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Ask Slashdot: Best Books On the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla?

Posted by timothy on from the you-mean-the-ones-they-haven't-hidden-from-you dept.

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?

12 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Not a narcisisst by wiredlogic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    1. Re:Not a narcisisst by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Not a narcisisst by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Probably Edison's greatest invention was the modern Research and Development Lab. Before him, inventions were made by individuals working out of barns or the back room in existing factories. Edison pioneered the idea of having a staff of scientists and engineers working for one organization.

    3. Re:Not a narcisisst by ray-auch · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  2. Margaret Cheney by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Man Out of Time

  3. Read Tesla's patents by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Read Tesla's patents by janimal · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Read Tesla's patents by Beck_Neard · · Score: 4, Interesting

      > 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.

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      A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
  4. The Tesla Archive. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

    1. Re:The Tesla Archive. by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Funny

      Tesla was so kick-ass to put all of his stuff into PDF format. That is some serious forward thinking. Edison has all of his stuff on wax cylinders and in PPT.

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      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  5. Tesla Biography by shubus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Why Edison is a household name and Tesla is a band by Vellmont · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    AccountKiller