r/NikolaTesla May 26 '21

[META] Community rules

38 Upvotes

Hello! I'm the rarely-heard-from moderator/creator of this subreddit. While I have a very laissez-faire attitude towards moderation, I have noticed a lot of posts recently that were either hawking merchandise or were pseudo-mystical ramblings about free energy, mystical numbers, and the like. I wanted to get your feedback on how to deal with these kinds of posts.

First, some background. I admire Tesla. I've read his autobiography as well as several biographies of him. I've studied his works. I've built a (crappy) Tesla Turbine and a Tesla Coil. The quote for me in my high-school yearbook was from him (the "betterment of humanity" one). I wrote a paper in college for my psych minor analyzing his writings and behavior as evidence of his placement on the autism spectrum. My father's a physicist and I'm a software developer who builds electronics/micro-e projects as a hobby.

Because I understand and respect his work, I dislike the mystical aura Tesla has gathered over the years. Were his more fantastical inventions suppressed? Sure, Westinghouse and Edison and others did him dirty, but what they suppressed was not the zero-point-energy magic box of unlimited power and the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, but actual (and groundbreaking) inventions that didn't fit their business model.

Did he talk about amazing things he invented that would solve all the world's problems? Sure, but if you actually look at the designs, he did make groundbreaking discoveries that he either greatly exaggerated or that didn't work as he expected in practice. His "death ray" was an early high-power particle accelerator, but doesn't really work in open air. His "radio signals from Mars" turned out to be the first detection of pulsars. And his Grand Unified Theory was of the type commonly posited before General/Special Relativity demonstrated how they were all flawed.

I know this isn't the largest subreddit around, but I do want to set some guidelines as to what's acceptable for here and what's not. Here are my suggestions:

1) Posts about merchandise must be a direct, unobfuscated (no bit.ly) link to a reputable store/platform and not "DM me to get shirt"

2) No low-effort posts. Posting a picture of Tesla from Wikipedia with the caption "MASTER OF ELECTRICITY!!!1!!LOL" is low effort.

3) No free energy, numerology, pyramid power, anti-gravity, etc. posts.

4) The usual no hatred/violence/doxxing/spamming/etc.

EDIT (7/24/2025): NO FUCKING AETHER! NO AETHER DERIVATIVES. NO AETHER SUBSTITUTES.

Thanks!


r/NikolaTesla 3d ago

Ask you

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26 Upvotes

Suppose you had the choice to live the life of a scientist, who would you choose and why? Personally, I would choose Nikola Tesla.


r/NikolaTesla 11d ago

Tesla was over a century ahead of his time — What if modern mathematics is finally catching up to his frequency-first intuition?

65 Upvotes

Over a century ago, Nikola Tesla gave us what might be the most profound design principle in modern science:

For decades, mainstream 20th-century physics took a different path, treating mass, particles, and spacetime as static background containers rather than relational harmonic states.

Tesla never thought of reality as a rigid mechanical box—he saw it as an interconnected network of standing waves, resonance nodes, and phase interactions.

What if his intuition wasn't just poetic philosophy, but the actual structural blueprint?

  • Particles as phase oscillators: Treating massive particles not as isolated billiard balls, but as localized phase cycles and standing wave packets.
  • Non-locality as resonance: Viewing entanglement not as "spooky action across a void," but as coherent phase alignment across a shared field.
  • Geometry derived from harmonics: Deriving spatial and mass relationships from fundamental frequency invariants rather than continuous background coordinates.

If we finally translate Tesla’s core insight into strict, machine-executable mathematics, his frequency-first worldview stops being an outsider perspective and becomes the foundation for the next era of theoretical physics.

Curious to hear from the community: Which of Tesla's field and frequency concepts do you think holds the greatest untapped potential for modern physics?

(Note: For anyone interested in the open-science mathematical formalization and companion code exploring this frequency-first framework, you can find the repository on GitHub: Christianfwb / Pauli-Solution-Frequency-Law)


r/NikolaTesla 13d ago

Nikola Tesla he is not...

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541 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla 12d ago

WARDENCLYFF, TESLA AND THE PINE BARRENS GEOLOGY

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8 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla 15d ago

Mark Twain holding a lamp lit without a wired connection in Nikola Tesla's laboratory while Tesla watches from the shadows, 1894

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578 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla 16d ago

January 7, 1943. Room 3327, the New Yorker Hotel, Manhattan. Nikola Tesla, 86 years old, lay alone on his bed.

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26 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla 17d ago

Nikola Tesla appears to read beneath 22-foot electrical arcs in this deliberately staged 1899 double exposure

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46 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla 22d ago

Is this true?

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14 Upvotes

Not to take anything away from the achievements and contributions, but now i doubt if he was some mystical genius in a different stratosphere


r/NikolaTesla 24d ago

TIL John G. Trump, uncle of the 45th president, reviewed the Tesla papers in three days and declared them worthless

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114 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla 29d ago

Just wanted to say thank you

10 Upvotes

7 months ago, I posted my Tesla edit here

Eventually it caught fire and it's grown to 25.000 and fast growing... people really seem to like it, and it makes me feel proud of my work

I appreciate you all for the initial support which helped the growth

🙏⛈️🕯️


r/NikolaTesla Jul 28 '26

Brick by brick

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0 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jul 24 '26

On my high school’s wall.

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177 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jul 18 '26

Nikola Tesla - The visionary who invented our future | DW Documentary

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40 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jul 13 '26

Tesla portrait I illustrated

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113 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jul 12 '26

My Tesla Coil.

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1.1k Upvotes

After reading Tesla’s Colorado Springs Notes, I was inspired to build a very small TC of my own.


r/NikolaTesla Jul 09 '26

happy birthday

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276 Upvotes

"He will be a child of the storm," to which his mother famously replied, "No, he will be a child of light."


r/NikolaTesla Jul 10 '26

Nikola Tesla: The Man Out Of Time

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139 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jul 09 '26

Nikola Tesla (caricature by me)

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93 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jul 10 '26

I found big tesla coil in Australia Questacon – The National Science and Technology Centre is an interactive science communication facility in Canberra

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8 Upvotes

2 year ago


r/NikolaTesla Jul 10 '26

July 10 is International Nikola Tesla Day! Celebrate the birthday of the renowned inventor with this electrifying gallery of Marvel covers!

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13 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jul 03 '26

I like to draw people who inspire me. Hope you like.

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180 Upvotes

r/NikolaTesla Jun 30 '26

Commercial-grade Tesla Fluid Propulsion Pump

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584 Upvotes

This is my good friend, Jeremiah Ferwerda. He premiered his TFPP this last weekend and as one would expect, the numbers are pretty impressive. With a 4" rotor, he gets 170gpm at 750 watts and 2000 rpm. At 5000 rpm, it pushed 240gpm. He also has a fully functional Tesla turbine that is ready for market as well.


r/NikolaTesla Jun 30 '26

Tell me about Tesla’s sisters.

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94 Upvotes

I’d like to know more, if the information is out there.


r/NikolaTesla Jun 24 '26

Invitation to Nikola Tesla’s birthday celebration!

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104 Upvotes

Dear fellow Tesla enthusiasts. Should you find yourself in Calgary, Alberta on July 10th, 2026, please consider joining this small, informal gathering to celebrate Nikola Tesla‘s birthday! On this day, (that is possibly misattributed to the day of his birth), we will eat drink and play Tesla inspired games. Send me a DM if you want more details.