Articles
Each one starts from a document that exists — a patent, a lecture as published, a contract, a court opinion — and stays with it.
The rule that shapes this list is simple and it is the reason the list is short. An article here has to be built on a named public source a reader can open, and the source has to say what the article says it says. Where the popular account and the document part company, the article says where, once, and carries on. Where the only witness is Tesla writing about himself thirty years later, the sentence says so rather than letting the reader assume a document exists.
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What the tower at Shoreham was for
The contract J. P. Morgan signed in March 1901 bought transatlantic wireless telegraphy, and the plant that ran the tower burned coal.
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1885–1893 · The polyphase patents
The war of the currents was an argument about copper
Edison was not fighting Tesla. He was fighting a rival company, over the price of transmission and how far a central station could reach.
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Wireless power, and why “free energy” is not what he was selling
He proposed a way to move energy, never a way to make it — and the way he proposed does not work.
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1885–1893 · The polyphase patents
Did Tesla invent alternating current?
He did not, and the thing he did invent is more interesting than the thing he is credited with.
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1943 onward · The record since
The Supreme Court did not rule that Tesla invented radio
It held the broad claims of Marconi's tuning patent invalid, and the prior art that killed them was mostly somebody else's.
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1943 onward · The record since
Quotes Nikola Tesla never said
The most circulated line attributed to him — the one about 3, 6 and 9 — appears in none of his books, patents or verified lectures.
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The boat that obeyed him
US 613,809 describes a vessel steered without wires in 1898, and the drawing shows the mechanism that made it obey.
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What a Tesla coil actually does
Two tuned circuits, energy passing between them, and a voltage that climbs because the circuits agree on a frequency. It was never a way to distribute power.