Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA trained as an engineer at the Universities of Graz and Prague and then worked for the Edison company in Paris. His experiments with electrical machines were described and, in 1884, emigration in poverty to the United States. A year later, Tesla had sold the patent rights of his electrical inventions to George Westinghouse. Westinghouse was later to use the machines in the Niagara Falls Power Project, which provided the city of Buffalo with electricity in 1896. Tesla appears to have spent the money he obtained from his inventions in building a laboratory: There he experimented with X-rays, electrical lighting and alternating currents. A few years later, financed by JP Morgan, America's most powerful banker, he constructed a second laboratory in Long Island, New York, from which he attempted to perfect worldwide radio broadcasting. This latter project seemed to have failed, not so much through scientific obstacles, but out of severe financial difficulties. From that time, Tesla became increasingly reclusive and eccentric. He was given to proffering pronouncements to the newspapers concerning communications with other worlds, death rays and secret weapons. He died in 1943 and his notebooks and writings found their way back to his native Yugoslavia. Beyond his achievements, what picture of Tesla the man emerged from this article? The only hints as to his personality were references to a dreamer with a poetic touch, and 'self-discipline and a desire for precision', which seemed rather vague generalizations. There was an enigmatic sentence towards the end of the article: Though he admired intellectual and beautiful women, he had no time to become involved. I wondered what lay behind that statement. At the end of the encyclopaedia article was a reference to a biography which I determined to follow up in the library the next day. There was much to be done in the days which followed: I would get hold of all Tesla's patents; track down those stories about radio interference; and there was something which I had to find out as soon as I got into my office next day could not remember how a Tesla coil worked. - to my embarrassment I 29
