Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent biography!
Comment: After reading this book, I truly feel like I have gotten to know Tesla on a personal level. I feel the author does a superb job of conveying Tesla's personal side, as well as his many unbelievable professional achievements. The author combines many stories of his personal life with how these led to his brilliant inventions and does it in such a way that I could not help but to admire Tesla's unyielding devotion to his work. Few people are as committed to anything as this great man was! Although Tesla might arguably be described as a "mad genius" by some, there were so many other facets to his personality that I can only view him as an incredibly gifted, talented, and caring human being who marched to the beat of his own drum. He was truly a man ahead of his time!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good history of Tesla
Comment: Found this to be an excellent review of his life, and what he had gone through. The book is very readable, and does not put you to sleep like others. It does not go into details on his inventions, but does mention many of them, and the battles he had to go through with others at that time, and how most of his work was ahead of his time, and disregarded at that time.
Well worth the price.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Interesting depiction of Tesla's Life, yet not fully satifying
Comment: Cheney provides a lot of in depth information about Tesla's personal life, which at times is interesting. She refers often to his personal letters, which is information that is often hard to find in other biographies. However, there are a lot of lackings in the book as well. First, for anyone with a scientific or engineering background it is unsatisfying. Cheney's reiteration of Tesla's language when referring to his inventions is often archaic and unclear. I'm not sure her educational background, but she does not seem to be able to convey the engineering significance of his ideas. Secondly, she seems to almost be "defending" Tesla throughout the book. It doesn't necessarily detract from the book, but it comes across as desperate. Finally, it seems like the book's a little long. I feel like some information could be left behind. Nevertheless, for a compelte biography of all aspects of Tesla's life, this is the one for you--just be ready to focus more on his social interactions than his inventions.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Electrifying Read!
Comment: For some odd reason, there are not very many books out there on Tesla. This one is all it takes.
The way he could visualize an invention with such focus that he could even make changes to it based on how he saw it operating in his mind, without ever fabricating an actual model, was pretty wild. Some of the concepts he was working on almost 100 years ago still cannot be duplicated. Too bad he couldn't channel some of that genius toward his finances.
The book has a good mix of his technical inventions as well as the personal aspects of this fascinating inventor's life.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Absolutely mind-boggling
Comment: I found this book to be absolutely mind-boggling. It is incredible that one man could be a pioneer in so many separate fields of technology. Moreover, it is incredible that one man can be traced back to be the originator of practically all of our global power and information infrastrucure- yet he benefitted so little for it in terms of either credit or wealth.
Nikola Tesla was the single genius behind the the entire modern polyphase and single phase system for generating, transmitting, and utilizing electrical current. He was no mere theorist- he actually designed the dynamos, motors (the FIRST AC motors- when all the "experts" said that it was impossible), transformers, and automatic controls. It all occured to him in a flash in the 1880's. This alone should have made him the greatest of modern inventors, yet it was only a tiny part of his genius. Tesla also invented wireless communication (Marconi used his patents and lied about it.) Now combine this with his seminal work in superconductivity (he had to invent the technology to produce liquid oxygen on an indistrial scale), cryogenics, flourescent lights, radio-control, robotics, logic circuits, x-rays, radar, aeronautics, bladeless turbines, etc. He didn't merely predict the developments in these fields- if you look he held the original U.S. patents backed by detailed drawings and models (this book does an excellent job in tracing those patents.) Much of it dated from the 19th century- before the "electron" had been discovered or named.
Yet, he received so little in credit or financial reward. After his time working for Edison (who cheated him him out of his promised fee for redesigning his DC dynamos), and after starting up and being forced out of his own arc lighting company, he was actually pennyless and forced to work as a street gang laborer during the recession of of 1886. He barely survived. In fact he often found it difficult to even pay his room rent during his life. One is stunned to find that this greatest of minds could be so poorly treated by society- it truly puts one own misfortunes into perspective...
Those people who only associate the inventor with high frequency, high voltage stage spectaculars only see the tip of the iceburg. The only reason that Tesla even put on such theatrical displays was to try to attract investment capital from ignorant but wealthy men that did not understand his real work.
Personally, Tesla was an enigma. He held that human beings were fundamentally no more than "meat machines." Yet there has seldom been a more altuistic personality. He did not subscibe to the rule of the jungle and the social Darwinism of his times. In fact, he essentially gave away his royalty rights to Westinghouse just to see that his superior system would actually be given to the world. Plus, there is the fact that Tesla experienced many instances of ESP and precognition in his life- yet he seemed to pss this off as a type of "mental radio" not yet explained. However, he never did come to grips as to how he could predict events in the future...
One result of my reading the is book was that I grew ashamed that I kept a picture of Thomas Edison over my drawing board for years. Edison was a petty little man who behaved shamefully, especially concerning Tesla. Tesla was by far the greater innovator, plus a polished gentleman, linguist, and poet. One thing stuck out forcefully- Tesla was a great believer in developing solar, wind, geothermal, and ocean power as well as other forms of revewable energy. On the other hand, Edison held that such methods would not be needed for 50,000 years because just chopping down the South American jungles would provide us with that much fuel...
"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid by night;
God said, Let Tesla be, and all was light."
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