Marc J. Seifer – Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a Genius
Seifer more than once goes into Freudian analysis of Tesla’s personality. I’m going to go ahead and guess that he is not a particularly rigorous biographer. I probably should have chosen a different volume, but this one was on sale. Seifer’s cringy Freudianism is enough to automatically make suspect his conjectures about Tesla’s more out-there research on things such as death rays, worldwide wireless transmissions, and his theories about faster-than light transmissions and extraterrestrial life.
These are better seen as products of Tesla’s time, similar to Isaac Newton’s forgotten works on alchemy and mysticism. In Tesla’s time, Einsteinian relativity wasn’t yet universally accepted or understood in the scientific community. Nor was its implication that light is an absolute speed limit well thought out. Reputable scientists were still searching for workarounds, and there was not yet the sheer preponderance of experimental evidence for the cosmic speed limit that we take for granted today.
Tesla’s scientific, business, and personal lives are stories worth telling. So is his rivalry with Edison. Seifer gives plenty of attention to all of these aspects of Tesla. And he is a good storyteller. But his Freudianism and other quirks hard to take him very seriously.
Inertia Wins! 