanded customized machinery and someplace to house the experiments.
If he had focused on commercial products or had any kind of business savvy(as Edison had) he would not have had to be quite the showman.
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold