Nikola Tesla
Inventor, electrical engineer, and showman of the alternating-current age. This is a neutral reference to his life, his real inventions, his verified words — and the myths the internet built around him.
What this site is
Digital Tesla is a reference site about Nikola Tesla (1856–1943): the Serbian-American inventor whose alternating-current system powers the modern world. It covers:
- Start Here — the five-minute orientation: who he was, what he actually did, and what to read first.
- Biography — his life from Smiljan to the New Yorker Hotel, with uncertainty marked where the record is thin.
- Timeline — 18 dated events, each labeled by how well the date is established.
- Inventions — the real ones: the AC polyphase system, the induction motor, the Tesla coil, the remote-controlled boat, Wardenclyffe.
- Sayings — 12 verified quotations, each with its published source. Nothing apocryphal.
- People — the dozen figures who mattered: Edison, Westinghouse, J.P. Morgan, Mark Twain, Marconi, his family.
- Myth vs. Record — what the internet exaggerates about Tesla, corrected against the scholarship.
- Stream — the concept for a YouTube live channel with the owner’s animated Tesla character.
The one-paragraph version
Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, in what is now Croatia, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest. After studying engineering in Graz and working in Budapest and Paris, he emigrated to the United States in 1884. His polyphase alternating-current patents, licensed by George Westinghouse in 1888, became the technical foundation of the modern electrical grid. He was a brilliant inventor, a gifted lecturer and self-promoter, and in later life an increasingly isolated figure whose grandest projects — above all the Wardenclyffe wireless tower — failed. He died alone and nearly penniless in a New York hotel in 1943. Decades later, the internet turned him into a folk hero of “suppressed” free energy — a myth this site separates from the record. See Myth vs. Record.
How to use this site
- New here? Read Start Here.
- Want the chronology? Go to the Timeline.
- Want his actual words? See Sayings — every quote sourced, nothing invented.
- Wondering what’s true about the legends? Myth vs. Record is the honest page.
Source notes
- Site scope and editorial policy set 2026-09-26 (see methodology and sources).
- Biographical backbone: Tesla’s autobiography “My Inventions” (serialized 1919), W. Bernard Carlson’s Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (2013), Margaret Cheney’s Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981), Marc J. Seifer’s Wizard (1996).