Inventor Nikola Tesla, once forgotten by history, has only been recently rediscovered, being remembered with a 1983 U.S. commemorative stamp and having a rock band and a car named for him. But while more people have come to appreciate Tesla’s genius for harnessing and producing electrical energy, relatively few people have any idea of how far ahead of his time he was. TESLA’S WORDS, written by Tesla himself and edited by Ellis Oswalt, offers a glimpse of the man and how his mind worked and what he saw for the future.

TESLA’S WORDS is a short book, less than 200 pages long, and it’s a fast read, yet reader’s will learn as much about Tesla from this as they might from a scholarly 600-page biography. Tesla recalls growing up in Croatia (although he was a Serbian ethnic), learning to master the ability to build numerous contraptions, and developing an interest in electricity and machines. He also admits to having had hallucinations as a boy and how he learned to control them while also acknowledging his ability to hallucinate as evidence of his gifts. “I could imagine . . . inventions and they would appear before me in midair,” he writes. “I could lift my arm and outstretch it, watching my hand pass through he object I was hallucinating. I was born to be an inventor.”

Tesla worked as an engineer in Budapest and Paris before emigrating to the United States, where he joined Thomas Edison’s company and impressed Edison with his knowledge before striking out on his own. Tesla’s work offered and still offers a tremendous vision of a world powered by naturally generated alternating currents (AC) through wireless technology. Undoubtedly more significant than his development of AC induction motors is his magnifying transmitter to generate electricity by pulling electrodes out of the air and harnessing them to distribute electrical energy without wires. Such ideas may have seemed far-fetched in the late fifties and early sixties, when post-war futurism was at its height, but Tesla wrote about it in 1919 with detailed explanations of his experiments to pull it off.

It is Tesla’s ability to explain in simple. clear terms that make TESLA’S WORDS so fascinating and also make it relevant for today, as many budding innovators seek to make his utopian visions of electrical energy simplifying life a reality. Tesla predicted electronic communication similar to the modern Internet, using radio waves rather than wires, and his descriptions of how his work could benefit humankind and bring it into greater harmony is exciting. He also got a few other things right, such as his prediction that the League of Nations would fail, that Germany’s punishment for instigating World War I would only lead to another global war, and weapons capable of annihilating civilization would proliferate.

Tesla still offers the hopeful conclusion that cheap, plentiful electrical energy, distributed wirelessly and equitably across the globe, could lead to peace and harmony, with no need to fight over energy resources. This book thus speaks to us even today as we face challenges to make the world more peaceful and more sustainable.

TESLA’S WORDS is an excellent and inspirational document of a man’s revolutionary talent and beautiful vision for a better world that speaks to us even today as we face new challenges.

~Steven Maginnis for IndieReader