Just a quick update – I have gone through at least some of the publisher’s edits in Nikola Tesla: Scientific Rock Star. Most are straightforward and not controversial. But then there is the question of the title.
Nikola Tesla: Scientific Rock Star will probably not be the final title.
Scientific Rock Star is my working title, but the publisher was keen on Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity. In the edits just received the title change has been made in the manuscript; that would seem to make it official.
My first chapter, however, remains titled “A Scientific Rock Star is Born.”
So I suppose I need to edit my tentative book cover:
More as I get through the edits.
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Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page calls Nikola Tesla his hero, but says it is better to be like Edison than Tesla. Page read Tesla’s autobiography “My Inventions” when he was 12 years old and was fascinated by his amazing inventions. Tesla’s problem, however, was that he didn’t know how to make money off of those inventions. In fact, Edison and Marconi got credit for a lot of things that were actually thought up by Tesla. In a 2008 interview with Fortune magazine Page said:
You also need some leadership skills. You don’t want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it’s a sad, sad story. He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You’d want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.
So Page says that Google is, in essence, a response to that failure. Innovate, but also sell it to the public so you can afford to innovate some more. With this in mind Google has brought us a wide variety of inventions beyond its initial search engine – Android, the Chrome browser, Google Earth, Gmail – just to name a few. Not everything Google invented became a hit of course, but enough of them did to keep the innovation rolling.
Page describes the influence Tesla had on his desire to become an inventor.
That desire to combine the inventiveness of Tesla with the commercial marketing savvy of Edison has grown beyond Google into other investments. Both Larry Page and co-founder Sergey Brin have invested in something else that pays homage to Nikola Tesla – Tesla Motors. Exploiting several unique innovations in harnessing the power of electricity, the Tesla Roadster can go from 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds while also achieving 100 miles per gallon. Now that is a high-performance sports car.
All you need is $100,000 to start (not counting options), or a friend named Larry Page.
I mentioned a while back that I was talking to an agent and a publisher about writing a book about Nikola Telsa, the great man of invention. Not the electric cars (though somehow it seems possible that he was behind the Tesla S model), but radio, alternating current (AC), the “Tesla coil,” guided missiles, wireless transmissions, polyphase power systems, a “death ray,” or two. You know, the usual science geek stuff. Add in his friendships with famous poets, business titans like George Westinghouse, and writers like Mark Twain…not to mention a few weird quirks about multiples of three and pigeons (long story)…and you have an eccentric genius of science.
Perfect topic for me to write about.
Today I received the initial offer from the publisher and agent to write the book about Tesla. More details to come once they are finalized, but suffice to say that things have progressed quite nicely, thank you very much. I’ll be getting back to the agent shortly and defining the book, the timing, and the all-important advance over the next few days or week. Then it’s all about researching and writing. Oh, and more researching and writing.
Just a quick update – I have gone through at least some of the publisher’s edits in Nikola Tesla: Scientific Rock Star. Most are straightforward and not controversial. But then there is the question of the title.
