Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tesla: Man Out of Time
Book Review: Good history of Tesla
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Good, not great
Summary: 3 Stars
Tesla: Man Out of Time is obviously very well-researched and the author does her best to bring a bit of literary flair into the book, but it still falls just a bit short of 4 stars. While I agree with a great deal of the propositions made about Tesla in the book, and COMPLETELY agree about the radio patent debacle, Ms. Cheney spends a bit too much time overstating the scope of Tesla's work and overemphasizing its significance. A test in which Tesla noted something that might be called plasma != creating plasma physics, for example.
Anyway, it was still definitely worth reading, so I'd recommend it.
Book Review: Had to put it down.
Summary: 1 Stars
Ms Cheney should clearly have stuck to the historical aspects of Tesla's life and his inventions instead of trying to write about the technical. After reading several of her speculations about Tesla's inventions, and explainations of how they worked, I had to stop reading the book becuase of her glaring ignorance on these matters. Examples are her asserations that capacitors discharge with "several hundred million oscilations a second" (they can, but it depends on the external circuit), and her comparison of the skin effect with superconductivity (currents flowing on the "skin" or surface of a conductor because of high frequencies cause the conductor to be MORE resistive, not less). She suggest that Tesla was the true inventor of radio (by her analysis, the first person who measured a magnetically induced signal of any kind should be) and the particle accelerator (again by her analysis, it should be the first person who observed that an electic field can accelerate a charged particle). On a side note about accelerators, or as she calls them "atom smashers", a cyclotron cause particles to have a spiral, not circular, orbit as she says. Finally she delved into the paranormal, at which point I stopped reading. As someone who has spent a career working with high voltage, high current, and high frequency electronics, I found this book an embarrassment to the genius of Tesla's work. A word of advice to MS Cheney, get a technical editor.Book Review: How Can Such an Intriguing Man Get Such a Lifeless Biography
Summary: 2 Stars
"Tesla: Man Out of Time" succeeds only in making the life of an extraordinary man a lifeless and frustratingly shallow story.
Prior to reading this book, I was only aware of Tesla as a mysterious genius and some kind of cult figure. And I had read a brief but intriguing description of Tesla's paranormal experiences. I read this biography anxious to dive into the life and times of this fascinating man. Unfortunately, I would STILL like to be fascinated by the story of Tesla, because this book skims over the most interesting aspects of this ingenious and troubled inventor and engineer.
The book brings attention to countless captivating things about Tesla, confirming that he deserves a quality biographical study, but fails to deliver much more than a sketch of the events in his life. It seems like most of the pages are wasted on describing Tesla's lab equipment. I say "wasted" because even after countless tiresome descriptions of Tesla's experiments, I still have no idea about how his inventions were supposed to work or the basic theories behind them. I still don't know which of his ideas, if any, were revolutionary, or if any of his unattained goals have been achieved by any inventor-scientist after Tesla. The author should have (even briefly) explained some basic electrical concepts in order to make the writing about his experiments meaningful, or better, she should have minimized the descriptions of his devices and concentrated on the man - his odd talents, his relationships, his obsessive-compulsive behavior, why he failed in his business enterprises, and why he seemingly became an outrageous liar and huckster.
I now know who Nikola Tesla was and what he did. Two stars for that much.
Book Review: Interesting
Summary: 4 Stars
Interesting book...Tesla was really a genius, on the contrary of Thomas Edison who stole a lot of ideas from this great jugoslavian mind!