Wizard: Life and Times of Nikola Tesla - Hardcover

Seifer, Marc J.

3.72

6,135 ratings by Goodreads

9781559723299: Wizard: Life and Times of Nikola Tesla

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559723297 ISBN 13: 9781559723299

Publisher: Citadel Press, 1996

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Original material and recently acquired documents form the foundation of a biography of the man who served as an inspiration for modern electrical inventions

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Review:

I highly recommend this biography of a great technologist. A.A. Mullin, U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command. -- Computing Reviews

From the Author:

Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla has taken me 20 years to write. My key reasons for writing the book were to try and answer many of the questions left unanswered by the other authors, such as why Tesla's name dropped into obscurity, whether or not he really received signals from Mars, how his magnifying transmitter really worked, what exactly happened to cause his failure with JP Morgan, what happened to his secret particle beam weaponry papers, and would his particle beam weapon have really worked.

The book is set up completely chronologically, and begins with a quote for each chapter. It also differs from the other biographies in a number of other ways mainly because I had access to hundreds of documents which had never been published before, many received through the Freedom of Information Act. To find this information, I travelled to archives in New York City, Washington, DC, Berkeley California and Belgrade Yugoslavia.

For the first time ever, Wizard explains why Tesla stopped working for Edison, why Steinmetz dropped Tesla's name from his textbooks on AC power, why Michael Pupin never mentioned Tesla's name in his physics courses at Columbia University, how Tesla pre-dated Rutherford, Bohr and Einstein in theories on the structure of the atom and on what came to be called Quantum physics, how Marconi pirated Tesla's apparatus, why Tesla had a falling out with his editor TC Martin, John Jacob Astor, JP Morgan and John Hayes Hammond Jr, what Tesla's link to the Navy was, how Franklin Roosevelt used the Tesla patents to block payments on wireless apparatus to Marconi, yet at the same time cut Tesla out of the Marconi/Sarnoff/Westinghouse deal to create RCA, how Tesla interacted with Telefunken, the German wireless concern during WWI and the US War Department during WWII to help them design a particle beam weapon, and how and why Tesla's name has been picked up by cult circles.

Wizard is not only the story of Tesla's amazing life, but also a story about the rise of corporate America at the turn of the century as well as a story about numerous Tesla contemporaries such as Tom Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, George Westinghouse, Robert & Katharine Johnson, John Jacob Astor, JP Morgan, Stanford White, Franklin Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover.

This trade paperback edition has a new illustration of Tesla's flying wing VTOL which was a forerunner of Lockheed Martin's X-33 which will replace the shuttle, and also a new section on the June 1908 explosion at Tunguska Siberia. The book contains over 1600 endnotes including references to 250 documents never published before, a full bibliography and index, and 16 pages of photos.

Best wishes,

Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D. Author

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