Word: tesla
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...late Nikola Tesla was a spectacular eccentric scientist and showman. Sure that his name will outlive Thomas Edison's, Tesla's admirers hold that he and Michael Faraday were the greatest electrical discoverers of modern times. Last week one admirer, who according to the inventor himself understood him "better than any man alive," published the first Tesla biography-Prodigal Genius (Ives Washburn; $3.75). The author: John J. O'Neill, science editor of the New York Herald Tribune...
...Neill, throwing off journalistic reserve, describes Tesla as "a superman-unquestionably one of the world's greatest geniuses." O'Neill credits him not only with inventing the polyphase alternating current generator and Tesla induction motor, which scientists generally have hailed as the basis of "our electrical power era" (TIME, July 20, 1931), but also with discovering the basic principles of the radio, radar, electronic tube, X ray, fluorescent light, electron microscope, rocket bomb, etc. All these and the discovery of cosmic rays besides, says O'Neill, were inspired by basic Tesla findings. Less ardent admirers...
June Bugs and Generators. Tesla had the fictional earmarks of genius. He was humbly born (in a Croatian village now part of Yugoslavia) of a preacher father and illiterate mother who loved to invent household gadgets. Nikola invented a popgun and a water wheel at five; a 16-bug-power motor (operated by June bugs glued to the arms of a tiny windmill) at nine; a "vacuum motor" at twelve; his famed alternating current generator at 25. This came to him while he was reciting Goethe's Faust one day in a Budapest park; he promptly diagrammed...
...ruddy Hugo's numerous publications today hold many important positions in the U.S. radio industry. They fondly call Gernsback "the old buzzard." At 59, Hugo presides over a shabby Manhattan office where he has a death mask of his good friend, the late, great, grandly eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla.* Hugo Gernsback has never made much money out of his astounding ideas...
...many years before his death at 86, last January, Tesla was a recluse in a Manhattan hotel room, where he kept his laboratory and nursed sick pigeons. At each birthday he solemnly announced to newsmen that he was on the verge of communicating with other planets...