Page 51 - The Peorian Vol 3 Issue 1 Winter

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At times, his visitors would
be physically overwhelmed by
the spectacle. Others – like Mark
Twain – were thoroughly fasci-
nated (the two became very good
friends). At one point, to dem-
onstrate the safety of AC power,
Tesla took a 250,000-volt shock
through his body.
Unlike Edison and Bell, Tesla
regularly boasted of his inven-
tions before they were a reality –
perhaps because he could picture
them working in his head. In
1899, he boldly stated he would
transmit messages across the At-
lantic. But Marconi beat him to it
in 1901. So Marconi is the one we
read about in the history books.
And it was around this time
that the man who in 1894 had
been proclaimed by Electrical En-
gineer as to have “achieved such
a universal scientific reputation”
began his downfall. By 1903, the
press was writing that the name
Tesla “provokes at best a regret
that so great a promise should
have been unfulfilled.”
While Tesla lived another 40
years, he could not repeat the
advances and breakthroughs he
made in the 1890s – nor could
he find the businessmen to back
him financially. He spent a great
many of those last 40 years nearly
penniless, while still attempting
to make new technological inno-
vations and realize his dream of
wireless communications.
Despite his failures, he always
drew the interest of the press,
which loved to print his fantasti-
cal boasts about his future inven-
tions: a new motor that would
work on cosmic rays, a pocket-
sized mechanical oscillator that
could destroy the Empire State
building, a particle-beam weapon
that could bring down an aircraft,
and even machines that allowed
him to receive transmissions from
Mars and extraterrestrial life.
In the end, Nikola Tesla was
the poster child for the eccentric
genius. He was the man who
ushered in the era of modern
electricity and inspired future
inventors, while at the same time
he was the man who sent a tele-
graph messenger to deliver $100
to his friend Mark Twain – nearly
30 years after Twain’s death.
Almost every biographer
focuses on the eccentric side of
Tesla because, well, there’s a lot
of material there; e.g., he was
kicked out of one New York hotel
for having too many pigeons in
his room. In fact, one corner of
Bryant Park behind the New York
Public Library – the place where
he would feed the pigeons almost
daily – is officially designated
“Nikola Tesla Corner.”
But in this book Carlson bal-
ances the eccentricities with the
genius, showing the cultural and
technological impact of Tesla’s
work, as well as delving into the
individual machines he built –
the successes as well as the fail-
ures. I hope, at the very least, this
new biography will underscore
Nikola Tesla’s rightfully earned
place among the forefathers of
modern technology.
“Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age”
By W. Bernard Carlson
Princeton University Press
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