Meditation on Modernity: Tesla and The Current War, The Young Karl Marx, and A Dangerous Method; and Questions for Fordham University Press Director Fredric Nachbaur

Or even that water boils at a lower temperature at high altitudes—or that cell phones work through radio waves, oscillating electric and magnetic fields? Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943), a scientist and telegraph drafter and lecturer as well as poet, dandy, and a gambler, may have valued evidence, reason, and skepticism, aspects of the scientific approach, but he valued imagination too: a Serb born in the village of Smiljan during a lightning storm, the son of an Orthodox priest and a mother who invented tools for household use, a boy haunted by the death of an older brother, Nikola Tesla studied at the Technical University in Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague, before taking New York as his home; and Nikola Tesla made various discoveries regarding the electric motor, alternating electrical current, transformers, lighting, and shadowgraphs (proto-electromagnetic radiation graphs, or x-rays). Tesla installed the Niagara Falls’ first machinery for power, a hydroelectric power plant, bringing electricity to the town of Buffalo. The motion picture has direct to camera narration, some artificial backgrounds, and features anachronistic details (computer, cell phone) that work because of its subject’s technological prophecies. Artists and intellectuals shared their understanding of the human being in history; and they explored the elements and forces of nature, and expanded the potential for the celebration, exploitation, and transformation of nature—land, water, plants, animals, and minerals.