About

The Tesla Record is the publication at teslainfo.org. Its subject is Nikola Tesla, 1856 to 1943 — the patents he filed, the lectures he read, the contracts he signed, the machines that were built from his drawings and the ones that were not, and the long argument about him that has continued since his death.

It works by one rule. Every article starts from a named public document and stays with it: a patent, a lecture as printed, an agreement, a court opinion, a set of laboratory notes. The document is identified on the page and linked to the repository that holds it — Google Patents and the Patent Office for the grants, the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress for the periodicals, the published reports for the case law — so that a reader who doubts a sentence can open the source in one click and check it. Quotations here carry an issue, a page, a patent number or a docket. Numbers carry a source rather than a hedge. Where the only witness to a story is Tesla writing about himself decades later, the sentence says so in the sentence, not in a footnote.

Corrections of the popular account appear here often, because the subject attracts invented quotations and confident arithmetic. They are handled as a by-product of reading the document rather than as the point of the exercise. Every one of them names the person the familiar version leaves out — Galileo Ferraris and William Stanley for the rotating field, George Westinghouse for the fight over transmission, John Stone Stone and Oliver Lodge for tuned circuits, J. P. Morgan and Guglielmo Marconi for Wardenclyffe. A story about a lone genius is usually a story with someone deleted from it.

A quarterly print magazine on the same subject was published at this address between 2013 and 2017.