Nikola Tesla was a bundle of contradictions – a consummate showman and a private recluse; a man of science addicted to self-promotion; a prolific inventor of technologies that made other people’s fortunes.

Tesla made giant leaps in the technology of electrical supply, X-rays, radio remote control, and wireless electrical transmission. He embodied the aspirations and the contradictions of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Then as now, he attracted cranks and visionaries in equal number. His restless speculations and experiments about the way tomorrow would look helped to inaugurate a new way of trying to understand the future.

More than just a biography of Tesla, this book takes the inventor as its guide and follows him through the cut-throat entrepreneurial culture of late Victorian and Edwardian electrical invention. The book will explore the electrical future that Tesla helped create and the raw materials from which that future was forged.