Sources

Everything on this site traces to these sources. Primary sources first, scholarship second, the internet a distant third.

Primary sources (Tesla’s own writings)

“My Inventions” — serialized in Electrical Experimenter (1919); Tesla’s autobiography. Vivid, essential, and self-mythologizing; used here with that caveat stated wherever Tesla is the sole source.
“The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” — Century Magazine (June 1900); Tesla’s long philosophical-technical essay.
“Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency” — lecture before the Institution of Electrical Engineers, London (1892); the published lecture text.
U.S. patents — the polyphase system patents (granted May 1888), the Tesla coil patents (1891), the telautomaton patent US 613,809 (1900), the bladeless turbine US 1,061,206 (1913), and others; via the U.S. Patent Office record.
Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900 — Tesla’s laboratory notes, published 1978.
Contemporaneous press interviews — New York newspapers, 1890s–1930s; used with care, since late-life interviews mix fact with showmanship.
Naturalization papers — U.S. citizenship, 30 July 1891.

W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press, 2013) — the most technically rigorous biography; the backbone of this site’s engineering and business history.
Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981) — the biography that revived popular interest; strong on the life narrative.
Marc J. Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (1996) — the most detailed on the later years, the FBI files, and the papers’ seizure.
The Nikola Tesla Museum, Belgrade — holder of Tesla’s papers and personal effects; source of several photographs used here.

Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. v. United States, 320 U.S. 1 (1943) — Supreme Court decision upholding Tesla’s priority on key radio patents.
Office of Alien Property / FBI files — the 1943 seizure and review of Tesla’s papers (summarized in Seifer).

Unsourced quotation compilations, “mindset” blogs, and social-media quote cards — the main vector for the apocryphal Tesla sayings debunked on Myth vs. Record.
Conspiracy literature about “suppressed” inventions.
AI-generated imagery presented as historical — see methodology.

See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.

Source list compiled 2026-09-26. No page numbers are cited for the secondary works because editions vary; chapter-level references are given on the pages that use them.
This page describes the sources consulted; it is not itself a bibliography of everything ever written about Tesla.