Methodology

The rules this site holds itself to — so you can trust what it says and know exactly where it stops knowing.

Quotation policy

• A quotation appears on this site only if it can be traced to a published primary source: Tesla’s writings, his patents, or a contemporaneous, named interview.
• Famous internet “Tesla quotes” with no traceable source are excluded, and the most-shared ones are named on the Sayings page so their absence is explained, not mysterious.
• Quotations are given verbatim from the source text, with the source named. Paraphrase is never presented as quotation.
• If a credible primary source for an excluded saying surfaces, the policy is to add it with citation — not to keep it excluded out of stubbornness.

Uncertainty labels

• ● Firmly documented — parish records, patent grants, court decisions, corporate records, multiple independent contemporary sources.
• ◐ Tesla’s account — events known mainly or only through Tesla’s own late-life telling (the Faust-in-the-park insight, the $50,000 Edison anecdote, the ditch-digging year). These are presented as his version, with the thinness of corroboration stated.
• Legend — stories the internet tells for which no reliable source exists. These appear only on Myth vs. Record, labeled as such.
• Where biographers disagree on interpretation (e.g., how much of AC’s success belongs to Westinghouse’s engineers), the disagreement is named rather than smoothed over.

People and events

• No dialogue is invented. No scenes are dramatized on the reference pages. The stream page’s sample scripts are explicitly labeled as illustrative dramatizations.
• Motives are attributed only where the record supports them (“Morgan declined further funding after missed milestones” — documented; “Morgan wanted to suppress free energy” — not documented, and said so).

Image policy

• See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.
• No AI-generated historical imagery. Nothing on this site fakes a photograph of Tesla or a historical scene.
• Character art is labeled. The animated Tesla character on the stream page is owner-supplied from the Vizlings app — AI-generated dramatization art, captioned as such everywhere it appears.

What this site will not do

• Invent quotations, dates, citations, or scholarly consensus.
• Present Tesla’s late-life press pronouncements as established fact without noting they are his claims.
• Repeat the “suppressed free energy” narrative, the apocryphal quotations, or the Edison-cage-match framing without the corrective record alongside.
• Pretend the stream is live before it is connected — see the stream page’s honest “not yet connected” state.

Corrections

If you find an error — a misdated event, a misattributed quote, a mislabeled photograph — the fix belongs on the page with a note, not silently. (Contact channel to be added by the site owner.)

Source notes

• Methodology written 2026-09-26; adapted from the Digital Jesus template’s methodology to an inventor-figure subject.
• Quotation verdicts rest on searches of Tesla’s published writings (“My Inventions,” 1919; Century Magazine, 1900; lecture texts; patents) and the biographical literature (Carlson 2013; Cheney 1981; Seifer 1996).