Nikola Tesla's Reading List
The 5 books that shaped Nikola Tesla — inventor & electrical engineer.
Visionary inventor who dreamed up alternating current, wireless power, and the modern electrical grid through voracious reading and photographic memory.
Influential Books
My Inventions
Nikola Tesla(1919)
Tesla's autobiography — vivid descriptions of his visualization technique and the obsessive mind of an inventor.
Faust
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1808)
Tesla was reciting Faust during a walk when the idea for the rotating magnetic field came to him in a flash.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
James Clerk Maxwell(1873)
Maxwell's equations were the theoretical foundation Tesla built his alternating current inventions upon.
The Works of Voltaire
Voltaire(1778)
Tesla consumed Voltaire's complete works as a young man — nearly a hundred volumes of Enlightenment thought.
Principia Mathematica
Isaac Newton(1687)
Newton's physics was the bedrock of Tesla's engineering education in Graz and Prague.