Essays on Tesla's electromagnetic work — what he actually recorded at Colorado Springs, and how those notebooks read against a century of measurement since.
Written from primary sources · updated as pieces are finishedIn 1899 Tesla spent 221 days in a shed on the Colorado prairie writing down what his instruments did, in daily entries totalling some 716,000 characters. Most of what circulates about that winter is second-hand. This essay works from the notebook itself: what he measured, what he inferred, what he got right, and the places where his own record contradicts the legend that grew around it.
The Schumann resonance was formally measured in 1952. Tesla was writing about Earth's electrical periodicity in 1899. What did he actually detect, what did he only suppose, and how close did the 1899 apparatus get to a signal that took another half-century to name?
The "earthquake machine" is the most repeated Tesla story and the least documented. Separating the 1896 mechanical oscillator experiments from the newspaper mythology, and looking at what resonant mechanical coupling in structures actually does.
Born during a lightning storm in a Croatian village, Tesla spent a childhood watching weather the way other children watch animals. Where the lifelong preoccupation with electricity actually started.
Tesla's most ambitious build, and what it was really for — a planetary-scale test of the Colorado Springs conclusions, abandoned before it could confirm or refute them.
Eighty-six years, and a body of work still being read.
Born during a lightning storm in Smiljan, Croatia.
Arrives in New York with four cents and a letter of introduction to Edison.
The resonant transformer that changed electrical engineering.
Resonance experiments with mechanical apparatus — the source of the "earthquake machine" story.
221 days of experiments on atmospheric electricity, Earth conductivity and natural frequencies.
Tesla dies at 86, leaving notebooks that researchers are still working through.
“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
— Nikola TeslaEvery piece works from Tesla's own notebooks, published papers and contemporary records, with modern commentary kept clearly separate from quotation. Where the historical record is thin or contradictory, the essay says so rather than filling the gap.
Tesla's stationary-wave work is treated here as a question in the history and physics of science. No essay on this site claims that Tesla predicted earthquakes, and this program makes no forecasting claims of its own.
The essays draw on the Colorado Springs notebooks and the archive behind them.
IN HONOR OF NIKOLA TESLA · 1856–1943
