Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future

Nikola Tesla’s reputation has long outlived him and, if anything, has grown in recent years. Professor Iwan Rhys Morus’s biography is a valuable and readable addition to the literature on Tesla, linking his successes and failures to the cultural values of the time in which he lived. Tesla understood the power of image and media in the United States, which he used to further his ambitions. In the end, however, Tesla proved unable to fulfill the huge expectations he created for his ideas about electricity. Tesla represents a cautionary tale of the solitary genius, and this may be a pertinent lesson for our own time.