"Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" by Marc J Seifer

Tesla was, to say the least, eccentric. Perhaps he was "the quintessential mad scientist" (C 45). Perhaps he was a misunderstood genius; perhaps he was a charlatan. In this odd biography Seifer attempts to write  "the biography of a genius."

Born a Serb in Croatia, Tesla studied in Serbia and Paris before making his way to New York to work for Edison. He was fascinated by electricity, in particular by electromagnetic induction in which a changing magnetic field induces electric current to run through a wire. This is the fundamental principle used in generating electricity, it is used to transform voltages up and down, and it is used in creating electromagnetic waves which enable you to send electrical signals from transmitter to receiver by electromagnetic waves, including radio waves.

When he arrived in New York he was a pivotal player in the 'battle of the currents': Edison championed direct current (dc) electricity; Westinghouse was in favour of alternating current (ac); the great advantage of ac is that it can be easily transformed to very high voltages which can be transmitted with negligible loss of power over great distances and then transformed down to safe usable voltages; it is the basis for most modern grid systems. Tesla had realised as a young student that ac had an advantage over dc in that an ac  generator doesn't need a component called a commutator as a dc generator does. Tesla was therefore an ac convert and his invention of three-phase ac, after leaving Edison and setting up as an independent inventor,  was the key component of the Westinghouse victory.

One of the grisly side-issues in the battle of the currents was Edison's attempt to brand ac as more dangerous than dc by having it employed to execute prisoners. An Edison associate called Brown manufactured electric chairs and experiment on electrocuting animals and sought employment as a prison executioner. The first prisoner to be capitally punished by electrocution was subjected to a drawn-out, much bungled affair. (C 6)

This led to fame and fortune for Tesla who began a lifetime habit of living in hotels, hobnobbing with rich and famous (John Jacob Astor III (as well as being one of the richest men in the world at the time he was a bit of an inventor including "a bicycle brake ... a storage battery, an internal-combustion engine, and a flying machine"; C 17), John Pierpoint Morgan and many luminaries of the science world), working all hours to come up with even more exciting inventions and writing patents, and fighting patent litigation battles against other inventors he claimed were pirating his patents (or those who claimed they had priority over him). The intricacies of the patent battles, fully described in the book, are a bit of a yawn.

As a very young man Tesla invented the Tesla coil, a coil of wire used to produce high-voltage high-frequency ac electricity and a key component in the early wirelesses. Thus, he claimed priority over Marconi, who used a Tesla coil in his early wirelesses. Tesla also claimed to have invented the ability to transmit much further using ground waves. Marconi's triumph in their endless battles over patents and priorities embittered Tesla and, perhaps, turned him from eccentric to madman. As a succession of investors discovered before pulling out, Tesla's Leonardo-like inability to focus on a single project to completion and his inability to produce something merely good, led to a succession of never-actually abandoned projects. His work degenerated into showmanship and endless promises of revolutionary new designs and world-beating systems which were incomparably better than anything yet seen but never actually materialised. This was the polar opposite of the Edison system of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration (Tesla criticised Edison by saying "If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw"; C 4) and Tesla, for all his genius, for all his spent his mature years dodging from hotel to hotel, his bills unpaid, sponging off friends, pleading for funds, and feeding pigeons.

The biography embodies the restless energy of Tesla, his chaotic lifestyle and his eccentric approach to life. I was surprised when, about half-way through, it moved from a conventional approach to quoting conversations verbatim; some of these are clearly 'reconstructed'; it is as if it has become a novel based on the life of Tesla at these points. For me the biography failed to make sense of the chaos of Tesla's life and it certainly failed to explain in a way I could understand and appreciate the physics behind Tesla's inventions (and I taught Physics for 33 years so I have some idea of electromagnetism). The moments it came alive were in the sympathetic portrayal of the character of the man, especially in old age, his triumphs forgotten, still working hard to pay his debts, still working hard to persuade investors of the value of his latest scheme.

In the end, Tesla was a bit of a loony. These tendencies started early when he seemed to be claiming that some of his nearly perpetual-motion systems used energy very similar to 'vril' the mysterious force invented by Lord Lytton in a work of fiction called 'The Coming Race' which became a favourite of occultists and led to a drink called Bo-Vril. When studying Hertzian electromagnetic waves he decided the Hertz was wrong and that radio waves were longitudinal. (C 11)His pursuit of perpetual motion disregarded the laws of thermodynamics; later he claimed to have invented particles and waves that travelled faster then light in defiance of Einstein's relativity: "the various discoveries and suggestions inherent in Tesla's theory violate not only accepted theories such as relativity and quantum physics but also, on the surface, common sense." (C 44)

This looniness went a bit sour when he became a devotee of eugenics: "Tesla supported the idea of 'sterilizing the unfit and deliberately guiding the mating instinct'." (C 46) He himself was. probably, celibate. "Tesla denied himself certain pleasures as a way to supposedly establish total control over himself. And yet Tesla was a complete slave to his idiosyncrasies and to a cauldron of phobias." (C 46)

There are also plenty of other weirdos, such as Abraham Spanel, an Odessan Jew who fled Russian pogroms in 1905 and ended up as president of the International Latex Corporation in Delaware, now Playtex.

Some brilliant bits:

• "Other bogus inventors of the day included Gaston Bulmar who tried to sell General Electric (GE) special pills that turned water into gasoline." (C 7)
• "Michael Pupin ... wanted to go to Cambridge to learn under James Clerk Maxwell, but he found upon his arrival that Maxwell had been dead for four years." (C 8)
• "For exercise, the inventor would walk '8 - 10 miles per day' ... Later, Tesla would add to his repertoire the squishing and unsquishing of his toes one hundred times for each foot each night." (C 43)
• Tesla said: "I'll never be rich unless the money comes in the door faster than I can shovel it out the window." (C 44)

June 2020; 470 pages