Richard Munson

This book is so disappointing that I abandoned it. Credibility is crucial in a biography, and a biographer needs to demonstrate reliability as a researcher of general facts to convince her or his audience of meticulous research into the facts of the subject's life.

Munson fails this first test of authority. Some examples:

page 30 - Munson sends someone off on another tact. At best this is careless; the worse alternative is that he does not grasp a common nautical metaphor.

page 49 - We read a reference to 'the Royal Canadian Government'. There has never been such an entity, and certainly not in the time period of this book.

page 62 - Munson refers to King Edward VII at a time when Edward was still Prince of Wales.

page 91 - The electrical engineer Ambrose Fleming was not 'an aristocrat' and was not knighted until 1929, long after the time in question.

pages 253 and 254 - Munson uses 'friars' and 'monks' as synonyms. They are not.

Given the number of errors in the first hundred pages, and the later one I stumbled across, I felt that there was little reason to suppose that Munson's research into Tesla's life was reliable.

My suggestion is to look instead for W. Bernard Carlson's "Tesla : inventor of the electrical age".… (más)

Nikola Tesla has become a Culture Icon known more for his reputation as a kind of magician and rogue inventor, thanks to the movie The Prestige, and as a visionary, his name recognized because of Tesla Motors. And yet few of us understand that everything we take for granted today--the electric grid, cell phones, satellite television, the Internet, the smartwatch, and even the remote control of warfare--first sprung from his imagination.

I knew Tesla from bits and pieces. I remember when my son and husband bantered about things looking like a 'Tesla coil,' a reference to a weapon in Command and Conquer Red Alert. The 2006 movie The Prestige showed Tesla's Colorado laboratory and work in remote transmission of electricity.

In 2016 I read The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore, an exciting historical novel about the rivalry between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, with Tesla in the center. In The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson and The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City by Margaret Creighton I learned about the Chicago and Buffalo fairs lit by Tesla and George Westinghouse.

And then, in my mailbox, I found a gift from W. W. Norton-- a copy of Richard Munson's biography Tesla: Inventor of the Modern. I was pleased to have all these bits and pieces of knowledge integrated into an understanding and appreciation of Tesla's life and work and legacy.

The more I learned about the man, the less I felt I 'knew' him. He was brilliant and flawed and complicated and chimerical. He worked out entire inventions in his mind before he built them. He was impeccably dressed and amazingly fit-- and a charming germaphobe who could not be touched. His obsessive-compulsive disorder ruled his habits and he fought depression with self-administered electroshock therapy. He was a lousy businessman who signed away his rights to millions and later, deep in debt, lost his research facilities. He could be vain and he could be magnanimous. He was addicted to the pure science of discovery.

"The War of the Currents" refers to the rivalry between inventors vying for precedence. Thomas Edison clung to direct current, which could not be transmitted over long distances and relegated electric power to the rich few. Tesla invented alternating current capable of powering whole regions. With George Westinghouse using Tesla's inventions, in 1893 they created the City of Lights at the Chicago Columbian Expedition.

The commission to harness the power of Niagara Falls attracted worldwide attention. Westinghouse and Tesla won the contract and in 1896 the hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls was opened, powering the Rainbow City at the 1901 Pan-American Expedition in Buffalo, NY. Tesla saw the feat as signifying "the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man" that would "relieve millions from want and suffering."

Tesla had reached superstar status, but already he was envisioning the next big idea.

At the turn of the century, gas lamps still reigned, with only 8% of American homes wired for electricity. The question remained to be answered:"Was electricity for all or for the wealthy? Would power become a necessity or remain a luxury?" Tesla was obsessed with the idea of using the earth for the transference of wireless electric power.

He went on to invent remote control and multichannel broadcasting systems. Tesla had little interest in creating and marketing useful devices based on his discoveries. He rejected an offer to develop wireless communication for the US Lighthouse Board and other projects which would have financed his research.

Next up, he built a research center in Colorado, portrayed in the movie The Prestige in which David Bowie plays Tesla in Colorado puttering around with wireless energy. His last facility on Long Island, NY went far over budget. Tesla was broke. He lost backers who wanted practical applications, something they could make money on, and Tesla was only interested in pure research. It was heartbreaking to read about Tesla's untethered last years, his increasing eccentricities in behavior and poverty, as he watched other make millions on his ideas and inventions.

Munson offers Tesla as a role model, writing, "...we have great need today of Tesla's example of selfless out-of-the-box thinking if we are to tackle our twenty-first-century challenges...particularly in the electric-power industry he helped create." Munson continues, "he would lead a charge for sustainability and against the carbon pollution that is changing our climate." He knew that coal was a limited supply and imagined harnessing energy from the sun and geothermal energy.

Tesla was one of the most interesting and remarkable men I have read about. I appreciate that Munson's explanations of Tesla's discoveries and inventions were written so the general reader could grasp them.… (más)