I read, voraciously, the same biography. Cheney is an amazing biographer. The level of research she did for that book is astounding.
The afterward of that book was interesting too, admissions from the Feds that there were concentric levels of security around Tesla’s work.
I’m an electrical engineer. It’s astounding what is NOT being done in the area of high frequency power, given the eye-witnessed evidence of what Tesla was able to do with it.
It’s 2007, and it was only a week ago that somebody finally announced a method for transmitting power wirelessly, something Tesla was doing in 1918 in Denver. There’s a scene from The Prestige that alludes to it - where Tesla and the magician are standing in a field of light bulbs, and the field lights up. Tesla walks over to a bulb, picks it out of the ground like a carrot, and it goes out. Minute he grips the base of the bulb, the bulb lights up again.
As you know, what the Feds didn’t confiscate got burned up in the lab fire he had around 1904 or thereabouts. Had Tesla been as assiduous about filing patents as Edison was, the world would be a far different place.
Yes, that was one incredible book. I wonder, though, had Tesla not allowed his invention of AC power to be stolen, what else might he have invented? As I remember, starting in the mid-1890’s, he started to have major money problems that only continuously worsened until about 1920 when his physical research was pretty much over. It is no exaggeration to say that Tesla basically invented the 20th century.
The problem, of course, with trying to send substantial amounts of radio energy through the air is that it can and will all too easily be intercepted and dissipated by things that we don’t want to intercept and dissipate it. Tesla could put on a grand show but he could not make wiring obsolete.