2013, Fall River Press, NY, 248 pages
This very attractive glossy magazine style book is targeted for the youth market, and makes use of ‘gee-whiz’ comics from the WWII era, and 19th Century newspaper clippings and period photos to track the eccentric life of one of our most brilliant inventive minds: Nikola Tesla.
For any sci-fi reader from the second half of the 29th Century the graphics in this book will evoke chills of gee-whiz wonder. Likewise, the reportage on the quirky life of Tesla and that terrible bastard villain of patent-piracy Thomas Edison might evoke the image of an age of gas lit ignorance passing into a corrupt age of electric-powered avarice.
The photos and quotes of Tesla and his inventions are worth the price of the book. The meat of it though has to be the bizarre circus of invention and exploitation that was the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, highlighted by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
From the quirks of Tesla, who walked around the block thrice, and required 18 napkins to clean his silverware at the Delmonico Restaurant because everything in his daily routine had to be divisible by three, and his outrage at women’s fashion and the female booth boxer Ida Schall, to the outrage among eugenicists over Tesla not giving his genius genes back to the white race through impregnating some worthy woman, to Edison promoting Tesla’s alternating current technology to execute poor white trash and a homicidal Coney Island circus elephant named Topsy, David Kent packs dozens of head-shaking moments into this look at one of the ambitious cooks that got us to where we are.
Incidentally, among the photos of leading figures of science and industry is a photo of John Jacob Astor, one of the richest and most successful men on planet earth, which seems to me to be a portrait of a man with significant African ancestry.
Tesla is a must read for anyone mired in our celebrity culture that wonders what it might have been like to live in a world where celebrities did more than act, sing, buy designer clothes and play ball.
