seven days a week, and when on the trail of an idea, he had a “mania for finishing,” neglecting his health and the rest of the external world until the peculiar music of his mental spheres tuned itself to practical harmony. This is not to denigrate Tesla’s work ethic, for he was capable of fanatical effort and concentration. Tesla worked best alone and was subject all his life to visions, “flashes” as he called them, in which groundbreaking ideas arrived complete as if drawn in the air by some “borrowed mind,” to use his own description of a robot. Edison came to his discoveries by teamwork and painstaking trial and error, afterward promoting and defending those inventions vigorously. The two men, obviously both brilliant, also worked very differently. Typically, out of loyalty to his benefactor, George Westinghouse, he once tore up a contract that would have made him a vast fortune. The Wizard of Menlo Park, Tesla’s hero-turned-rival whom he met on his second day in America, was a master at funding and public relations, while Tesla was miserable at making and managing money. One reason for the historical amnesia may be that Tesla, alongside his striking list of personal dualities - the dapper ditch-digger, the shy showman, the famous footnote - was Edison’s opposite in two important ways. Munson doesn’t dwell on this twist of cultural memory, but he demonstrates in considerable detail why it shouldn’t be so. Tesla was world-famous once, but in 2018, his name tends to bring to mind Elon Musk’s car, or perhaps an 80s metal band.

Seventy-five years after his death, though, it is not. He worked in Budapest, New York, Pittsburgh, London, and Chicago, amassing some 300 patents and inventing so feverishly (at times literally so) that one might think his name would be forever linked with Einstein’s and Edison’s. The peripatetic Tesla was born in what today is Croatia, at the stroke of midnight during a thunderstorm (accompanied by a lightning bolt, it’s tempting to say, and as Tesla himself claimed, though he was perhaps not in the best position to recall). Munson lays out this thoroughly researched volume chronologically, each chapter linked to a city. As one example, he may well have made the first X-ray image in human history - it was of Mark Twain’s hand - and this is not in the top 10 things Tesla will be remembered for, assuming he is remembered at all.

Tesla richard munson