Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla

It was Seifer’s…intention to bring…Tesla’s…major scientific and technological contributions…together. He has done a very impressive job collecting a massive amount of documentation of original and secondary sources…The letters in the J.P. Morgan collection, in particular, shed considerable new light on Tesla’s connection with Morgan and his contemporaries.

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Nature

The best chapter in Seifer’s book describes late 19th century science fiction and locates Tesla’s projects among other predictions of the future…Seifer is [also] good at describing Tesla’s lack of practical, economic and personal judgment and the way his enormous ego invited unscrupulous partners…

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Washington Post Book World

Seifer paints a picture of Tesla that anyone familiar with the life of someone such as Orson Welles will recognize. Here was a man who peaked early, traveled in famous company…and started believing his own press hype. That made him spend the rest of his life trying to score another universe-changing coup…
Wizard
does a pretty good job of placing Tesla within the firmament of inventors, thinkers, and futurists. With Seifer’s scholarship to build on, anyone reconstructing those dizzy years of invention and litigation at the turn of the century would be foolish to try and leave out Nikola Tesla.

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Winston-Salem NC Journal

Despite Tesla’s impact on electricity, history does not regard him as highly as many of his inventive contemporaries…As Seifer shows in great detail…Tesla’s story is complicated and tests our definition of science…Where does someone like Tesla fit it?

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MIT’s Technology Review

Wizard
…presents a much more accurate…picture of Tesla…[It] is thorough, informative, entertaining and a valuable addition to electrotechnological history, past and future.

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Electronic Engineering Times

Here is a deep and comprehensive biography of a great engineer of early electrical science. Indeed, it is likely to become the definitive biography of the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla. The book brings together, into a cohesive whole, the many complex facets of the personal and technical life of the “wizard” who stands alongside Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse as another great implementor and inventor…Highly recommended.

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American Academy for the Advancement of Science

In modern times, Tesla may be enjoying a comeback thanks to books like “Wizard.”

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New York Times

The next time you dial your cellular phone, there’s a guy you should think of. If you don’t use a cell phone, then look at the light by which you’re reading this newspaper. He helped make it brighter…WIZARD chronicles Tesla’s contributions to alternating current, or AC, the electrical system used in most homes today. Though today he is almost forgotten, written out of history by the people he once worked for, Tesla lived in New York’s Waldorf Astoria and was world famous…“His notebooks are filled with mathematics,” said Seifer. “He predates Einstein and Bohr with his description of the atom. He was one of the forefathers of quantum physics.”

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Narragansett Times

[Wizard] brings the many complex facets of [Tesla’s] personal and technical life together into a cohesive whole…The book contains excellent discussions of the controversies, fury of activity, and lawsuits surrounding the development of new hardware technology. In many ways, they are similar to the later legal battles in the development of computers…I highly recommend this biography of a great technologist. A.A. Mullin, U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command.

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Computing Reviews

Rare insight on a great mind.

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New Bedford Standard Times

Nikola Tesla was my father’s uncle, and as such he was treated by our family much as any uncle might have been who lived at a considerable distance and was advanced in years. But there were stronger bonds between my father and Tesla than might otherwise have been the case. They came from identical social backgrounds, sons of Serbian Orthodox priests, born and raised a few miles apart in the Austro-Hungarian military frontier district county of Lika in the Province of Croatia (my grandmother was Tesla’s sister Angelina); they were the only members of a relatively limited extended family to emigrate to America; and they were the only members to undertake science and technology as their life’s work.

My father, Nicholas J. (John) Terbo (Nikola Jovo Trbojevich), was thirty years younger than his uncle, came to America thirty years after him, and died thirty years after Tesla. Tesla was already famous as my father was growing up, and he became a model for my father’s technical career. Father held about 175 U.S. and foreign patents, the most important of which was his 1923 basic patent on the Hypoid gear, used on the vast majority of the world’s cars since 1930. The Hypoid gear introduced advanced mathematics to the art of gear design, much as Tesla’s work united electrical theory and electrical engineering. Tesla henceforth proudly referred to my father as “my nephew, the mathematician.” (That these patents brought considerable financial as well as professional recognition to my father was also not lost on the often cash-poor Tesla.)

Because the ethnic and professional similarities between Nikola Tesla and my father were so striking, I feel that I have been granted a special privilege through this comparison in understanding Tesla’s private personality, including his well-developed sense of humor and his often cavalier disregard for money. Once, when Tesla was visiting us in the early 1930s, my father took him to lunch at the Book Cadillac Hotel, then the finest in Detroit. They arrived late, only a few minutes before a cover charge of $2 or $3 would end. (This was equivalent to $20 or $30 by today’s standards.) My father suggested waiting, but Tesla would hear none of it. They sat down amid a flurry of waiters and Tesla ordered a chafing dish, bread, and milk and proceeded to prepare his own lunch to his own specifications (to my father’s amusement and the unease of the maître d’).

I had not yet reached thirteen when Tesla died in January 1943, and I did not have the sense of the ending of an epoch marked by his passing, both for our family and for an era of individualism in scientific discovery.

I may have reflected with some uneasiness that I had had the opportunity to meet Tesla some three or four years earlier and that no further meetings would ever happen again. I remembered my reluctance to be dragged to the meeting in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker when my mother and I were spending a few days in New York before returning to Detroit after our summer vacation at the Jersey shore. (I would have preferred spending more time at Radio City Music Hall or at the docks, watching the ocean liners.)

I was shy (rather, overwhelmed) and spoke hardly a word to this very tall, very gaunt old man. I would have been repelled—as any young “all-American boy” should have been—to be hugged and kissed by this stranger if my father hadn’t often done the same. (This is the way my mother’s women friends often acted, but my American mother’s brother would have only given me a firm handshake.) Little did I realize that Tesla’s hugging, kissing, and patting my head would belie his famous idiosyncrasy of an overriding phobia of germs. Surely, a young boy would have been teeming with “germs”! One could therefore speculate that this “idiosyncrasy” was possibly an affectation designed to preserve his “space.”

While Tesla lived, some considerable degree of his fame endured—in no small measure because of his ability to stimulate the media. However, after his death the nation and the world were occupied with other more pressing matters—war and reconstruction, international political realignments, an unmatched explosion of new technology, a new consumer society—and Tesla’s fame and recognition nearly evaporated. Only a few in the U.S. and international scientific communities and the abiding respect and admiration of Serbs and all Yugoslavs worldwide kept his name alive.

My awareness of a resurgence of interest in the life and works of Nikola Tesla began in the early 1970s, when I moved from Los Angeles (where it seemed no one had ever heard of Tesla) to Washington, D.C., where at least the name was recognized. In February 1975 my mother phoned to tell me that she had read in the
Los Angeles Times
that Uncle Nikola was to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and that I should look into it. I chanced to notice on a local TV news program that evening a short segment monitoring the Hall of Fame and an interview with a girl of ten or twelve who had invented a new can opener or some such. I dismissed the Hall as a commercial promotion and went on to something else.

Only later did I read a newspaper account about the induction of Tesla (along with Orville and Wilbur Wright, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Tesla’s nemesis, Guglielmo Marconi) and citing the Hall’s sponsorship by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Patent and Trademark Office. The closest living relative of each honoree was to receive the induction diploma at an elaborate ceremony. Lacking any “Tesla” (or even any “Trbojevich”) to represent the family, an officer of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) accepted the Tesla diploma. (The IEEE considers Tesla one of the twelve “apostles” of electrical science and continues to offer an annual prize in the field of Power Engineering in his name.) When I presented myself at the Patent Office a few weeks later, they were delighted and made arrangements to make a second presentation to me at the 1976 awards ceremony held that year at Congress Hall in Philadelphia as part of the U.S. Bicentennial Year celebration.