Intense

This book is a very thoughtful well researched and revealing work about Nicola Tesla and his theories. It is also an interesting look into the mans personal relationships and idiosyncrasies. Difficult at times to wade through, the end result is well worth the effort. Death rays, anyone?

A thorough book about the life of Nikola Tesla. I am happy there is this book with much research having gone into his life to get an objective view of what was going on, why possibly he was the kind of person he was, and all the external factors forging his path in life as it did.

Children across America grow up knowing the names Einstein, Newton, Curie... but few know Tesla (or know the car). This book revealed why that is the case, and underscored what an injustice it is.

Tesla was eccentric, brilliant, and isolated. At a time in history when people were comfortable attributing the unknown to magic, he intuitively understood the fundamentals of energy and electricity.

It’s hard to fathom just how much of modern technology is rooted in Tesla’s patents. Engines, generators, wireless transmission, long-distance energy transmission... He was a man born a generation too early who wanted to harness the Earth to send free, unlimited energy to everyone in the world. He was also a shameless social climber (who thought he was above paying rent) with off-putting and bizarre personal habits.

His unrealistic idealism, disregard for profit, and secretive research angered and frustrated scientists who wanted to collaborate with him as well as businessmen who funded him. His enemies illegally used his patents and made a concerted effort to erase his name from electricity textbooks, which the author credits for Tesla’s surprising lack of fame.

Genius can change the world. But charisma gets the credit.

A bit disappointed by this biography, too many unnecessary details (mostly gossiping).

I would give Nikola Tesla 10 stars, what an amazing man, but this account of his life is academic to the point of being exhausting, rather than exhaustive. Nonetheless, a fascinating insight into the times and the many battles between science and capital that leave one feeling that the greatest limits on human progress are contrived by capitalists, whose obsession with profiting from the skill, dedication and genius of others is nothing short of pathological. Tesla proposed a system of providing free electricity to the world, but was ultimately straitjacketed by oligarchs like JP Morgan into futility. Free electricity? Who would profit from that? the reasoning went, and so it was undermined. Add to this the jealous ambitions of lesser men, like Edison, Marconi, and a whole stream of others who claimed Tesla's insights for themselves and we soon appreciate the obstacles Tesla had to surmount.

And as for the great question: was Tesla's work eventually stolen by the American establishment, we learn that the answer is, maybe. Perhaps even probably. And has it been suppressed in service to oligarchic capital ever since? Almost certainly. 7/10

I’m a big Tesla fan, but this book was such a slog that I had to take a break in the middle of it to go read a more engaging book and then come back to finish. The author meant for it to be an exhaustive biography, and it was indeed exhausting. Not every factoid in existence needs to be used just because it’s there.

Some of the text seemed written just to please an electrical engineering audience: "Tesla stated that he could create electromagnetic oscillations that displayed transverse and also longitudinal wave characteristics. The first (transverse) case corresponds to the concept of the ether as a medium for propagating wavelike impulses; and the second (longitudinal) case corresponds to what today is known as a quantum of energy analogous to the way sound waves travel through air. Tesla maintained, against all opposition, even to this day, that his electromagnetic frequencies traveled in longitudinal, bulletlike impulses, and thus they carried much more energy than can be ascribed to Hertzian transverse waves. In fact, as alluded to before, Hertz wanted to eliminate the idea of mass from the Maxwellian electromagnetic equations."

Other parts of the book seemed to reflect the author’s unstated wish to have been a psychiatrist (he’s actually a handwriting expert, for heaven’s sake). I really dislike postmortem psychoanalysis:
"…in order to explain Tesla’s unusual personality, self-proclaimed celibacy, and alleged homosexuality, it is possible that he may have suffered repressed guilt feelings associated with the untimely death of his older brother Dane when Tesla was five years old. In the throes of the Oedipal complex and admittedly overattached to his mother…" “"By denying his libido, his censor had converted his primal sexual energy into an odd mixture of prelogical behavior patterns that tended to diffuse, redirect, and sublimate the highly cathected complexes the inventor wished to deny." “As a counterhypothesis to the psychoanalytic paradigm (and as no solid evidence of homosexuality has been discovered by this researcher) one must place Tesla within his time period.” Geez Louise.
It also drove me crazy that the author kept trying to use dozens of ways to refer to Tesla without using Tesla’s name. E.g: the “wizened prestidigitator,” or “the sly conceptualist,” or “the slim epicurean.”

Tesla was indeed way ahead of his time in many ways. As a scientist, his inventions included the induction motor, the electrical-power distribution system, fluorescent and neon lights, wireless communication, remote control, and robotics. As an environmentalist, he realized that the earth was a finite place and that the natural resources which gave humans the fuel to produce electricity would eventually run out. ‘Man will go to the waterfalls [and] to the tides,’ Tesla speculated, because these, unlike coal and oil reserves, are replenishable.” As a pacifist, “He is a man who wonders at the folly of men who invent guns when they might invent tools.” As a feminist sympathizer, he viewed the woman’s movement as “one of the most profound portents of the future…” “This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior…” "It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women. As generations ensue, the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated."

He counted among his friends people like Kipling, Twain, and Muir. Women adored him. But he also was, undeniably, an eccentric and stereotype of the mad scientist.

"The hotel was requested to keep one table permanently reserved for himself. No one else was allowed to eat there. If a fly landed on the table, it had to be reset and a new plate of food brought forth." "Going out of his way to avoid handshakes, displacing his amorous affections onto birds, keeping hotel servants at a distance of at least three feet, throwing out collars and gloves after one use…" "For exercise, the inventor would walk “8-10 miles per day” and also loosen up in the bathtub (although he also touted a waterless bath which involved charging his body with electricity in such a way as to repel all foreign particles). Later, Tesla would add to his repertoire the squishing and unsquishing of his toes one hundred times for each foot every night. He claimed the practice stimulated his brain cells."

You gotta love the guy. But you don’t have to love this book.

So, I'm glad that I read this book, but it was a bit much. There was a lot of description of Tesla's work that was a bit over my head, but I appreciated the sheer volume of Tesla's body of work. The constant searching for funding and fighting over patents was depressing. Though I sometimes got bogged down in the details, I still came away from this book with a deep appreciation for this icon of electricity. What a fascinating man!

This was an extraordinarily well documented and researched biography! A phenomenal read and definitely well worth the time for you to read IF you are big into technology, innovation, and biographies. Tesla was, without a doubt, much akin to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined in the latter part of the 1800s. Intriguing and heartbreaking, all at the same time.

I hadn't read much about Tesla's life and inventions, so I thought this would be enlightening and a pleasure to read. As a person interested in science and technology, this seemed like a great choice. Instead, it was pretty boring. In some ways, Tesla comes across as the genius he is, being at the forefront of the electronic age and developing solutions and ideas for wireless communication, light, and electricity for all. On the other hand, his financial problems and his issues with getting credit for his own work could have been addressed if he just had an attorney helping him along the way. I became less sympathetic towards him as the story progressed as a result.

The bigger problem for me in this book was the lack of context to the rest of the country and world. Good biographies weave a tapestry with the fabric of society at the time it was written or the context of the topic. See Robert Caro explaining the history of the Senate before writing about LBJ's time as Majority Leader or Nixonland as good examples. This is a timeline story of Tesla, with not enough to bring it back to really show the contrasts between this European immigrant and American inventers and his true place in history. Despite the work that Seifer clearly put into the book, it feels on the level of a high school thesis instead of a great biography.

I wouldn't recommend this. It's not engaging enough, though the content is at times interesting.

I did not like this book. The story jumped all over the place. Nothing appeared in chronological order. Opinions about Tesla's sanity are thrown around but never explain. It was all too jumbled and confusing.

A very good read to understand one of the brightest people ever. Testla being a very complicated person, Marc Seifer does a very good job of explaining him.

No review of mine would be complete without a little backstory, so I shall share it now. I've been acquainted with the genius of Nikola Tesla for a long, long time. Ever since I've come to the realization that we owe that man a lot, I've striven to inform myself about the man and his work. I watched documentaries, attended lectures, read publications; I was terribly angry when the recreated Tesla laboratory in the Technical museum wasn't open when I found a time slot to visit it... heh, the only sin I'm guilty of is not visiting his house in Smiljan. I've even watched Prestige just to see how David Bowie had tapped into Tesla's role, for crying out loud.

That all being said, I have to admit that I've expected The Wizard to be a book suitable for revision of facts I already knew about Tesla. I thought that it should be good as an introduction to Tesla's life and work, but I was a bit skeptical on what new could such a book offer to me. You can't imagine my delight when I started reading - after the chapters on Tesla's origins and childhood, which presented me with little new facts, I embarked on a very different journey. I can only imagine the time and effort it took the author to collect so many sources, and write such a unique and complete biography. Every passage, sentence or letter has a reference, so that readers can be directed to other sources, either for checking or simply finding new literature. What I also loved was the inclusion of multiple tellings of some situations in Tesla's life (for example, the two contradictory stories that depict Tesla's drive for money, or lack thereof, in his dealings with Edison).

Seifer pictures Tesla's life in such minute detail, that even a person with a ready-made skeleton can make tweaks on the skeleton and start to construct tendons and joints, and completely flesh the structure out. The sheer wealth of information left me very impressed, and I was a skeptic no more. Instead, I learned so many things I didn't know prior, concerning Tesla's life and struggle. Because, let's face it, people - it was a battle with many admirable adversaries. From Edison, the people with whom Tesla had founded his first company, svindlers galore (yes, Michael Pupin and all that mendacious crowd that had preferred to simply not mention Tesla), money investors and bankers (yes, I'm talking about J.P. Morgan and the gang which squashed Tesla's dream of free energy), plagiators (yes, that is pointed towards Marconi), fires in his laboratories, to the general public (during the battle of currents and also later on in life), Tesla had had to fight his way to the top. And even though he had had his share of triumphs (1891/92. and the European tour, the fame which came in 1893/94., etc.), external factors and his own ideas seemed to work against him (after all, the ideas he had later on in life were the culprits of his pendulous fall...). Not to mention that he was in a not so grateful position of an expatriate in a new country (which he clearly felt, at least in the beginning, for he had written upon the demise of his Hungarian friend Szegeti, “I feel alienated, and it is difficult [for me to adapt to the American lifestyle].”). But in spite all that, he achieved great things of unsurpassed practical value. It would take me a whole book to list his discoveries, but let's mention the rotating magnetic field, polyphase electric system, lasers, fluorescent lights, wireless transmission and radio among the myriad other things we use in everyday life. But ultimately, Tesla's life story doesn't end up on a very optimistic note. Because, it all boils down to a man who had lots of great ideas which could have brought even more prosperity to mankind, but was barred from achieving the bulk of them by people who didn't have such altruistic interests as he had.

All in all, I really liked this book. After all, it can't possibly be dull when it has such a fascinating topic! However, it wasn't flawless. The chronological structure, while logical, was perhaps one of the weaknesses of the book. I can tell that Seifer's goal was to present Tesla's life in an orderly way, but as a result of that, some chapters felt jumbled as we got to read about the different aspects of Tesla's life, consecutively. (Don't get me wrong, one of The Wizard's strengths is that it also discusses Tesla's social life, and gives proof in the form of various letters, directed either to or from Tesla, but that was tightly enmeshed in the tales of Tesla's discoveries, which made it a bit difficult for my mind to switch from topic to topic.) Another minor quibble - after the chapter Loose ends and Tesla's death, the author talks about some historical issues which perhaps were not necessary. But aside from that, the book is great and I highly recommend it.