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Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
By W. Bernard Carlson.Princeton University Press. 520pp, Pounds 19.95. ISBN 9780691057767. Published 29 May 2013
The Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company, a visionary band of engineers and financiers hoping to improve Earth's climate, met in New York's exclusive Delmonico's Restaurant in the 1890s. The company, depicted in a science fiction novel by Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, was fictional; the restaurant, real.
The crossover says something about the atmosphere of the time. There were great fortunes, a fascination with invention and a sense of infinite possibility as technology took wing. Astor, heir to $100 million and a small-time inventor himself, personified this strain in New York society. So did a fellow habitue of Delmonico's, Nikola Tesla.
Well, except for the fortune. Tesla, as Bernard Carlson's splendid biography notes, was mostly broke. But he combined vision with technical prowess like no one else. Astor, one of Tesla's backers, enjoyed speculative fancies about future wonders - solar power, a global communications network, interplanetary travel. Tesla was striving to realise them.
He is famous partly because he succeeded, some of the time. The three- phase...