IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 18

Book Reviews
A. David Wunsch

The Truth about Tesla: The Myth of the Lone Genius
in the History of Innovation
By Christopher Cooper. New York:
Race Point Publishers, 2015, 195 pages.

sk a "twentysomething" or "millennial"
what the word Tesla
means and you'll likely be told of a sleek,
expensive electric automobile that
goes from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds, and costs, for its new Model X,
around $130 000.
Were you to ask a historian of
technology what the word says to her,
you might see a facetious smirk and
hear, "Yeah, the man who invented
everything." But, putting the same
question to a Tesla buff, you'd get,
with no trace of irony, nearly the
same answer.
Nikola Tesla, the Serbian inventor, (1856-1943) has been a cult
figure for decades extending back
to his own lifetime. To sample the
buffs and their cult, you might visit
Powell's bookstore in Portland, OR.
On a recent trip I counted 50 books
on one shelf that were either by or
about Tesla. Edison rated half that
number. Tesla, The Life and Times
of an Electric Messiah by Nigel Cawthorne told me on its cover flap.
"Today all homes and appliances run
on Tesla's alternating current." I
guess Tesla invented AC.
The website http://www.activistpost
.com/2012/01/10-inventions-ofnikola-tesla-that.htmllists "Ten Inventions of Nikola Tesla That Changed

the World," and includes such discoveries as alternating current, radio,
x rays, robotics, laser and limitless
free energy.
The most distinguished late 20th
century historian of the wireless telegraph, Hugh G. J. Aitken, observed
in his 1985 book The Continuous
Wave, "There is no adequate biography of Tesla."1 He then refers to two
inadequate but once popular works
on the subject: J. O'Neill's Prodigal
Genius and Margaret Cheney's Tesla:
Man Out of Time.
Both books are pure hagiography.
Cheney claims for example that a
U.S Supreme Court decision of 1943
credits Tesla with the invention of
radio and that his work (alone) anticipated Marconi. Reading the decision
you will realize that the court asserted nothing of the sort. There is a
nice discussion of this point at the
web site: http://earlyradiohistory.us/
tesla.htm.
In 1907 Tesla received a worshipful poem from the young O'Neill
beginning with the line "Most glorious man of all ages..." His biography, written after the hero's death,
has Tesla discovering the electron
microscope in 1892. Strange to say,
the microscope employs de Broglie
waves created by moving electrons -
and the existence of such waves
was not postulated by de Broglie

until 1924. To understand them
would have required that Tesla had
a thorough grounding in modern
physics and there is no indication
that he ever did. In fact, during his
lifetime he spoke of particles moving faster than the speed of light - a
violation of the theory of relativity.
Had Aitken lived until 2013 he
would have deleted his remark about
inadequate biographies and would
have cited probably just one: Tesla:
Inventor of the Electrical Age by W.
Bernard Carlson, a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the
University of Virginia.2 The title of
the book is misleading - Tesla
is here presented, with scrupulous
scholarship, as an inventor of the
electrical age. Perhaps Carlson had
hoped to con Tesla buffs into buying
yet another celebration of their hero.
He has ploughed through what must
have been a cubic meter of Tesla
correspondence and has worked at
the Tesla Museum in Belgrade. The
book is remarkably free of technical errors - and it's obvious that
Carlson had his manuscript read by
members of the electrical engineering profession.3 He takes us carefully
through Tesla's best achievements -
his earliest. Dating from the late 19th
century, they are the induction motor
and his work with George Westinghouse to promote the generation and

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2696602
Date of publication: 8 June 2017

1
The wireless telegraph, i.e., the Morse telegraph system that didn't need wires, is the progenitor of what came to be known as radio.

2
The book is reviewed in the Spring 2014 issue
of this magazine by Eric Wenaas.
3
Full disclosure: I was one of them.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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june 2017

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