The Fake 1899 Nikola Tesla Interview: Where It Really Comes From

The “1899 Tesla Interview” Is Fiction: Where the Text Comes From

Short answer: Nikola Tesla never gave the famous 1899 interview to a reporter called John Smith. The long conversation that circulates online, full of talk about light, angels, cosmic music and Einstein, is a script from a fictional Serbian television drama made in 2001. The Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade has no record that any such interview ever took place, so none of its lines should be quoted as Tesla's own words.

That does not make the text worthless. It is a piece of creative writing inspired by a real and genuinely strange man, and knowing where it comes from helps you enjoy it for what it is. Below we explain what the text claims, where it really started, the clues that give it away, and what Tesla actually said about himself in sources we can trust.

What the viral “interview” claims

The text is set out as a question-and-answer session. A journalist named John Smith visits Tesla, supposedly for a magazine called “Immortality”, and asks him who he is. Tesla answers with sweeping statements: that everything in the universe is light, that each nation has its own ray in the sun, that nobody truly dies but returns to light, and that he hears a kind of music of the spheres.

Later the “interview” turns into a list of ten conditions that allow an angel to adapt to life on Earth, with Tesla as the example. Along the way he discusses Mark Twain, sleep, memory, visions, illness, diet, Kundalini yoga, ball lightning and his disagreement with relativity. It is poetic, mystical and very quotable, which is exactly why it travelled so far on social media around 2015.

Where the text really comes from

The Italian fact-checking site Butac traced the text in 2015. It found that the “interview” is a translation of parts of a television film made for Serbian TV in 2001, in which an imaginary reporter, John Smith, meets Tesla in 1899. Butac links to a Serbian Wikipedia entry that reportedly identifies the drama as Tesla ili prilagođavanje anđela (roughly, “Tesla, or the Adaptation of Angels”). That title fits neatly with the ten “conditions of adaptation” in the dialogue.

Butac also notes that the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, which holds Tesla’s personal archive, has no information confirming the interview. No 1899 magazine called “Immortality” with a Tesla interview has ever been produced as evidence either. The text appears to have been machine-translated from Serbian into English, then copied from blog to blog with the fictional framing stripped away.

In short, it is fan fiction with good intentions: a writer imagining how Tesla might have spoken if he had been free to talk about everything at once.

Clues that give the fake away

Even without the fact check, the text contains details that could not have been said in 1899:

Einstein and relativity. The “Tesla” of the dialogue argues with Einstein about curved space. Einstein published special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915, so nobody could debate them in 1899.
Black holes and radar. The speaker mentions black holes and says he extended his hearing with radar. Both ideas belong to the twentieth century; the term “black hole” only became common in the 1960s.
The Waldorf-Astoria. The reporter mentions birds visiting Tesla’s window at the hotel. Tesla did live there, but according to his biography he moved in from 1900, after the supposed date of the interview.
Splitting the atom. The text credits Tesla’s lab with breaking the atom, something no one achieved in 1899.
A tidy life story. The dialogue looks back over his whole career, including events from decades later, as if the speaker already knew how his life would end.

The odd, broken English is another hint. Tesla wrote fluent, formal English; the viral text reads like an automatic translation.

What is true about Tesla in the story

The writer of the drama clearly knew Tesla’s biography, and several background details are real, even though the words are invented:

He was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, in the Lika region of today’s Croatia, into an ethnic Serb family.
As a young man he caught cholera after finishing school in 1873 and was bedridden for months, at times close to death.
He set up an experimental station at Colorado Springs in 1899, where he worked with enormous electrical discharges.
He became a close friend of Mark Twain, who admired his induction motor.
He never married and once said that remaining single helped his scientific work.
He fed pigeons for years and was especially devoted to one white pigeon he nursed when she was injured.
He later disputed Einstein’s physics and in 1933 announced his own energy theory opposed to it.

So the drama borrows real colour from his life, then puts lines into his mouth that he never said.

Tesla in his own words

If you want Tesla’s genuine voice, the best place to start is My Inventions, a six-part autobiographical series he wrote for the magazine Electrical Experimenter in 1919, later collected as a short book. In it he describes the vivid mental images that troubled him as a boy and that he later learned to use as a design tool: he said he could build and test a machine in his imagination before touching any metal.

The chapter on the rotating magnetic field tells the story the fictional interview borrows. Walking in a Budapest park with a friend at sunset, reciting lines from Goethe’s Faust, he suddenly saw how a rotating magnetic field could drive a motor. That idea led to the alternating-current induction motor he developed and patented in 1887–1888, which Westinghouse licensed and which still powers much of the world.

His real writing is strange and proud enough on its own. There is no need to invent mystical sermons for him.

Why fake Tesla quotes spread so easily

Tesla has become a modern legend: the misunderstood genius who died alone in a New York hotel room in January 1943. That image makes him a magnet for quotations about free energy, spirituality and the secrets of the universe. People want to believe that the inventor of AC power also held a hidden key to life itself.

Fictional dialogues, translated quotes and memes then lose their context as they are shared. A line written for an actor becomes a “quote”, and the quote becomes a “lost interview”. The same thing has happened to Einstein, Buddha and many others.

How to check a Tesla quote yourself

Ask for a date and a publication. A real interview names a newspaper or magazine you can find in an archive. “Immortality” magazine cannot be found.
Look for anachronisms. If a supposedly 1899 text mentions relativity, black holes or radar, it is not from 1899.
Search a fact-check site. Butac, Snopes and similar sites have covered many viral “lost interviews”.
Go to primary sources. Tesla’s own articles, patents and My Inventions are widely available, and the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade keeps his archive.

Read the John Smith dialogue, if you like, as a piece of Serbian television drama about a national hero. Just don’t put Tesla’s name under it.

Sources: Butac: L’intervista falsa a Nikola Tesla (Italian, 2015); Wikipedia: Nikola Tesla; Wikipedia: My Inventions; image: Wikimedia Commons; the dialogue first circulated in English via Truth Theory.

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