The favorite biography among Tesla fans, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla by John J. O'Neill has been getting some recent media attention in The Business Insider. The article documents the untold story of Larry Page (the co-founder of Google), how he came to found Google, his struggles, his successes, and his relationships with his coworkers. The writer of the article, Nicholas Carlson, compares the two individuals and depicts how Page learned from Tesla's story* and read O'Neill's biography as a young boy. Some highlights from the article include:
"In that moment, Page realised it wasn’t enough to envision an innovative technological future. Big ideas aren’t enough. They need to be commercialized. If Page wanted to be an inventor, he was going to have to start a successful company, too."
"Tesla’s story also taught Page to watch out for the Thomas Edisons of the world — people who will use you and place your dreams in the service of their own cynical ends."
To read the full Business Insider article, please do so here. We add a note to this article, which states that Tesla was a Croatian immigrant to the U.S. However, although he was born in Smiljan, currently in Croatia then in the mid 1880s part of the Austrian Hungarian empire, his parents were Serbian and he is considered by most to be Serbian.
Among a hardcover, paperback and eBook version of Prodigal Genius, Cosimo also offers the following titles by Nikola Tesla:
- Experiments With Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency in both paperback and hardcover
- The Problem of Increasing Human Energy: With Special Reference to the Harnessing of the Suns Energy in paperback
Nikola Tesla was NOT Serbian. Older authors of his biography know that he was Croatian. I was in school in Karlovac, which Nikola Tesla mentioned in his intimate writing My Inventions. This school is very proud of Tesla and they care about original documents from that time! On all documents you can see official insignia and \ or stamp: Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia with Croatian Military Border under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. That was Croatia under Habsburg Crown! Nikola Tesla fall in love with engineering thanks to his professor MARTIN SEKULIC, charismatic and ingenious teacher in Karlovac, Croatia.
ReplyDeleteYou can check for yourself with Gimnazija Karlovac in Croatia.
"He is considerd by most to be Serbian"... HOW?
ReplyDeleteWho say that his parents were Serbian? My memory told me that Tesla was promoted as Yugoslav-American. Then world can witness terrible war in ex-Yugoslavia in which almost 85% of horrible atrocities came from Serbian side. For Croatia and Bosnia as recognized states this was war for independence - Serbian military and paramilitary attack them! When they struggle to recover after war for their freedom and independence, Serbia invented another interesting approach: to invert history, adapt some facts and then start to campaign their version of things worldwide. As far as I can see, world does not check facts and important details, world just trust to heavily promoted new facts and help to spread them.
But real facts are well known to one group of very serious professors from Croatian and Bosnian academy circles.