Sean Gursky reviewed Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney
Review of 'Tesla' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Wanted to read this in July 2013 and finally made good on it. It may take a while but the "To Be Read" mountain does decrease.
"The present is theirs, the future, for which I really worked, is mine."
To put it simply: Tesla did a lot. He was always working on something, improving an idea, creating patents and theorizing on the future. At times the scope of what he worked on was overwhelming. Unfortunately I feel that the delivery in this book was a burden and detracted from appreciating it all.
I read this slower than I typically do and at times it was a chore to continue reading. Tesla was a busy man and connecting one idea to the other could be a challenge for any author so perhaps this is a downside of summarizing a full life down to a few hundred pages.
Years later Pond was …
Wanted to read this in July 2013 and finally made good on it. It may take a while but the "To Be Read" mountain does decrease.
"The present is theirs, the future, for which I really worked, is mine."
To put it simply: Tesla did a lot. He was always working on something, improving an idea, creating patents and theorizing on the future. At times the scope of what he worked on was overwhelming. Unfortunately I feel that the delivery in this book was a burden and detracted from appreciating it all.
I read this slower than I typically do and at times it was a chore to continue reading. Tesla was a busy man and connecting one idea to the other could be a challenge for any author so perhaps this is a downside of summarizing a full life down to a few hundred pages.
Years later Pond was to say that he disagreed with history's assessment of the two inventors. Edison was "the greatest experimenter and research this century has produced - but I wouldn't rate him as much of an originator," he said. Tesla, however, he considered "the greatest inventive genius of all time."
However the book was executed I was continually amazed with what Tesla worked on, how he could be years ahead of his peers and yet was still ostracized he was in the scientific community. Through it all he had to borrow, plead and spin a tale to get loans to continue research or keep debts at bay. Tesla laid the foundation for for radio, radar and anything that had an electric pulse and he had fleeting glimpses of wealth and had to survive public humiliation.
To him the value of money consisted in what one did with it rather than in any intrinsic worth.
This biography is constructed in a chronological fashion and has ample footnotes and references. Some reviewers criticize Cheney for being a bit sympathetic and biased towards Tesla but I either didn't notice or mind the way the story was slanted.
Once he understood exactly how an invention worked (in his mind), he tended to lose interest, for there were always exciting new challenges just over the horizon.
I was curious in learning more about Tesla's life after The Oatmeal published a comic in 2013 (theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla) and reading the comic back now it covers all the high's and low's. If the comic piques your interest in any such way and you want to learn more then I would recommend this book (or any other Tesla biographies) to learn more about the greatest inventive genius of all time.
I had additional highlighted passages that couldn't fit in to this review so here are the remainders...
"A man always has two reasons for the things he does - a good one and the real one."
This gifted madman seemed bent on making whole systems obsolete as soon as they came into being, and just when they promised to start earning profits.
As is typical of so many of Tesla's inventions, scholars still do not know the whole range of their possible applications or, in some cases, even their full theoretical significance.
