Science & Technology Leaders

At last an audiobook about Nikola Tesla. I've always been interested in Tesla, but just didn't have the time or energy to read one of his many biographies, I guess you could say everything I know about Tesla, I learned from Wikipedia. But the Seifer book is enjoyable enough to listen to leisurely, but detailed enough to hold my scientific interest. I loved the British accent on the reader, who I've heard before, but not sure where. He makes everything seem so profound.

I liked the psychological angle, Dr. Seifer is a psychologist and that tends to humanize Tesla instead of getting bogged down in all the bells and whistles of his inventions. This is really a story of men behaving both badly and wizardly (so to speak). After listening to Wizard, I feel that Tesla has become 3 dimensional for me, while Edison remains 2 dimension. That probably isn't fair to Edison, but he just seems like a guy who invents a lot of neat things, while Tesla has so much more going on in his personality.

Everything to do with Edison is great. In someways this is Gates v Jobs only a century earlier, (not sure who is who) These two characters are archetypes and the differences get played out in so many fascinating ways. I also really like the theories about extra-terrestrial origins, which of course remain a little too far out to be taken seriously.

The fact that Tesla invented the foundations of the electrical era is old news. What is really interesting is that he is also the father of the wireless era of the internet, cellphones, and even those new swirly CFL light bulbs. The Seifer book paints with a broad enough stroke to encompass that fact without getting stuck merely on Tesla's electricity contributions. I think listening to the Seifer Tesla book has gotten me ready to tackle the Steve Jobs biography next, one tends to flow effortless into the other.