Skip to main content

Tesla: Man out of Time – Margaret Cheney ***

It’s hard to imagine a better subject for a scientific biography than Nikola Tesla. You only have to take in the cameo appearance of Tesla as a character in the movie The Prestige – the sense of mystery, the weird electrical experiments, the larger-than-life character… and yet someone who simply doesn’t register on the modern mind the way, for instance, Edison still does.
This biography of Tesla is strong on his emotional life (as much as can be known – very little seems to be sure about him), his involvement in the New York social scene at the start of the 20th century and his strange mix of master engineer and showman. What seems quite remarkable to modern eyes is that financially Tesla’s fortunes were often rather low, yet he continued as much as possible to live the high life, expecting the hotels he spent his life in to provide 14 napkins per meal and to put up with his habit of bringing stray pigeons into his room.
Unfortunately, where Margaret Cheney struggles is the science. She makes several remarks that make it plain she doesn’t understand a lot of it herself, and that makes it very difficult for her to put Tesla’s contribution into a properly balanced context. For instance, he was a pioneer of radio controlled vehicles, arguing correctly as we now see with drones etc. that they would play a significant part in the future of warfare. But Cheney equates radio control with robotics (or as she quaintly puts it ‘robotry’) – which suggest she doesn’t know a lot about it. Things get even worse when we get to physics, where her terminology is positively Victorian (she refers to a ‘pressure’ of n million volts) and her grasp of what’s going on with electromagnetics is shaky.
Oddly enough, this rather neatly reflects Tesla himself. There is no doubt the man was a genius as an engineer – his invention of AC motors and a whole host of other inventions puts him in the same league as Edison. But in many ways he was a very poor scientist. He never accepted, amongst other things, relativity, quantum theory or even that light and radio were the same thing, electromagnetic radiation propagating without a medium. His wildly impressive looking attempts at worldwide communication seemed based not on how radio actually works, but on an idea that radio was propagated by a vibration in the earth, triggered by electrical discharges. Cheney’s inability to understand physics makes her unable to see how wrong this was.
There is also one historical oddity. There was a contemporary rumour that Tesla and Edison had won the 1915 Nobel Prize for physics, which in fact went to the Braggs. Cheney suggest that the pair were in line for the prize before something changed the committee’s mind – but this seems highly unlikely. Neither Tesla nor Edison were physicists, and the Nobel prize isn’t about being a great inventor.
The other flaw in Cheney’s approach is that she can’t see what seems obvious reading between the lines of what she writes – that though Tesla was a genius as an engineer, he was a fantasist who was always saying he was able to do something (wireless distribution of power, death rays, flying machines without wings) that had no basis on fact. The way he presented information in such a flashy but secretive way, always making vague assertions, never explaining anything makes this pretty clear. He comes across in this as a huckster rather than a great man. Cheney seems surprised that a box in his hotel room he told everyone contained a deadly secret had nothing of significance in it. This seems typical of what had come before.
I am still fascinated by Tesla, and want to find out more about him, but this isn’t the book to give a good picture of his science and technology. Something of a fail, I’m afraid. (See Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age for a better scientific biography.)

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more