Wizard: The Life And Times Of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer

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Wizard: The Life And Times Of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer

Tesla, a super intellect invented and innovated a hundred years ahead of his time but was duped and swindled by the publicity savvy unscrupulous.
This is a must read true story that seems an impossibility. Having an electronics background I loved this books revelations into the cutting edge technological innovations still employed to this day.

Excerpts:
Tesla realized that it was a finite place and that the natural resources which gave humans the fuel to produce electricity would eventually run out. What will man do when the forests disappear, when the coal deposits are exhausted? he asked his Philadelphia audience. Only one thing, according to our present knowledge, will remain; that is to transmit power at great distances. Man will go to the waterfalls, [and] to the tides, Tesla speculated, because these, unlike coal and oil reserves, are replenishable.

According to calculations performed by Professor John Tyndall, the Edison electric lightbulb had an efficiency of about 5 percent, meaning that 95 percent of the electricity produced went into the production of heat or was simply lost in transit. The gas flame, which was still by far the most common form of artificial luminescence, had an efficiency of less than one percent. As Tesla told Martin, if we were dealing with a corrupt government, such wretched waste would not be tolerated. This squander was on a par with the wanton destruction of whole forests for the sake of a few sticks of lumber.

Tesla also considered harnessing wind power, the tides, solar and geothermal energy, and also energy released during the process of electrolysis. If water was separated into oxygen and hydrogen, these explosive substances could theoretically be used to generate the heat to create steam. Working along varying lines of research, Tesla also patented ozone-production machines and devised a scheme whereby nitrogen from the air would be electrically separated out and blended with conveyor belts of soil to create a fertilizer machine.

An address on The Future of the Common Man for the Serbo-Croatian edition. The essay not only portrays a prophet who envisions a better world in the future; it also betrays the conflict and humiliation he himself suffered in his dealings with the greedy industrialists who capitalized on his inventions with little regard for his well-being, let alone the welfare of mankind as a whole: Out of this war, the greatest since the beginning of history, a new world must be born that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity, where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall be a world of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect.

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