I’ll admit I didn’t know a lot about Tesla. Seems his rival Marconi got more of the credit historically and at the time. But that seems note to do with business deals and associations with the right people and companies and the circumstances around WWI that maneuvered Tesla out of the limelight and Marconi into it.

Good book. Learned a lot about the man, the process of innovation at the time of the late 1800’s/early 1900’s including Edison, Marconi and others. Seemed like a lot of patent infringement and stealing going on at a time of rapid innovation.

I learned way too much to write in this box right now, Tesla was a real freak, but clearly an under-recognized founder of our modern electrical era. I had no idea.

I listened to this on audiobook. This is one of the more poorly-written biographies I've read. Tediously long, the author seems more intent on proving his superior skills as an investigator than in giving the reader a clear picture of Tesla's life. The book suffers from a lack of discretion as every detail is given equal weight, and much of the discussion around his inventions is highly technical. Yet bizarrely, the author spends a good amount of time speculating on various aspects of Tesla's life that seem to be based on shoddy evidence at best (such as an armchair psychoanalysis, entertaining the theory that FBI agents stole the plans for his death ray invention, etc.). The reader does learn about some of the key aspects Tesla's life, including aspects such as :

1. His Serbian upbringing and relationship with family
2. His invention of the AC induction motor and Tesla coil
3. His relationships with Westinghouse, Edison, and JP Morgan, both personally and economically. This included Tesla allowing Westinghouse to renegotiate his royalty payments, which severely impacted his financial well-being, forcing Tesla to constantly badger JP Morgan for financing in the future
4. His personality traits (extreme dedication to work, neuroticism, egomania/boastfulness, celibacy, poor financial decision-making)
5. His rivalry with Marconi and Tesla's deserved credit for actually inventing wireless transmission due to the critical necessity of the Tesla coil

However, these aspects are necessary to any biography, especially one that spans ~600 pages. Ultimately I hope to read a better biography of Tesla which can give the appropriate definitive treatment of the life of the genius inventor that he deserves.

This was a good but difficult book. The author is intent on putting down in meticulous detail the life of this amazing character and in doing so skips around with chaotic effect. Tesla knew and interacted with many famous people of his time and it was hard keeping track of his interactions with them as the author related stories and jumped from one character to another.

The author relates in detail the many inventions and ideas that Nikola Tesla advanced that were subsequently used by other inventors who gave no credit to Tesla and in fact stole his ideas. There are many instances depicted where Tesla is depicted as constantly fighting to convince the world that his ideas were stolen by other famous inventors. There are chapters which begin with one topic and then switch for no particular reason to another seemingly unrelated topic.

There are things I liked about the book. I liked reading about Teslas conviction that he could communicate with Mars and how he had a vision of the world wide web and cellular communication. I was fascinated with the struggles Tesla had in the Wardenclyffe project.

I liked the depiction of Teslas relationship to Katherine Underwood Johnson and would have liked a more satisfying telling of that relationship. The author simply announces at one point a list of people who died and Katherine is among this list. This is the main problem I had with this book. The organization requires better editing.

Another aspect of the book that turned me off was the constant detail concerning monetary and financial problems. It seems like Tesla was constantly concerned with obtaining funding for his many inventions. I suppose this is the plight of many an inventor but I would have preferred less detailing of this (to me) boring topic.

Although I struggled with this book, I did enjoy reading about this great man's life and work and would recommend this book for anyone interested in Nikola Tesla.