Nikola Tesla Books
AFTERWORD A Modern mind Looking back after nearly 20 years since the first edition of this book, the life and times of Nicola Tesla as inventor now seems even more of a paradox to me. Tesla was born into a world in which all the miracles of technology that surround us today were absent. When he was a young boy there were no automobiles, aircraft, electric lights, radios, telephones, movies, plastics, antibiotics, artificial fibers or X-rays, and the first crude bicycles had only just appeared. Darwin had yet to propose his theory of evolution, Freud's discoveries were decades away, science did not know of the existence of atoms and Mazwell had yet to develop his theory of light. As regards electricity, scientists had begun to use batteries to study the flow of electrical currents through wires and Faraday was investigating the relationship between electricity and magnetism. In other words, the young Tesla grew up in a world in which modern science was unknown and in which technologies had advanced little over the past few centuries. Nevertheless, his experiments and inventions - with high-voltage alternating current - would transform the world. It was thanks to Tesla that electrical power could be transmitted efficiently across a continent: and it is electrical power which provides the cornerstone of all the technology that has radically transformed the way we live. Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuan wrote of 'The Global Village', and just as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century produced a revolution in the communication of knowledge, so too the modern means of mass communication (made possible by easily available electricity) have transfomed our world from a vast number of independent communities to a single network in which information can be shared, all but instantly, across the globe. The linguist, David Crystal, believes that this new ability to talk to many people at once via our computers is bringing about a lingistic revolution 145
