An overview of the life of Nikola Tesla, one of the most unusual thinkers of our millennium, originally published in 1944 by a guy that Tesla himself said understood him “better than anyone else in the world.” The best thing about this book is a little surprise regarding “the love story of Tesla's life,” early on promising the skinny on “a romance the like of which is not recorded in the annals of human history,” and he's not kidding. Sure, the stories of his 1897 invention of our modern polyphase alternating-current electrical distribution system, his unsung creation of what later became broadcast radio, and his experiments with the wireless transmission of power through the air and even the Earth itself are all pretty interesting, but you'll forget all about that trivia when you get to the part where he explains his tendency to obsessively feed pigeons. “There was one pigeon,” Tesla reveals, “a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female… I loved that pigeon. Yes,” he replies to an unasked question, “yes, I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.” Oh, the humanity!
DB
Publisher: Brotherhood of Life
Paperback: 329 pages