10 Best Physics of Electricity Books

2018 Reprint of 1919 Edition. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a prophet of the electronic age. His research laid much of the groundwork for modern electrical and communication systems, and his impressive accomplishments include development of the alternating-current electrical system, radio, the Tesla coil transformer, wireless transmission, and fluorescent lighting. Tesla’s research was so groundbreaking that many of his contemporaries failed to understand it, and other scientists are unjustly credited for his innovations. The visionary scientist speaks for himself in this volume, originally published in 1919 as a six-part series in Electrical Experimenter magazine. Tesla recounts his boyhood in Croatia, his schooling and work in Europe, his collaboration with Thomas Edison, and his subsequent research. Written with wit and elan, this memoir offers fascinating insights into one of the great minds of modern science. Chapters include: My Early Life; My First Efforts In Inventions; My Later Endeavors: The Discovery of the Rotating Magnetic Field and The Discovery of the Tesla Coil and Transformer; The Magnifying Transmitter; The Art of Telautomatics.

Part philosophical ponderings on humanity’s relationship to the universe, part scientific extrapolation on what technological advancement might bring to that understanding, this long essay, first published in Century Illustrated Magazine in June 1900, is yet another example of the genius of Serbian inventor NIKOLA TESLA (1857-1943), the revolutionary scientist who forever changed the scientific fields of electricity and magnetism. From the possibilities presented by robotics to the “civilizing potency of aluminum,” from a “self-acting engine” to one of the first proposals to use solar power to run industrial civilization, and much more, this is a wide-ranging but illuminating look into the thoughts of an unsung hero of scientific philosophy.

The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age–Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse–battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light , historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber–Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.