Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, W. Bernard Carlson, Princeton U. Press, 2013. $29.95 (500 pp.). ISBN 978-0-691-05776-7
Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human—a visionary who was sometimes realistic and sometimes not, a man with insecurities and a temper who didn’t always honor his debts. And not only do we meet a real person, but we meet him in the real world. Carlson does more than re-create the inventive environment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: With his understanding of the sociology and history of technology, he paints a world in which inventors sell a persona along with their inventions; reputation can attract investors or keep them away; public opinion can be crucial; and the ability to create a practical, durable device or system is more important than having a brilliant idea.
Working with a daunting scarcity of source material, Carlson grounds Tesla’s insights and inventive style as firmly as he can in Tesla’s youth and education without explaining them away. Indeed, brilliant ideas were Tesla’s stock in trade. The importance of his first great breakthrough—conceiving and then demonstrating that a rotating magnetic field can drive an AC motor—can hardly be overestimated. It led to the practical development of AC power. His subsequent work on components for an AC power system was almost as significant.
One of the book’s great strengths is the way Carlson deals with many of the legends and myths surrounding Tesla: He elucidates what did happen and he leaves out what did not. He fleshes out the people who surrounded Tesla, explaining and illuminating their characters and motives. We learn about Tesla’s work in the battle between AC and DC, but the titanic personal struggle between Tesla and Thomas Edison, so beloved in popular histories, is nowhere to be found. Indeed, Carlson quietly introduces an 1893 letter from Tesla to his uncle in which he proudly writes of having received a photograph from Edison inscribed, “To Tesla from Edison.” And in Tesla’s storied attempts to transmit wireless power, we see how his inability to anticipate practical realities and problems led to his underestimating expenditures, overestimating success, and alienating investors.
Carlson’s historical sophistication gives the book a contextual depth that helps the reader understand why, despite Tesla’s power-transmission attempts, it is historically questionable that he anticipated the radio. Carlson’s rich, careful description of Tesla’s work—which is sufficiently technical to be satisfying without disrupting the narrative—is given meaning by its juxtaposition with an analysis of invention and innovation that is grounded in the real world of engineers and machines. And when Tesla and his partner Edward Adams fail to entice investors in the mid 1890s, Carlson’s equally deep understanding of business and business history allows him to explain that failure clearly and thoroughly.
It is hard to resist comparing Tesla and Edison, the two most celebrated electrical inventors of their time. They both achieved remarkable early successes, but perhaps the failure of Tesla’s wireless power transmission, set against Edison’s 1890s failure in iron mining, is a useful illustration. Despite wrestling with and overcoming all sorts of engineering difficulties, Edison failed because he was economically overwhelmed by the opening of the rich Great Lakes ore deposits. He recognized defeat and turned his energies to developing portland cement and storage batteries. Tesla, on the other hand, “was unable to grasp the disjuncture between how he thought his system should work versus how the Earth actually responds” (p. 412), and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Carlson describes one of the great flaws in Tesla’s approach to invention: his inability to think convergently, to focus his attention on a goal and sustain it. Again and again he developed an idea, and nearly as often he failed to get it from his head to the laboratory bench and then out into the world. But what he did produce was remarkable, and we now have in Carlson’s biography the means to appreciate it properly. Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments.
Robert Rosenberg is a former editor and director of the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
