By Christopher Cooper
Every little thing you're thinking that you recognize approximately Nikola Tesla is inaccurate. Nikola Tesla used to be one of many maximum electric inventors who ever lived. For years, the engineering genius used to be relegated to relative obscurity, his contributions to humanity (we are advised) obscured via a few nineteenth-century inventors and industrialists who took credits for his paintings or stole his patents outright. in recent times, the historic list has been "corrected" and Tesla has been restored to his rightful position between ancient luminaries like Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Gugliemo Marconi. such a lot biographies repeat the widely used account of Tesla's existence, together with his invention of alternating present, his falling out with Edison, how he misplaced billions in patent royalties to Westinghouse, and his struggle to turn out that Marconi stole thirteen of his patents to "invent" radio. yet, what rather occurred? ponder this: every little thing you're thinking that you recognize approximately Nikola Tesla is incorrect. Newly exposed info proves that the preferred account of Tesla's existence is itself very improper. within the fact approximately Tesla, Christopher Cooper units out to turn out that the traditional tale not just oversimplifies heritage, it denies credits to a few of the genuine inventors in the back of some of the groundbreaking applied sciences now attributed to Tesla and perpetuates a false impression in regards to the strategy of innovation itself. Are you confident that Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone? Are you definite the Wright Brothers have been the 1st in flight? reconsider! With a provocative foreward via Tesla biographer Marc. J. Seifer, the reality approximately Tesla is among the first books to set the checklist instantly, tracing the starting place of a few of the best electric innovations to a coterie of colourful characters that traditional heritage has all yet forgotten.
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Extra info for The Truth About Tesla: The Myth of the Lone Genius in the History of Innovation
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Their decision was to mark the beginning of the end of Edison’s DC system. In 1890, the Niagara Falls Power Company formed the International Niagara Commission, a panel of electricity experts and financiers led by Sir William Thomson (better known as “Lord Kelvin”). The Commission was tasked with analyzing various proposals for harnessing the energy of Niagara Falls to generate electricity. The impetus for the project was as much ecological as it was industrial. Early Niagara settlers had diverted part of the upstream flow of the Niagara River to makeshift canals designed to power waterwheels.
According to Cheney, Edison’s people claim that it was Tesla who approached Edison with an offer to sell his patents for an AC generator for $50,000, which Edison declined. This story is unlikely since Tesla did not apply for a patent involving AC until 1888 and was not granted one on his “electro-magnetic motor” until at least three years after this incident is said to have occurred. See Cheney, Tesla, 57. According to the conventional account of most biographers, Tesla resigned in protest.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Tesla was reaping the monetary benefits of his efforts. He began dining regularly at Delmonico’s in New York City, where the rich and powerful could see and be seen. He befriended Robert Underwood Johnson, the famed editor of the journal Century, and his wife Katherine. Through the Johnsons’ social connections, Tesla met prominent personalities like Mark Twain, naturalist John Muir, writer Rudyard Kipling, and Theodore Roosevelt (then merely a New York City mayoral candidate).