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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
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.
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