W. Bernard Carlson
Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Penn Bookstore (36th and Walnut)
W. Bernard Carlson, author of Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, will tour the Northeast with a Tesla Coil in hand, visiting college bookstores at Johns Hopkins, U. Penn, Dartmouth, and Harvard during the first week of May.
Plenty of biographies glamorize Tesla and his eccentricities, but until now none has carefully examined what, how, and why he invented. In this groundbreaking book, W. Bernard Carlson demystifies the legendary inventor, placing him within the cultural and technological context of his time, and focusing on his inventions themselves as well as the creation and maintenance of his celebrity. Drawing on original documents from Tesla’s private and public life, Carlson shows how he was an “idealist” inventor who sought the perfect experimental realization of a great idea or principle, and who skillfully sold his inventions to the public through mythmaking and illusion.