My favorite bit about Tesla is that all the biographers include the wak-ee story about him compulsively computing the cubic volume of the food he ate, particularly in later years. What they omit, and I read in an unsympathetic contemporary account, is that he also calculated the cubic volume of his, um, output.
He had good idea but a problem with why we don’t have death rays guns used in wars is they would need power cable hooked up to big power source. So it is major power source problems why death rays guns and laser guns. And batteries cannot hold that much electricity.
He didn’t have a good idea. Everybody from the time of Wells onward thought about death rays and variants, and dozens of people talked about them before Tesla. Edison himself talked a great deal about electric weapons. They don’t work because they can’t work. Tesla’s in particular didn’t work because his power source was imaginary. There’s nothing there that can be called good.
Stop thinking about them. Believe in fairies and elves instead. You’ll get farther.
He was at least complicit in the implementation of the electric chair.
And he enthusiastically worked with the government to develop weapons in WWI. That’s why I said he talked out of both sides of his mouth.
The problem with Edison being that his fanbase turned him into a virtual saint who had fully developed inventions leap from his brow.
Gerrett Serviss’ Edison’s Conquest of Mars goes way beyond mere sainthood. A follow-up to Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Serviss has Edison single-handedly inventing a ton of superweapons to wipe out the Martians and make the universe safe for American imperialism. This was 1898. Cuba didn’t stand a chance.