The Other Tesla
Feb. 24th, 2026 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: My Inventions and Other Writings, by Nikola Tesla
If I'd read this a few years ago I would probably have filed it as largely pseudoscience. With developments in recent years, I would still regard it as such, but would add that there's a lot of egotistic pronouncement about what Tesla would like to be the case in areas where he did not have knowledge (because it wasn't available yet). Tesla was right about quite a few things and maybe was a genius - certainly he thought so - but he was also wrong about a lot of things and failed to keep quiet about them. Does any of this (probably not all of this) sound familiar?
Sadly there isn't that much real science in the book, and the edition I read also omits the illustrations which originally accompanied the writing, which might be important in some cases. There is a lot of writing about war and armaments, which reads completely naïvely today (the idea of machines fighting each other in a bloodless war is not quite how things turned out). Most of the writing is either nineteenth century, or refers to events in that period. Some things might have been different if Tesla had understood relativity or the photoelectric effect - or human nature.
If I'd read this a few years ago I would probably have filed it as largely pseudoscience. With developments in recent years, I would still regard it as such, but would add that there's a lot of egotistic pronouncement about what Tesla would like to be the case in areas where he did not have knowledge (because it wasn't available yet). Tesla was right about quite a few things and maybe was a genius - certainly he thought so - but he was also wrong about a lot of things and failed to keep quiet about them. Does any of this (probably not all of this) sound familiar?
Sadly there isn't that much real science in the book, and the edition I read also omits the illustrations which originally accompanied the writing, which might be important in some cases. There is a lot of writing about war and armaments, which reads completely naïvely today (the idea of machines fighting each other in a bloodless war is not quite how things turned out). Most of the writing is either nineteenth century, or refers to events in that period. Some things might have been different if Tesla had understood relativity or the photoelectric effect - or human nature.