Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future

By: Iwan Rhys Morus

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

Nikola Tesla was a bundle of contradictions - a consummate showman and a private recluse; a man of science addicted to self-promotion; a prolific inventor of technologies that made other people’s fortunes.

Tesla made giant leaps in the technology of electrical supply, X-rays, radio remote control, and wireless electrical transmission. He embodied the aspirations and the contradictions of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Then as now, he attracted cranks and visionaries in equal number. His restless speculations and experiments about the way tomorrow would look helped to inaugurate a new way of trying to understand the future.

More than just a biography of Tesla, this book takes the inventor as its guide and follows him through the cut-throat entrepreneurial culture of late Victorian and Edwardian electrical invention. The book explores the electrical future that Tesla helped create and the raw materials from which that future was forged.

©2019 Iwan Rhys Morus (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd

Robotic narrator, high level story

This book is an OK listen. The story is pretty high level with more time spent on the background than Tesla himself. Of course it is impossible to separate a treatment of Tesla from one of electrification of the world. Just be aware, this is not a detailed biography of the man. The narrator is a cross between Gerald Rainey and Paul Harvey with a robotic, jerky delivery that takes a while to get used to. It is not overly dramatic, but is almost like an old newsreel. I think he improves as the reading proceeds, but in the beginning it is annoying.

The book is not technical. I noted one point in a discussion of the adoption of the units "watt" and "joule" are confused as being for "work and power respectively". That's a pretty basic mistake on the part of the author and editors. I learned that in junior high science and it is probably now being taught in grade school.