Leland I Anderson

Leland I. Anderson
Leland I. Anderson
Born	1928
Died	October 15, 2021
Residence	Denver, CO, United States
Nationality	USA
Alma mater	University of Minnesota
Known for	Tesla scholarship, the first comprehensive Tesla bibliography, the Tesla Society
	Scientific career
Fields	Electrical Engineer, Technical writing, History of science

Leland I. Anderson (1928 – 15 October 2021) was an American electrical engineer, technical writer and archivist, and the foremost historian of Nikola Tesla. More than any other individual he is credited with the recovery of Tesla's reputation in the second half of the twentieth century — assembling the documentary record at a time when Tesla had been largely written out of the standard histories, and making it available to others.

Anderson's contribution to the tradition documented on this wiki is not a theory but something arguably rarer: he ensured that the primary sources survived and could be read. The Tesla literature catalogued here rests very largely on material he located, transcribed, annotated and published.

Career

Anderson graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1954 with a degree in electrical engineering. He worked for Sperry Univac in Minnesota during the 1960s, and later moved to Denver, Colorado, where he was employed by the United States Department of the Interior. His Tesla work was carried on alongside this professional career rather than as part of it.

Tesla scholarship

Anderson's interest in Tesla took root in the early 1950s and continued for some seventy years.

He compiled the first comprehensive bibliography of Tesla's life and work, encapsulating hundreds of scientific papers and newspaper articles — the reference tool that made systematic Tesla scholarship possible, published as Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography. He founded the Tesla Society and edited its newsletter, Tesliana, for many years from the 1950s onward.

His major editorial achievement is the Tesla Presents series, in which he prepared and annotated primary Tesla material for publication:

Nikola Tesla On His Work With Alternating Currents — Tesla's own extended account, given under oath in pre-trial testimony, of the development of his alternating-current system.
Nikola Tesla: Lecture Before the New York Academy of Sciences, April 6, 1897 — a lecture on the Lenard and Röntgen streams, reconstructed by Anderson from surviving fragments.
Nikola Tesla: Guided Weapons and Computer Technology.
Nikola Tesla's Teleforce and Telegeodynamics Proposals.

He also wrote the monographs Priority in the Invention of Radio - Tesla vs. Marconi, which assembles the documentary case for Tesla's priority over Marconi, and Ball Lightning & Tesla's Electric Fireballs, on Tesla's production and observation of ball lightning.

The Anderson archive

Over seven decades Anderson assembled what became the largest Tesla archive in the United States, and the second largest in the world after that of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. The collection is now curated by the Heinz History Center, the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

The archive is the reason much of the Tesla material on this wiki exists in citable form: correspondence, testimony, lecture texts and press coverage that would otherwise have been dispersed or lost.

Related work on this wiki

Tesla is among the most heavily represented subjects here; see Nikola Tesla and the material indexed under Category:Tesla. Anderson's own papers catalogued on this wiki are listed below.

Abstracts

2006 - "Final Thoughts on Tesla's Work with High-Frequency Alternating Currents"
1998 - "Rare Notes from Tesla on Wardenclyffe"