This book was great...if I could only understand half of it. Ha ha. I have a fascination with Nikola Tesla and always have, however I am not of the capacity to understand his genius, which is what this book is mostly about. It gives a good account of his personal history, but of course, it focuses mostly on his amazing life's work and the vast improvements made to others work. Where would we be without Nikola Tesla? He has no doubt been touched by God. To understand energy and be able to harness it as he has makes him one of the greatest men in world history, with one of the most beautiful minds.

Dr. Marc J Seifer is the preeminent authority on the life and times of Nikola Tesla as evidenced through his exhaustively researched best seller: Wizard. Dr. Seifer ’s wide ranging and meticulously researched published articles, novels and books span subjects ranging from metaphysics, behavior analysis to science fiction. Besides his authoring, he is a forensic expert and published master of handwriting analysis. The author's website. Known for the History Channel's TESLA FILES, the author, born 1948, writes an in depth narrative on Nikola Tesla including dialogue making it a compelling read; a good companion to the Tesla's timeline as seen on the NikolaTesla website. You don't have to know about an incandescent lamp or a commutator. Read/ listen with delight on this genius of a man.

The author does a fabulous portrayal of Nikola Tesla during the times he lived and how he influenced people, cults , evil all over our Planet.


Be it known that I, NIKOLA TESLA, from Smiljan, Lika, border country of Austria-Hungary, at present residing in this city, county, and State of New York, have invented certain new and useful Improvement in Commutators for Dynamo-Electric Machines and Motors, of which the following is a specification, reference being had to the drawings accompanying and forming a part of the same. The invention relates to dynamo-electric machines or motors, and is an improvement in the devices for commutating and collecting the currents.... May 15, 1888. From The TeslaUniverse website  .

Synopsis of the book : This book is in Audio form running for 22 hours.
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity. Based on original material and previously unavailable documents, this acclaimed book is the definitive biography of the man considered by many to be the founding father of modern electrical technology. Among Tesla's creations were the channeling of alternating current, fluorescent and neon lighting, wireless telegraphy, and the giant turbines that harnessed the power of Niagara Falls.

The author makes reference to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as well as a bit of Nikola Tesla's sexual identity; his relationship with his mother, his older brother, who died at a very young age; as well as, with Pierpont Morgan and Westinghouse.

The author mentions Nikola Tesla's interest in wireless technology. Imagine what the world would be like if we had cell phones on the early 1900's. The book cites some interesting research showing the author's 'obsession' (a good obsession) in Nikola Tesla; for example letters of communication between Tesla and General Andrew McNaughton. Tesla was aware of various wars but, as a Serb he was influenced through his learning about the Battle of Kosovo (1389).
It is a good book for a elementary or middle school-aged students doing projects in Science. He discounted Einstein's theories and that was a great downfall -jealousy. However Seifer thinks that if Tesla were alive today, he would be selling Ozone generators. Wow. Ozone therapy. Very interesting.

Well-researched and detailed...perhaps too detailed.

The biography of Nikola Tesla entitled Wizard written by Marc Seifer is in my opinion an interesting and thorough telling of a great physicist, inventor and practical developer of many of the foundations of modern life. The book also clearly presents how Tesla's genius was also unfortunately coupled with overzealous beliefs in his creations and his truly disastrous and completely absent business sense.

Tesla's humble personality and commitment to the betterment of all of mankind are enviable and desirous traits that our world would do well to promote and expand. However, unfortunate for him these same qualities made him an easy target for exploitation by the opportunistic, self-serving and greedy leaders of business and industry that were (and still are) found throughout society.

The author makes a reasonable attempt to provide the reader insight and reference into Tesla's inventions but I found them to be less than needed to fully understand the practical applications of these advancements in Tesla's time or in today's world. Possibly the author tried to balance the presentation of this information against what would be an overwhelming amount of technical information that would have been confusing and distracted from the purpose of the book. Still, it would have provided more insight into Tesla's genius and his undeserved and almost complete omission from history.

Nikola Tesla was an amazing genius. He came very close to winning a Nobel Prize, jointly with Edison. Tesla was an brilliant, arrogant, eccentric character, full of energy. He made numerous fundamental scientific discoveries, and tried, to some extent, to capitalize on his discoveries through a whole host of inventions. He obtained many diverse patents, but he had little business sense, and this was exacerbated by corporations that often infringed on his patents without offering compensation. Corporations (Westinghouse, RCA, AT&T, American Marconi) around the turn of the century had only profit as their motive, and honor and honesty was not given even a wink. He was more responsible for wireless communication than Marconi, but to this day people credit Marconi with the invention.

On the other hand, Tesla was the quintessential "mad scientist". He was often far ahead of his time, and people did not believe his grandiose ideas and grandiose claims. The thing is, he often came through on his grandiose claims. Before issuing a patent for "teleautomation", the chief patent examiner insisted on coming to witness Tesla's invention, and saw for himself that it did work. J.P. Morgan initially invested in Tesla's "wireless" system so that ships and racing boats could be tracked while at sea. However, Tesla took the investment and proceeded to develop ever-more grand systems to transmit radio waves across the oceans, even around the world. Then, when Tesla started to claim that he was working on wireless transmission of power, Morgan actively discouraged investors. Not because Morgan doubted that Tesla would be successful--on the contrary--he knew that the "wizard" would come through on his fantastic claims. Morgan did not believe in distribution of power "for free."

Toward the end of his life, Tesla made claims that he had invented a particle-beam death ray. We don't know if it was true--but it did get some attention from the FBI and other government agencies--after he died! And his eccentricity seems to be boundless--he hired people to feed pigeons in public places around New York City.

My favorite story is about how, in the very earliest days of his wireless experiments in Colorado Springs, he heard three distinct "taps". Tesla attributed the taps to communications from Martians. Later he was told that Marconi had been simultaneously demonstrating to the British Navy a long-range radio transmission. Tesla, though, still held onto his claim that he was receiving messages from Mars!

This book contains a wealth of detail about Tesla's life. It quotes many letters and documents written by Tesla, or to Tesla, or about him. Sometimes I felt that the book went into too much detail--it could have been considerably shorter without lessening its impact. The book contains some interesting analyses of Tesla's life, and some speculations as to why Tesla behaved as he did. The book goes into psychoanalytic speculation about reasons why Tesla became so eccentric--reasons having to do with early events in his life, when he grew up in Serbia. Tesla was the uncle of the author's father. Nevertheless, this family relationship does not seem to cloud or bias this biography. Both the good and the less-good points of Tesla's life story are included.

A balanced insight into the life and achievements of a true genius.

I’m still looking for the definitive biography on Nikola Tesla because rest assured this isn’t it.
The author throws non-essential information about like it was confetti. I knew from the first chapter when he starts with the history of Croatia that this would be a less than promising beginning. Unfortunately it doesn’t get any better. People keep cropping up who had very little contact with or influence on Tesla. Information on his discoveries are kept to a minimum while matters of who filed what patent and when go on ad nauseum. There’s very little real science involved. It’s amazing how many times the author strays off the subject to bring up a trivial piece of data I could’ve lived the rest of my life without knowing. I’m willing to bet that overall more of the text is not about Tesla.
I wouldn’t have thought that a book about such a creative genius could be balled up to the point of practically making it unreadable. Cripes! Please, somebody write a really good biography of this man who deserves better than the treatment here.

This is not a great biography. But the subject is so fascinating that it largely covers the significant flaws.

First the flaws:

The author is an unabashed fan of Tesla and clearly has an agenda to make sure that the reader recognizes Tesla above Edison and Marconi and the other giants of the age. For instance, he denigrates Edison as using the brute force of a massive volume of experiments to come to what works while Tesla would think it through and do the math and find what would work and then test it to confirm. The author celebrates Tesla as superior to Edison because of this difference--Edison is the plodding, dirty, workbench-chained technician--Tesla is the brilliant scientist with pencil and paper and thoughts soaring above. There might be some truth to this contrast, but it is made in an extreme sense and seems unnecessarily judgmental towards Edison. And so forth throughout the book.

A second flaw is that the author is so insistent in trying to prove Tesla's scientific priority over those that follows that he spends hundreds of pages going through technical aspects of patent applications and the inner-working of the various devices. This might be interesting to an electrical engineer, but to the lay reader it is tedious. I just about laid the book down once or twice. But there were enough brilliant insights to keep going.

A few interesting anecdotes:

Once Tesla nearly destroyed his lab building on Houston St. in NYC with one of his oscillators. Shortly afterwards he clamped one to a skyscraper under construction and nearly caused it to collapse, turning it off and slipping it into his pocket and slipping away in the confusion of men thinking an earthquake had struck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla... (the book does not calim the oscillator cause an earthquake, but that the effect of the oscillator connected to a building's support structure was like an earthquake an could tumble a buildng within minutes. Amazing if true (and it sounds true to this non-scientiest--resonence of marching on bridges and all that).

Tesla was backed at different times by both John Jacob Astor (the richest man in the world) and JP Morgan (the most powerful financier in the world). He failed to deliver both times, taking the money which was earmarked for one purpose and diverting it to another purpose. When he ran out of money to complete the non-disclosed purpose and came back begging for more money, he was rebuffed. If he had done what he told the two men he was going to do with the money (in both cases creating a product that could be taken to market) instead of burning through it on scientific research without an end, he would have been a very very wealthy man and who knows what he could have accomplished. As it was, he never was able to raise money after betraying JPMorgan and was unable to do much significant work after that time.

Tesla was constantly a deadbeat borrower, evicted from many hotels for unpaid bills, and constantly begging others for funding during the last half of his life. It is sad to read, really.

Tesla was a lifelong celibate, almost certainly homosexual, but never practicing. A man of amazing self-discipline and focus.

His consuming dream was to provide free electric powerful to the world. It is unlikely that there is merit to this scheme or it would have been implemented somewhere at some time (same with his death ray concept which he claimed to have build a prototype).

It seems the longer he lived, the crazier he became. For instance, he was fanatically committed to pigeons--paying people to feed them when he didn't have enough money to pay his rent. He loved pigeons more than anything for his last few decades. One favorite visited him, he claimed, and communicated to him it was dying and Tesla saw light shooting out of its eyes, telling Tesla that his work was also done. Very odd. He also had to circle the block of his hotel six times before he would enter each night. He wouldn't shake hands due to germs. Typical obsessive-compulsive behavior stuff. Sad.

Bottom line on the man: Tesla was brilliant and we owe him much for our modern world is built on his inventions--everything that runs on electricity is a grandchild of Tesla. Tesla invented: AC current, florescent light, X-Ray machines, radio broadcast (the US Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that Tesla's patents were violated by Marconi), remote control of boats/airplanes/etc, the electric motor, robotics (and the entire concept of a robot), the laser, wireless communication. That is quite a list. His name deserves to be immortal.

Bottom line on the book: Tesla is still awaiting the biography he deserves. But this one is worth picking up while we wait.

My review most certainly won't give this book justice, partly because I can't be bothered to write as in depth of a review as it deserves, but also because in the audio format and most definitely miss (or forget) a lot of good information. This book is dense. It is an incredibly detailed history of an incredible man. Wizard indeed. He did way more than I ever imagined and he had ideas that were incredibly beyond his times. Unfortunately, he was either backstabbed, or really terrible with money, or wildly eccentric, and all the things combined lead to a life that could have been so much more. He was like the original mad scientist, the devoted genius, as he put his work before everything. Barely slept, barely ate, had apparently no interest in romantic pursuits (despite some woman basically throwing themselves on him).

The one downside is that this book was written in 1996, so it would have been nice to have an updated addendum or something to relate to anything new. It's long before Tesla Motors (or Nikola motors) and frankly long before the real rise of fame in the internet age that Tesla has found.

This book could honestly be studied at length, there is so much here. It's worth being on the shelf along with other good biographies.

A fascinating look at the life of a strange and brilliant man. This is very much a warts and all approach to his life, which is a good thing, in my opinion. Tesla may have been a genius, but he was not a very practical man, and he had a deep self-destructive streak to him. There's a lot of great stuff in here, not the least of which is the appendix which examines whether or not Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower, which pretty much destroyed him financially (and mentally) could have ever been successful (probably not).

Seifer's text can be a little dry, but then it also swings to unusual moments of overdramatic prose. It's a little strange. I chalk that up to Seifer recycling bits from his doctoral thesis (just a guess). In any event, it's good enough, and Tesla's life was full of enough drama that even the dry bits are pretty interesting.

Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla is an excellent book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the life of one of the greatest scientific minds the world has ever known.

Tesla was amazing; this book is not. I am not even sure what he invented after listening to this book, it got so lost among completely unimportant and uninteresting trivial details about his legal and money troubles.

It is a bloated monster of 21 hours of listening. The first third has Tesla’s prime, his inventions of the Tesla coils, success with AC power with the Westinghouse Corporation. Unfortunately, that was Tesla’s last sizeable commercial success.

Tesla was a rare genius: he was both a scientist and an engineer. He discovered new principles and also made working prototypes of his inventions. Where he failed was making it a commercial success. Tesla spent much of his life begging for money to build something much bigger and better than the investors and the market wanted - and he never delivered anything. Much of the book is devoted to how Marconi stole everything he invented from Tesla. This is true. However, reading how Tesla kept sabotaging himself and his investors, I feel that if it was up to Tesla, we would still be without radio.

The last two third of the book is a mess of Tesla’s troubles in great detail. It is completely skippable. I was still going to give it three stars because of Tesla and the clearly huge amount of research that Seifer put into it. But then he throws in a Freudian analysis of Tesla, which made me gag. There is a reason why Freud is no longer used in psychology.

There has to be better biographies of Tesla out there, but I have yet to find one.

There are reasons why family members should not be allowed to write each other’s biographies.

The burden of legacy. Which leads to a wobbly foundation for objectivity, added to the pressure to please the tribe.
Writing skills. Family members aren’t necessarily trained writers.

It’s a true history, we get it. You want to be as honest and close as possible to facts. But facts don’t make an enjoyable read. If it’s biographical, mightn’t you at least have an idea about what rules that make a coherent narrative, memoir, non-fiction, creative writing?
***

I came to this book after so many references about Tesla in popular culture. His name is permeating nearly every layer of modern civilization, in Koontz novels, on smart cars, on electric magazines, even on 9Gag. I expected that a man whose name is that widely known would be nothing less than a thick concoction of demonic excess and godly genius.

So I probably didn’t need to be patronized with adjectives that he is, well, legendary. I probably didn’t need adjectives to understand what his long, productive life already showed and hammered too clearly.

***
With a history as kaleidoscopic as Tesla, oscillating between divine and dingy, I would probably also be trying to understand in layman terms the story that could make Tesla, as supernaturally gifted as he was, evidently flawed and understandably human.

I came to read the book because I wanted to know Tesla. I wanted to imagine how it might have felt living in that period of time. Since this isn’t a textbook; as much as I want to know facts, I also want to be entertained. My theory was that, if I was entertained, if I sympathized with the characters in this story, I will vouch for him regardless to his shame and disillusionments.

But…okay. Look, it’s Tesla. I’m already bought. You don’t need to sell him to me.

It's Tesla and we're sold. It’s alright that Tesla was not always understandable. It’s expected of him.
It’s a shame that Tesla squandered his resources. It’s tough being Tesla. But did we also need to know that many details to understand that even Tesla was not spared? How hard was it to understand how it felt to have your project’s funding unplugged at such a stage? How hard would it be to show less evidence of his shame and just hint about it in succinct, subtle sentences?

Did we also need to know about the author’s graphological skills to understand how it felt to be Tesla? How was that relevant to Tesla? How much was the author gaining by wedging himself in the narrative? Did it help make this project easier?

I sure hope so. He only had that one shot, that one Tesla in the history of mankind, after all.