"Don Foreman" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 22:23:09 -0600, "Tim Williams"
wrote:

Yeah. Real shame the guy was such a nut and attracted these people
posthumously

This man you refer to as a nut invented the AC induction motor, and
the first practical system for generating and transmitting alternating
current for electric power. The commonly-used SI unit of magnetic
flux density is named after him.

Do you, 100 years later, understand how an induction motor works well
enough to call its inventor a nut? Perhaps you do. Good! We
need someone who has that level of expertise. I don't pretend to have
that level of understanding and I'm pretty sure neither Jerry Martes
nor Bob Swinney would either.

Tesla is misunderstood by the general public, those few who know who he was
at all, for a variety of reasons, mostly because they don't see the
connection between his brilliant and insightful discoveries and inventions
of his early years, and his grandiose, war-related ideas of the years before
his death. Like many geniuses he abandoned many of his ideas in mid-stream:
not necessarily because they didn't work, but because his attention had
moved on to something else.

One of the most interesting stories about his life and work was aired on PBS
last year: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/. It may be a bit effusive and
uncritical; it reads that way, but I can't judge where the right balance is.

In 1974 I researched and wrote a brief biography of Tesla for _Electrical
World_ magazine's "Giants of the Electrical Century" promotion. I got all
the books I could to do the research but I didn't have much time (I had to
several biographies), and I didn't come across anything as easy to follow as
the PBS documentary.

--
Ed Huntress