24 Oct 2012 02:57:02
At the beginning of the 20th century, Tesla was for most Americans the embodiment of the inventor as genius. Born in Croatia in 1856, he emigrated to the United States in his 20s. His remarkable ability to visualise inventions soon made him famous. He pioneered alternating current power transmission and, as the novelist Samantha Hunt says in her wonderfully partisan and illuminating introduction, it was Tesla not Marconi who invented radio. What Hunt rightly describes as the "beautiful and strange" essays in this collection were written between 1893 and 1919. Tesla recalls his earliest inventions (such as a delightfully bizarre motor powered by live beetles), waxes lyrical on the "exquisite enjoyment" of invention, tells how he was inspired to create his revolutionary AC induction motor by a passage from Goethe's Faust, and dreams in 1916 of creating a superweapon so terrible that it would immediately end the carnage of the first world war. A fascinating insight into an extraordinary mind and an age when scientists were lauded as heroes.
