The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century [Kindle Edition]

The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century argues, legitimately, that Nikola Tesla was the most important of the inventors who made modern life possible, simply because his insistence on making alternating current the standard made electrical equipment so much more versatile than would have been the case had Edison won.

"Sparking and crackling round his darkened laboratory, making lamps glow from his pointing finger, (Tesla) must have presented an awesome spectacle, must have looked like a modern god of lightning ... The effects of Edison's claim about the deadly risks of AC electricity were being disproved in a most spectacular fashion."

The tragedy was that Tesla was so self-destructively naive in his dealings with other scientists, with money-men and with the state. Typically, he had his money stolen on the way to the US, but managed to get aboard his liner by explaining what had happened and proving his identity; then nearly starved because he had no money for food and was too proud to ask for help. Lomas is excellent on this self-destructive streak--Tesla constantly alienated the powerful while putting himself in their power and talked as if the Nobel Prize, unlikely ever to be given to "a mere engineer", was in his grasp. Lomas takes us through the technicalities of the famous inventions and makes what case can be made for the crankier things--the electric laxative, broadcast power and various death rays; ironically Tesla's disdain for theory meant he never read the Einstein paper on which lasers would eventually be based. --Roz Kaveney

Everybody knows that Thomas Edison devised electric light and domestic electricity supplies, that Guglielmo Marconi thought up radio and George Westinghouse built the world's first hydro-electric power station. Everybody knows these 'facts' but they are wrong.

The man who dreamt up these things also invented, inter-alia, the fluorescent light, seismology, a worldwide data communications network and a mechanical laxative. His name was Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American scientist, and his is without doubt this century's greatest unsung scientific hero.

His life story is an extraordinary series of scientific triumphs followed by a catalog of personal disasters. Perpetually unlucky and exploited by everyone around him, credit for Tesla's work was appropriated by several of the West's most famous entrepreneurs: Edison, Westinghouse and Marconi among them. After his death, information about Tesla was deliberately suppressed by the FBI.

Using Tesla's own writings, contemporary records, court transcripts and recently released FBI files, The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century pieces together for the first time the true extent of Tesla's scientific genius and tells the amazing tale of how his name came to be so widely forgotten.

Nikola Tesla is the engineer who gave his name to the unit of magnetic flux. The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century. Robert's biography of his childhood hero was launched at the 1999 Orkney Science Festival, where Robert gave a talk on Tesla in conjunction with Andrej Detela from the Department of Low and Medium Energy Physics at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubijana, Slovenia.

Reviews

Robert Gaitskell, a vice-president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, said:

"Robert Lomas is to be congratulated on an easy-to-read life of a tortured genius. The book not only takes takes us through the roller-coaster fortunes of Tesla, but also has well-constructed chapters on the history of electrical research and on lighting. Although dealing at times, with difficult technical concepts, it never succumbs to jargon and remains intelligible to the informed lay-person throughout. Every scientist or engineer would enjoy this tale of errant brilliance, and a younger student would be enthused towards a research career."

Angus Clarke, writing in the Times Metro Magazine said:

"Nikola Tesla is the forgotten genius of electricity. He invented or laid the groundwork for many things we take for granted today including alternating current, radio, fax and e-mail. A Croatian immigrant to America in 1884 Tesla combined genius with gaping character flaws and an uncanny ability to be ripped off by everyone. This is scientific popularisation at its most readable."

Engineering and Technology Magazine said:

"This book is fun, which is not something one often says about engineering books...Tesla is most widely known for the magnetic unit that bears his name, but sadly little else. This book is a thoroughly entertaining way of correcting that injustice, a must for engineers, especially electrical ones."