Title: The Man Who Invented The Twentieth Century
Author/Artist: Robert Lomas
Publisher: Headline
Media: Book
Reviewer: Pan
This pop-biography of Nikola Tesla - 'forgotten genius of electricity' - aims to remind us of one of the modern world's great inventors. Contrary to what the author believes, Tesla has not been forgotten by everybody but electrical engineers. Tesla's name also has a special places in the hearts of conspiracy theorists and alternative historians everywhere.
Tesla's long and eventful life had enough material to furnish a dozen conspiracy theories. A vastly intelligent and idealistic man, he was ripped off again and again by the likes of Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and JP Morgan. Tesla was the inventor who made AC current the basis of the modern electricity supply industry, who invented radio years before Marconi, who perfected the steam turbine and more. The mysteries of the profit motive, however, failed him.
He dreamed of supplying free power for all, without the need for expensive sub-stations, pylons, transformers and cables and all of the other equipment now in use. In his experiments he had shown that it was possible to harness the earth's electro-magnetic field to transmit AC power through the atmosphere. Suitable receiving equipment could be used to capture this transmitted power in the home. The promise really was of free electrical power for all.
Of course this scheme attracted the attention of the American electricity supply industry, already an extremely powerful force thanks to the work Tesla had done in making AC power a practical proposition - in the process of making them powerful he had, of course, been ripped off mercilessly. If Tesla's free power scheme took off then over-night the investment of men like Edison, Westinghouse and the capitalists headed by Morgan, would have been rendered worthless. So, once more exploiting Tesla's complete lack of business acumen, they bought his patents then starved him of funds so that he'd have no way of completing his work.
Portrayed in the popular press of as the archetypal 'wacky' inventor, it was easy to let him rant and rave in public, ensuring that eventually few people would take him seriously. In time he lapsed into obscurity, and when he died in 1943 his body lay undisturbed for two days. Penniless and alone, he died an almost forgotten figure.
The US government did not forget him. On his death the FBI impounded all his writings, afraid that they contained countless secrets of military value - including a 'death ray' that eventually was used as the basis of Reagan's 'star wars' project.
Tesla's inventions and his theories were so far ahead of their time as to have been viewed as little more than science fiction. But he was right on most things, and even when he disagreed with Einstein about a theory of gravity it seems that Tesla was closer to the truth than Einstein.
The dream of free and universal power is still just a dream. There's no money in it, that's the bottom line.
Despite the interesting story to be told, it has to be said that this isn't the definitive Tesla biography that I had hoped for. The writing is repetitive and conveys little of the excitement of Tesla's life and his inventions. The science has been stripped to a bare minimum and the patronising tone means that the book reads like it was written for a bunch of pre-teens. Far from risking alienating his readers by going into too much scientific detail, Robert Lomas has gone to the other extreme and risks alienating readers by adopting a patronising and simplistic tone at times.
Hopefully, however, the book will serve to rekindle interest in Tesla, and so may result in a more detailed biography at some point in the future.