Majority of the Projects and Inventions presented appears true and unfettered. However, no specific mention of the underlying engineering principles and core setup.

This is a very hard Read But for the things that Make Sense Its Worth it. I dont know anything about Science But i really did enjoy this book. Tesla RULES!

This book is amazing. Tesla, the original mad scientist, is depicted through his lectures, newspaper articles and other accounts. He was the creator of AC (alternating currents) elecricity which we still use today. Electromagnetics, Earth as a huge capacitor, death rays, UFOs, it's all here. It borders on metafiction in its accounts of his later experiments and modern mysterious phenomena. Part of a series, I definitely plan to read more.

Very informative, but not interesting reading.

Learn about his concepts. Free energy, mind control (for realz). He was the maddest scientist ever.

I have quite a few books on Tesla. This one did not contain any new information. That doesn't mean it's not worth reading. If you're interested in Tesla there are incredible number of books on him. This is just one and I believe it's mediocre when compared to some of the others.

I really liked that this book had all the patents and drawings of Tesla himself! I loved being able to read his own words, and read the papers he wrote or spoke himself at many various public functions.

More than reading his biographies, this book gave me a feel for what an educated and eloquent gentleman he was. I have great respect for him as a person, and a great awe for everything he discovered.

He truly is the Father of the technology of our modern era! Too bad more people don't know about his work!

No one doubts that Tesla was a genius and his uncountable inventions still inflame imagination.
However, this book is far beyond reliability, no matter how open minded one may be – time travel, teleportation, antigravity – really, if all these were possible, we would be populating at least this solar system in its entirety. The cherry on the cake was that he and Marconi fake their deaths and are still alive in a subterranean city in South America…

But I guess it’s worth skimming through, at least for the glimpse in his life and his credited inventions.

very good book about Tesla. It goes through his inventions in detail with some original source material copied into the book like patent drawings. Also covers some things I did not find in the biography I read a few years back.

Aren't there any good books written about Nikola Tesla?? This is the second one I've read, and both have been below par. "Fantastic Inventions" has entire chapters consisting of Tesla's patent drawings, none of which I can understand, being that I know nothing about how electricity works. But even if I did, there are no explanations accompanying the drawings, so what good are they? Other chapters seem to be lectures or articles he wrote. The Appendix is a partial transcript of a trial -just the part where witnesses are trying to describe the conditions of Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower before it was demolished. Some reprints of newspaper articles and photographs of the laboratories liven things up, but this books was very disappointing overall.
I took out of this two things of interest; One, that in his article of March 5, 1904 (Electrical World and Engineer) he states "... A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one's pocket, may then be set up somewhere on sea or land, and it will record the world's news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were, capable of response in every one of its parts." (Sounds like cell phones w/Internet access to me!) Two, that the mad scientist in the very first Max Fletcher "Superman" cartoons of the early 1940's were most likely patterned after Tesla, who believed that he had created a "Death-Beam" in 1934.

This book records the pictures of inventions made by Tesla, with some (insufficient) explanations. This might be better if there is another writer who can "decode" these raw patent graphs into explanations of what novelty each innovation has, and how it can inspire future innovators, like how Walter Isaacson decoded Leonardo da Vinci's notes which are tens of thousands of pages.

Main categories of Tesla's innovations by time:
1. First Biographical Sketch (1691)
2. The First Patents (1666 to 1606)
3. Experiments With Alternate Current Of High Potential & High Frequency (1691)
4. More Patents (1689 to 1900)
5. Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires (1904)
6. Tesla's Amazing Death-Ray
7. The Most Unusual Inventions
8. The Last Patents (1913 to 1928)
9. Tesla & the Pyramids of Mars

There are likely far better books on the subject of Nikola Tesla but this is the one that I initially received during my late middle school/early high school time that made me enraptured with this particular scientist. He was one of the first people working on what we now take for granted, wireless technology. Deeply subversive, shrouded in a certain amount of myth and mystery for being a real scientist with hundreds of patents.