Quotes Nikola Tesla never said

The most quoted sentence in Nikola Tesla's name is not his. If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe is on posters, on skin, over synthesiser music and under a great many short videos, and it is in none of his writings. Not in My Inventions, the autobiography he serialised in 1919. Not in the 1894 collection of his lectures, papers and patent descriptions. Its first half appears on none of the 23.8 million digitised American newspaper pages the Library of Congress makes searchable, and its second half turns up on about 170 of them without ever being put in his mouth. On the evidence available it is not anywhere at all before the present century.

A flat denial is worth about as much as the quotation, though — both are assertions with nothing under them. So what follows is the check itself: which corpora were searched, with which strings, and what came back. Half of it is method, because the method transfers to any attributed line. The other half is eight of the most circulated ones and what is actually behind each.

The part that is true.

Something real sits underneath the 3, 6 and 9 story, and it is smaller and stranger than the slogan. In the first instalment of My Inventions, published in The Electrical Experimenter for February 1919, he catalogues the compulsions of his early life — an aversion to pearls, to earrings, to the sight of a peach — and then this:

I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food—otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I mist I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours.

My Inventions, chapter I, “My Early Life”. The Electrical Experimenter, February 1919.

That is documented, first-hand, and published in his lifetime. Note the spelling: mist for missed, and elsewhere tho, addrest, witnest, opprest. The magazine printed the series in a simplified orthography, and the survival of it in a transcription is a small sign that the passage was copied from the original rather than from a quotation site, where it is usually modernised without a word.

A compulsion about multiples of three is not a key to the universe, and the distance between the two is where the myth lives. The correction has to stop where the evidence stops. He counted in threes; there is no record of him claiming that three explained anything.

What a quotation is actually claiming.

A quotation is not an opinion, and it cannot be argued about in the way opinions are. It is a claim about a document: that on some date a particular person produced these words, and that a record of it survives. There is therefore always a question underneath it with a yes-or-no answer — which record, and where — and that question can be put to any line, by anyone, in about ten minutes.

What makes the question tractable is that provenance comes in ranks, and the ranks are easy to tell apart.

Rank 5 is where most Tesla quotations live, and it is the rank most often mistaken for a source. “Attributed in a 1977 book” tells you that a book published in 1977 printed the line. It is a fact about the book. Unless that book names where it got the line — an issue, a page, a manuscript, an interview date — the trail stops there, thirty-four years after his death, and a stopped trail is not a short trail. It is no trail.

The sales page behind two famous lines.

Two sentences usually travel together: If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration, and My brain is only a receiver; in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. Wikiquote files the pair as disputed and gives one citation, to a page titled “Comments from the Inventor of the Purple Harmony Plates”, taken from the website of a company that sells purple plates, discs and tubes said to carry a “life force energy”. The Internet Archive's earliest capture of that page is 12 May 2006. On it, after passages on the longevity of the Hunza and the healing power of Ganges water, the seller writes:

… a conversation with the famous scientist, Dr. Nikola Tesla, in 1942. Tesla said, “If you want to find the secrets of the Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” I spent the last 50 years doing just that, and my products are a direct result of this investigation.

“Comments from the Inventor of the Purple Harmony Plates”, PurpleHarmonyPlates website, reproduced at bibliotecapleyades.net. Earliest Internet Archive capture 12 May 2006.

Everything a reader needs is inside that passage. A private conversation, with no third party, recalled roughly fifty years after it is said to have happened, published as the origin story of the product it is being used to sell. That is rank 4 shading into rank 5. It is not evidence that the words were said; it is evidence that someone had a commercial reason to say they were.

The second sentence is worse off still. The page carries only the first. Neither the 2006 capture nor the version live at the time of writing contains “My brain is only a receiver”, so the line most often reproduced with that citation does not appear in the thing being cited. It has no source, including no bad one.

The ones with nothing behind them at all.

Some attributions have no trail to follow at all. The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence is reproduced by the million. The phrase “non-physical phenomena” returns nothing across the Library of Congress newspaper corpus, and no book, article, letter or interview has ever been named by anyone circulating it.

There is a public record of that failure, and it is what more than a decade of unsuccessful searching looks like when somebody keeps the notes. Wikiquote maintains a holding list on the talk page of its Tesla entry, opened on 18 February 2009 with a standing request: supply a reliable and precise source for any line below and it will be moved into the article. The non-physical-phenomena line was added to that list on 26 August 2012. The 3, 6 and 9 line followed on 20 May 2015, with the note “Or slight variations”. Neither has moved. Both are absent from the article itself, including from its disputed section, which is where a quotation with a bad source goes. These have no source to dispute.

Then there is a fabrication on a larger scale: a full-length “interview with Nikola Tesla from 1899”, given to a journalist called John Smith and usually circulated as “Everything is the Light”, often with a magazine called Immortality named as its home. It reads beautifully and it cannot be what it says it is. The speaker argues at length against relativity and against the idea of curved space — special relativity was published in 1905 and the curved-space theory not until 1915, so in 1899 there was nothing to argue with. He describes the white pigeon that came to his window, a story from his last years in New York hotels rather than from the laboratory decade the piece claims to describe. Researchers who have traced the text report that it derives from Tesla, or the Adaptation of an Angel, a drama by the Serbian writer Stevan Pešić, first staged at the National Theatre in Belgrade in March 1995, after his death the previous year. That attribution rests on secondary reporting rather than on a document examined here; the internal dating settles the question on its own. A text cannot be an 1899 interview if its subject is answering questions nobody had asked yet.

The one that may well be true, and still is not documented.

Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents. This is the most attractive line in the whole set, because it is generous and funny and fits everything else known about him. It is placed in December 1901, on the news that Marconi had received a signal across the Atlantic, and staged as a reply to one of his own engineers, who is said to have remarked that Marconi had got the jump on him. Wikiquote files it under “Attributed” and cites a public-television web feature, which names no document; the phrase “seventeen of my patents” returns nothing in the Library of Congress newspaper corpus. Every printing traced so far leads back to a mid-century retelling rather than to anything written down at the time.

It may have been said. A remark to a colleague in a laboratory has no reason to reach a newspaper, and its absence proves little. But “may have been said” and “is documented” are different states, and collapsing them is how the whole problem started. The record of what the patents actually covered does not depend on the anecdote at all: the Supreme Court's 1943 opinion is a public document, and it is a stranger story than the quotation.

Two that read like forgeries and are real.

Correction runs both ways. The passage most often assumed to be a modern invention is genuine, and it is easy to check. In Collier's for 30 January 1926, page 17, under the title “When Woman Is Boss”, he told the interviewer:

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain … we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

“When Woman Is Boss”, as told to John B. Kennedy. Collier's, 30 January 1926, page 17.

That is rank 2: a dated issue of a mass-circulation magazine, printed while he was alive to object. A second printing survives as well. Six weeks later the Springfield Weekly Republican of 11 March 1926 carried the interview on its front page, credited in the text to Kennedy and to Collier's, and that page is in a public archive with the words on it. It is a syndicated reprint rather than independent corroboration — one interview, printed twice — but it puts the sentence on a dated page that nobody has been able to edit since.

The idea was not new in 1926 either, which is the other thing a real quotation usually has: a history as well as a citation. In “The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires”, his own article of 1904, he had already written that “the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were, capable of response in every one of its parts”, served by “a cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one's pocket”. American newspapers were reprinting that passage by May 1904. The vest pocket was a twenty-two-year-old thought being restated to a mass audience.

The second real passage is the one readers most want to be fake. In Liberty he set out a view of eugenics — that by 2100 the unfit would be prevented from breeding by sterilisation and by making marriage harder — in language that is neither ambiguous nor misquoted: “Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.” It stands in the same article as the charged-particle weapon the press turned into the death ray, and it is part of the record.

That article carries a second lesson, about dates rather than words. It is cited across the internet, including on the companion website to a well-known documentary, as Liberty, February 1937. The issue is 9 February 1935, pages 5 to 7. Two checks settle it. The editor's note introducing the piece calls him “now in his seventy-eighth year”: he was seventy-eight in February 1935 and eighty in February 1937. And surviving physical copies of Liberty for 9 February 1935 carry the article, catalogued and sold as such. A date repeated a thousand times is still one claim, and it can be wrong.

How to date a line yourself.

The corpora that matter here are free, and none of them requires a subscription or a login.

• His own books and lectures. My Inventions and the 1894 collection edited by Thomas Commerford Martin, The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, are both plain text. Download them and search the file rather than a web page: an in-browser search finds only what has loaded. Most of the periodical writing is transcribed at tfcbooks.com and in the Tesla Universe article collection, both with scans beside the text.
• The patents. A United States patent of this period is a legal instrument with a fixed shape — title, specification, claims — and contains no aphorisms of any kind, so “it is in his patents” fails before a search begins. The list of grants is here, and each links to the scanned face.
• Newspapers. Chronicling America at the Library of Congress holds about 23.8 million digitised pages, in some 3.2 million issues, dated from 1736 to 1963. Set the display level to pages rather than issues, or the counts mean something else. Put the phrase in quotation marks, and keep it to four or five words: newsprint sets narrow columns, and a longer phrase will be split by a line ending somewhere in the corpus.
• The web, dated. The Internet Archive's CDX interface returns every capture of a URL with a timestamp, which turns “this page says so” into “this page said so on 12 May 2006”.

Four traps are worth knowing before the first search. The first hides successes rather than inventing them: a phrase search finds a phrase only where the scanning software read it as one run of words, and the Springfield Weekly Republican page above breaks “A man will be able to / carry one in his vest pocket” across a line. Search that whole sentence and the page does not come back, even though it is sitting in the archive with the words on it. Shorten the string until it fits inside one line of newsprint. Second, book-scanning services date volumes by catalogue metadata, and bound periodical runs and later reprints are routinely stamped with the wrong year, so an apparently early hit must be opened and read on the page. Third, quotation sites cite each other, so a line with two hundred sources can still have none. Fourth, translation drifts: a genuine remark rendered out of Serbian and back can arrive in English as a sentence he never composed in any language.

The single most useful habit is to look for the earliest appearance rather than the most impressive one. A line whose first traces are web comments around 2010 and which is everywhere a decade later has a shape, and that shape does not look like a sentence written in 1919 and quietly forgotten for ninety years.

Why the failures are printed here.

A search that returns nothing is a result, and it is the result almost nobody publishes, because it takes the same hour as a search that succeeds and produces no quotable line. It is also the only part of this article a reader can fully audit: the strings are below, the corpora are named and open, and anyone who runs them and gets a different answer has found something worth having.

Sources — primary documents

• Nikola Tesla, My Inventions. The Electrical Experimenter, February, March, April, May, June and October 1919. Full text.
• Thomas Commerford Martin (ed.), The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla. The Electrical Engineer, New York, 1894. Project Gutenberg 39272.
• Nikola Tesla, “The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires”, 1904, for the earlier form of the “huge brain” passage and the device carried in one's pocket. Scan and transcription.
• “When Woman Is Boss”, as told to John B. Kennedy. Collier's, 30 January 1926, page 17. Scan and transcription.
• Springfield Weekly Republican, Springfield, Massachusetts, 11 March 1926, reprinting the Collier's passage. Digitised page, Library of Congress.
• “A Machine to End War”, as told to George Sylvester Viereck. Liberty, 9 February 1935, pages 5–7. Scan and transcription.

Sources — further reading

• Chronicling America, Library of Congress: digitised United States newspapers, searchable full text.
• “Comments from the Inventor of the Purple Harmony Plates”, PurpleHarmonyPlates website, reproduced at bibliotecapleyades.net. Internet Archive capture, 12 May 2006.
• Wikiquote: Nikola Tesla, for the disputed-quotations apparatus and its citations.
• TruthOrFiction on the 3, 6 and 9 attribution, for the reported web datings of December 2009, 2010 and 2013.