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: Some good information, but not worth the slog.
Summary: 2 Stars
What a disappointing read! I honestly struggled to finish this biography after starting it with such high hopes.
Tesla is a fascinating character. His early work laid the groundwork for much of the modern alternating-current-based electrical grid. Later on he made major discoveries in wireless communications but was unable to capitalize on either. The later part of his life is marked by grand proclamations but little actual experimentation. He's something of a controversial figure and the jury is still out on many of his inventions, including whether or not he actually made various discoveries or if he was just deluding himself.
Cheney does a remarkable job of turning this fascinating story into a dry, boring slog. While generally her writing is technically fine it just doesn't flow. She also has some very annoying habits:
1. She provides very few hard dates and skips forwards and backwards in time, making it very hard to understand the ordering of major events.
2. She provides almost no technical details on anything engineering-related.
3. She clearly has no understanding of most of the scientific principles involved and takes all of his ramblings at face value.
4. She breathlessly mentions how some of Tesla's work explains various paranormal activity which she seems to accept as fact, and at the end of the book implies that there's a huge conspiracy involving the US government to keep all of later inventions, including his "death ray", under wraps.
If you're interested in learning more about Tesla, avoid this book - it will just crush your curiosity.
Book Review: Superb biography of a mad scientist
Summary: 5 Stars
Nicola Tesla is one of the wonders of recent centuries. A more complex and mysterious man can hardly be imagined. He is known to have invented things like Alternate Current (AC), robots, guided missles, and the radio, among many other things. During his later years he was constantly broke and had no funds to purchase the equipment he needed to test his theories, and it is rumored that he invented a way to transmit energy wirelessly, a type of electic force field that could encircle an entire country and prevent it from being invaded, a death-ray that killed with highly concentrated energy beams, and a way to light the earth at night by stimulating the chemicals present in the atmosphere. He is also known to have invented an oscillator which he could fit into his pocket with which he could destroy buildings and once accidentally used to start a small earthquake in New York.
In addition to his imaginitive and innovative inventions, Tesla himself was an exceedingly interesting man. He was plauged by what sounds to me to be Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (though the book never called it that). He had to do things in groups of three (for example, if he walked around a block he had to do it three times), his apartment or hotel room number had to be divisible by three or he could not stay there, he had to calculate the cubic volume of his food before he ate it, etc. He also could not touch or be touched by other human beings and was excessively afraid of human hair. In addition to all this, he became obsessed with pigeons in his later years, and would take them into his rented room. He aquired many pigeons, and was kicked out of his hotel because of it. He moved about to other places and his pigeons followed him. If he could not make it to the park to feed the pigeons, he hired someone to do it for him, and when he went through a particularly sparce period when he was nearly bankrupt, he lived on crackers so that he could buy bird feed for his pigeons.
Needless to say, this is not a boring book at all. It discusses two things: Nicola Tesla and his inventions. Both Telsa himself and his inventions are some of the most interesting things that you will ever read about (as you can tell from the above paragraphs). You may have read fictional accounts of mad scientists, but Tesla is the only real one that I know of. I highly recommend reading about Tesla, and this book is as good a place to start as any that I know of.
Many who have heard of Tesla have heard about him mainly in the form of conspiracy theories. His strange inventions and even stranger claims in his old age, combined with his excessively eccentric personality have made him the center of any number of consipracy theories, and the dissapearance of his papers into the hands of the government and the government's subsequent denial of their possession of the papers only heightens feelings of curiousity and suspicion about him. Thankfully, Cheney takes the road less traveled and does not devote her book to conspiracies and extravagant claims. Most of her claims are backed up by citations from Tesla's works, newspapers, or those who knew him personally. When she does discuss controversial and unproven theories she makes sure to mention that they are controversial and she leans heavily toward disbelieving the conspiracy theories surrounding Tesla. In short, this is a very well researched book, providing the information needed to do more research if you feel inspired to do so after reading it. It is not a conspiracy theory book, unlike most of the other books I have seen about Tesla. Definitely a book worth reading.
Overall grade: A
Book Review: THE Definite Tesla Biography
Summary: 5 Stars
The best biography written on one of the most amazing men of the 20th century, or perhaps of all-time. Nikola Tesla was one of the world's greatest inventors, and definitely its most mysterious. To say that Telsa was ahead of his time is putting it rather mildly. Most of his inventions were so advanced that the public had a difficult time grasping just how important they really were.
Although Marconi is often credited with the invention of radio, the real credit goes entirely to Tesla. A long-running battle between the two ended when American courts essentially invalidated Marconi's radio patent, and awarded credit for the invention to Nikola Telsla.
In addition to radio, Tesla also invented Alternating Current (AC), which is the form of electricity used to deliver power to most homes and businesses on earth. He also patented hundreds of other inventions, many of which are in use today. Others are yet to be understood by modern scientists.
Probably just as fascinating as Tesla's inventions was Telsa himself though. He was the original, real-life "mad scientist", and often discussed his invention of the "death ray" with the popular press. The world has never seen an inventor the likes of Nikola Tesla, and may never see one again. This book is a fascinating look at an amazing individual.
Book Review: Technically unsatisfying, intellectually dishonest
Summary: 2 Stars
Cheney paints a rich portrait of the character of Nikola Tesla, Mad Scientist---or at least Eccentric Inventor, providing ample detail of his bizarre manners, his proficiency at gambling and billiards, his astonishing hubris, his society appearances, and his (putative) unrequited love.
However, Tesla was foremost an inventor, not an eccentric, and so the content and context of his inventions should be foremost in any biography of him. It's clear that despite this being Cheney's second book on Tesla, she simply does not understand the technical content of Tesla's work. For the reader, this is merely unfortunate. What is inexcusable, and intellectually dishonest, is that Cheney plagiarizes the writings of Tesla himself---unattributed verbatim copying---to provide explanations where she herself is unable. And not even good ones, at that.
Here are two examples. The first appears on page 37 and refers to Tesla's bladeless turbine:
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What he built was a cylinder freely rotatable on two bearings and partly surrounded by a rectangular trough which fit it perfectly. The open side of the trough was closed by a partition and the cylindrical segment divided into two compartments entirely separated from each other by airtight sliding joints. One of these compartments being sealed and exhausted of air, the other remaining open, perpetual rotation of the cylinder would result---or so the inventor thought.
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This paragraph was lifted verbatim from "My Inventions" by Nikola Tesla (Filiquarian, 2006; p. 32) without attribution. (In the original, the last words were "at least, I thought so".) The latter work by Tesla, a brief autobiography only recently published, does not appear to have been available in print when Cheney's book was written; perhaps Cheney was assuming none of her readers also had access to the manuscript.
The second example is even stranger. In an explanation of Tesla's "magnifying transmitter" appearing on page 147, Cheney writes:
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He considered the ultimate design to be a transformer having a secondary in which the parts, charged to a high potential, were of considerable area and arranged in space along ideal enveloping surfaces of very large radii of curvature, thereby insuring a small electric surface density everywhere. Thus no leak could occur even if the conductor were bare.
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I read this impenetrable paragraph half a dozen times before finally giving up trying to make sense of it. I wasn't sure if it was my lack of physics expertise, or Cheney's lack of explicatory clarity that was to blame. When I reached page 175, I was in no doubt. Cheney writes:
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"Well, then, in the first place", he wrote, "it is a resonant transformer with a secondary in which the parts, charged to a high potential, are of considerable area and arranged in space along ideal enveloping surfaces of very large radii of curvature, and at proper distances from one another, thereby insuring a small electric surface density everywhere so that no leak can occur even if the conductor is bare."
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What is astonishing here is not only that Cheney so wantonly plagiarizes Tesla's writing, but that she also (correctly) characterizes his explanation as "tantalizingly vague"---having shamelessly used the exact same explanation herself only 30 pages earlier.
In his introduction, Leland Anderson asks why anyone should wish to undertake another biography of Tesla after John J. O'Neill's "Prodigal Genius" (1943). He concludes that O'Neill's biography was "authoritative" but "thin with regard to his interactions with personal associates". Perhaps Cheney's "Man out of Time" might fill that particular gap, but it is certainly not authoritative, and her (and her publisher's) sloppiness are embarrassing.
I recommend that readers with a technical interest in Tesla's work look elsewhere.
Book Review: Tesla
Summary: 5 Stars
I read the Tesla book and finished it two weeks ago. I thought it was like a greek tragedy in some ways. His idea of transmitting electricity through the atmosphere sounded rather dangerous and impractical. He should have received more recognition than he did. If he was a little better businessman, he would have been wealthy beyond imagination.