Review of Jennifer Lieberman and Ronald Kline’s “Dream of an Unfettered Electrical Future: Nikola Tesla, the Electrical Utopian Novel, and an Alternative American Sociotechnical Imaginary

摘要

Jennifer Lieberman and Ronald Klein address a historically specific fantasy of wirelesselectrical technology in their recent essay “Dream of an Unfettered Electrical Future:Nikola Tesla, the Electrical Utopian Novel, and an Alternative American SociotechnicalImaginary”. They illuminate the connections between literary and technological innovationat the turn of the nineteenth century, specifically connections between Tesla’s research inwireless electrical transmission and contemporary utopian fiction. After a methodologicalintroduction that situates the terms of their argument in relation to earlier work on the socialhistory of electricity, the authors begin their analysis with the figure of Nikola Tesla,standing in a lecture hall at Columbia University, awing an audience of assembledengineers with a wirelessly illuminated globe in each hand.