RankingsPrimerArbiterPhysicistMathematicianContrarianQESites logClaimsSourcesResearch notes

Tesla: central claims

(Updated 2026-10-08 after QE (MINOR): claim 1 split into 1a and 1b, claim 4 reworded after a full read of Tesla's 1900 article, claim 6 corrected, claim 8 added, source-gap note refreshed. The earlier version said the 1900 text was "consistent with the second law"; see "Corrections to earlier documents". Updated again 2026-10-08 by the arbiter, revision F: the retried deep reads of the 1900 Century article (pp.15-24) and of Free Energy Secrets (pp.137-156), and the further reads R1-R3 of the Colorado Springs Notes, the 1916 interview and the 1904 Rankine papers, are folded in.)

Source gap note. The folder is rich in readable text: all 30 manifest documents were extracted and none was skipped. The key primary works are present: the collected US patents (OCR, headers unreliable), Martin's 1894 book (which contains the 1891, 1892 and 1893 lectures), the 1891 lecture, the 1893 lecture, the 1900 Century article, the 1892 "Dissipation" letter, the 1919 "Famous Scientific Illusions", and "Tesla Said" (Tesla's own letters and articles 1888-1939). Gaps to be aware of: - Obtained since the first version, from the Investigator and held in research/files/ (they are not manifest documents): Tesla's Colorado Springs Notes 1899-1900 (the laboratory diary), the 1904 Electrical World and Engineer article in full, the 1916 legal interview, the 1904 Smithsonian/Rankine letters, and two Corum papers. Read so far: the 3-4 July 1899 entry; and, in further read R1 (2026-10-08), the entries of 24 and 30 July, 6 August, 26 and 28 August and 8 December 1899, the photograph notes of 1-2 January 1900, and Marincic's introduction and his commentary on 30 July, 26 and 28 August and 2 January. The rest of the Notes (most of June-December 1899; the 3-7 January 1900 diary text) is digest-free and unread; no PDF of the book is held, so the garbled formulas of 30 July could not be checked on a page image. The 1916 interview chapter VI and Appendix III (Wardenclyffe appeal, Bingham, Exhibit B) were read in R2. The 1904 Rankine file was read in R3: it does not contain the Kerr, Page & Cooper opinion itself, only Tesla's covering mention of it. - Content-filter gap (2026-10-08): the first runs of three deep reads were blocked by the content filter (Century 1900 pp.1-33 and pp.15-33; Free Energy Secrets pp.137-156). The retries are done for Century pp.15-24 and for Free Energy Secrets pp.137-146 and 147-156, so the Free Energy Secrets gap is closed. Still without a deep read: Century pp.1-14 and pp.25-33 (the Colorado, wireless and "not as yet actually effected" passages); those pages rest on the fact-finder's full text-layer read, which is quoted in facts.json, and are not unread. Free Energy Secrets p.148 has no text layer and was not checked as an image. - Still not in the folder: the Allis-Chalmers (Dahlstrand) report and Richards's test log (known only as quotations), John Trump's 1943 report and the full texts of his Exhibits (known only from the FBI file's abstracts), Eyring Corp.'s raw coil measurements, Sutton and Spaniol (1988) and Corum, Corum and Spaniol (1988) on cavity Q (known only as reported in Valone), Golka's Air Force reports, and Flowers's 1925 proposal and any Bureau of Standards reply. Anything about those rests on the secondary quotation named in each case. - OCR quality: the patents, Tesla Said, Valone and the FBI files are OCR; patent numbers in page headers are frequently garbled (512,840 for 512,340; 685,058 for 685,958). The collected-patents PDF has a duplicated page (PDF p.415 repeats p.414), so US 723,188 is present only as a drawing and its first specification page. - Most claims of "radiant energy", "fuelless generators", "longitudinal waves" and "Tesla's papers seized" are known only from later advocates (Vassilatos, Lindemann, Nichelson, Valone, O'Neill, Cheney). The deep reads separate Tesla's own words from these interpretations; later steps must do the same and say plainly when a conclusion rests on [memory] alone. - Digest-only coverage that remains: Martin's appendix (oscillators, pp.505-520; J. J. Thomson exchange, pp.417-430), Tesla Said outside the pages deep read, Valone's biography and Niagara chapters and homopolar trials, and the peripheral documents. See "Remaining reads" at the end.

The central claims (deduplicated across documents)

1a. Stationary waves were observed in the earth at Colorado Springs, and power can be sent through the ground over short distances by resonance. Tesla's 1904 account of 3 July 1899 (a thunderstorm tracked to about 300 km; receiver response rising and falling "in regularly recurring intervals"; his assistant Lowenstein made similar observations) is his stated experimental evidence; the Notes entry of 3-4 July records the relay set more delicate and the storm "greater than 200 miles". The Notes for 1-7 January 1900 describe five lamps lit "through the ground" by a "carefully synchronized coil", an estimate that 40 to 60 lamps could be lit at full excitation, and the sentence "The existance of stationary waves proves the feasibility of the project almost beyond any doubt". The Notes do not give the ground-path distance for the 2 January lamps (Marincic: "Tesla gives no data about the distance"); the 1 January field lamps (three lamps in a 62-ft square loop centred about 60 ft from the primary loop, not grounded) were lit by magnetic induction, a different set-up. Earlier entries: 24 July 1899, sparks on the lightning arresters with the secondary on an isolated ground plate ("the earth behaves simply as an ordinary conductor"); 30 July, a 240,000-per-second system with which stationary waves were "hoped" for (no result recorded), and short waves giving "higher e.m.f. per unit of length in the ground"; 26 August, arrester arcs with waves "3-4 miles long", the question whether the ground connection is a node or a crest left "to be decided by further observations", and Tesla's own alternative, "static induction upon wire through the air". The 6 August water-pipe stationary-wave experiment is listed among items omitted for want of time: the only datum is "Distance from groundplate to End of main exactly 550 feet". Marincic judges that the standing waves Tesla used to explain the arrester sparks "cannot be significant at these frequencies", and that Tesla's "total energy set in movement" (300,000 W in his 2 January estimate) is circulating energy, the active power being "much less" and inversely proportional to Q. The 1900 Century article describes lamps lit at about 100 feet from the primary and sparks drawn from a water main 300 feet away. Tesla's 1900 statement of what had not been done: "I have not, as yet, actually effected a transmission of a considerable amount of energy, such as would be of industrial importance, to a great distance". [read: Tesla Said and Valone (1904 article), Notes (research/files), Century 1900 pp.24-25, 30-32, Prodigal Genius deep read; deep/further-R1.md]

1b. Power and signals can be sent to any distance, even the antipodes, through the earth (and the rarefied upper air), with little loss, by true conduction and not by Hertzian radiation; and Tesla stated that he had done it. Tesla (1893 NELA lecture; patents 645,576, 649,621, 787,412, 1,119,732; 1900 Century article; 1904-1927 statements) says a grounded, quarter-wavelength resonant coil with an elevated terminal sets up stationary waves in the earth, recoverable in tuned receivers with "a small fraction of one per cent" loss even at the antipodes (US 787,412: the planet transmits slow oscillations "without sensible distortion and attenuation"; frequency "smaller than twenty thousand per second", lowest "six per second"; a wave-train of "not less than ... 0.08484 of a second"). The patents give no measured loss or efficiency. The only quantitative circuit is a 0.04 uF, 50 kV, 230-250 kHz "model plant" with terminals 50 feet apart in an evacuated tube. Tesla's own statements of a performed test, all promotional or interview texts with no laboratory record in the folder: December 1904 (Carpenter interview, as quoted by Corum) "I actually sent electrical vibrations around the world and received them again"; 1907 a current of "one hundred amperes around the globe"; the World System prospectus "passed a current, sufficient to light more than 200 incandescent lamps, around the Globe" and "a loss not exceeding a few per cent"; 1917 efficiency "as high as 96 or 97 per cent"; 1927 a current "returning from the antipodes to its origin with undiminished strength". O'Neill (1944, p.171), citing "a number of publications" he does not name, says Tesla lit 200 lamps (about 10 kW) 26 miles from his laboratory at over 95 per cent efficiency; Valone repeats it citing O'Neill. Against that report: Tesla's 1900 caveat above; his 1916 statement that the Colorado receiver was "10 miles or so" away; and the Notes' editor Marincic, who says the diary records no measurements at great distances and that Tesla "was never able to carry out the experiments" at the frequencies where the earth's resonances lie (Tesla's 1900 article claims effects observed to about 600 miles). In the 1916 interview Tesla calls the Colorado test distances "small", meant "to give me quantitative data", puts his greatest signalling distance at about 30 miles (Houston Street to West Point, before 1897), cannot give the distance of the grounded-coil lamp test ("That was out in the field. I cannot tell you"), says that coil would work as well at the antipodes as 10 feet away (a design statement, not a test), and says Wardenclyffe "was not yet quite ready" for a distance test. Replication of the apparatus, not of the transmission: R. Golka's Project Tesla built a 51-foot coil at Wendover AFB, reportedly run at twice Tesla's power; no result for the earth-ionosphere cavity is reported. The cavity numbers conflict: the Corums' 1984 table gives accepted Q 3.8-7.8 and Q 3.2-6.4 from Tesla's data; Van Voorhies reports Sutton and Spaniol (1988) measuring Q "as high as 1000" (confirmation by "personal correspondence"); Grotz estimates "about 6% per round trip". [read: Complete Patents, Tesla Said, Famous Illusions, Prodigal Genius, Valone, Century 1900; deep/further-R1.md, further-R2.md]

  1. The transverse-wave ether of Maxwell and Hertz is the wrong picture; the effects are electrostatic, carried by a medium of particles ("electric sound waves"), and later authors call them longitudinal or scalar. Tesla (1891, 1892, 1905) asserts that light and heat effects come from rapidly alternating electrostatic force, that air dissipates energy by "sound waves of electrified air", and that the Maxwellian transverse-ether hypothesis is no longer believable. He never uses the word "longitudinal" in the pages read; Vassilatos, Valone, Bass and Grotz supply it. [read: 1891 lecture, Dissipation letter, Tesla Said; secondary: Valone, Free Energy Secrets]

  2. High-frequency, high-potential resonant circuits do things ordinary circuits cannot: wireless lighting, single-wire power, large voltage rise, and a coil whose own capacitance neutralises its self-induction (the bifilar coil); some advocates claim a measured voltage gain. Tesla's lectures and the Coil patent (US 512,340) are the primary sources; Trinkaus, Nichelson and the amateur coil literature claim efficient lighting and "voltage gain". The patent itself claims only built-in capacitance, and Nichelson's measured trace is a transmission ratio below one (0.97 against 0.18). [read: Martin 1894, 1891 and 1893 lectures, Coil patent, Trinkaus, Voltage-gain, Thermodynamics2]

  3. Energy can be drawn from the ambient medium (a "self-acting" or "fuelless" generator; radiant energy / "cold electricity"). Tesla's own statements range from a 1891 possibility ("some more direct way from the medium"), through the 1900 sink and tank argument, to 1902 and 1931-33 claims to have harnessed "cosmic energy". In the 1900 Century text Tesla himself argues a partial net gain from a single ambient reservoir: because no perfect heat-conversion is known, "continuous pumping out" is needed, "But evidently there will be less to pump out than flows in ... some energy will be gained from the medium. What is not converted in flowing down can just be raised up with its own energy, and what is converted is clear gain." He reaches the scheme from his own paraphrase of the second law ("impossible for an inanimate mechanism or self-acting machine to cool a portion of the medium below the temperature of the surrounding"), which drops Kelvin's "coldest of the surrounding objects"; his thermopile reaching to outer space is therefore an ordinary two-reservoir engine, not an exception (p.19-20). He reports no measured output of any self-acting engine (pp.15-24). He adds that he "cannot hope to produce a self-acting machine ... for a long time yet", that in the liquid-air case the consumer's gain is "offset by an equal loss of the producer", and (p.33) that "we shall soon have a self-acting heat-engine capable of deriving moderate amounts of energy". Nichelson reads this as the unipolar dynamo and the bifilar coil; Vassilatos and Lindemann read it as unidirectional spark-gap impulses producing a non-electromagnetic "radiant" event, identical to Edwin Gray's conversion tube and to Moray's and Baumann's devices. Output evidence in the folder: none by instrument. Gray's 1973 demonstrations are press reports with company officers and one outside guest as named witnesses and no energy measurement; Lindemann's own build of Gray's 1975 patent produced "a negligible amount" of recycled energy and no cold electricity (no data given). Lindemann's 1995 article proposes a condenser-less cycle (compressor, ambient heat exchanger, throttle, turbine) whose turbine output exceeds the compressor input, with no energy balance, and names working machines (Doczekal 1939, Schaeffer and Serogodski, Wiseman) with no test data. [read: Century 1900 pp.15-22, 33 (deep read pp.15-24); Fuelless; Thermodynamics2; Free Energy Secrets; Valone; 1891 lecture]

  4. The Tesla disc ("bladeless", boundary-layer) turbine and pump give very high power for their weight and good efficiency. Tesla and his associate Lowenstein report about 10 hp per pound, 200 hp from an 18-inch rotor at 9000 rpm and 125 psi using 38 lb of steam per hp-hour, projected 8-12 lb if compounded; the Allis-Chalmers engineer Dahlstrand reports about 38% mechanical efficiency on a 60-inch, 500 kW unit, disk distortion and a need for gearing. Recomputed against ideal expansion, all measured figures lie between about 25% and 52% (the low end is Lowenstein's first test, 102.8 bhp at 53.4 lb per bhp-hour, about 25% by IAPWS-IF97, arbiter QE revision E; QE's 27% from memory steam values is superseded), below the "80 to 90 per cent" Tesla stated. [read: Hayes deep read, Cairns, Prodigal Genius, patents 1,061,142 and 1,061,206]

  5. Tesla's "teleforce" beam (death ray) and the fate of his papers. Tesla (1934, 1940) said a beam of tiny particles could melt aircraft engines 250 miles away. No apparatus or test is on record, but written descriptions existed in 1943: John Trump's abstracts of Exhibit F (a 'non-dispersive' particle beam through an open-ended vacuum tube), Exhibit H (letters to the British Government of 1936-38 offering it for a fee; British reply "a polite expression of disinterest"), Exhibit J (one sentence of method) and Exhibit Q (a signed 20 April 1935 agreement with the Soviet trading body Amtorg, $25,000, 50 million volts, range 100 miles or more); Trump, an OSRD evaluator with an institutional stake, judged them unworkable. The full texts have not been read. His papers were sealed by the Alien Property Custodian on 9 January 1943; Trump (NDRC/OSRD) reported they held nothing of significant value; the FBI says it did not seize them but O'Neill (1944) says FBI operatives opened the safe. Later military interest in the record: on 21 August to 11 September 1945 (Cheney's quotation of OAP letters) photostats of the Trump-annotated exhibits went to the Equipment Laboratory at Wright Field and were "never returned"; on 26 October 1945 a former Tesla protege and two Wright Field men asked the FBI for access to the stored effects (some 75 boxes and trunks) and were referred to the Custodian; a 6 December 1960 caller said he was making a study "for U. S. Air Force on subject of geophysics"; a 9 February 1981 memo from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense says Tesla's papers "may contain basic principles which would be of considerable value to certain ongoing research within the DoD"; a 1983 airtel records Wright-Patterson staff seeking the papers because the Soviets "allegedly" used them. Bloyce Fitzgerald told the FBI in January 1943 that Tesla's wireless experiments "had been completed and perfected", that a working model costing "more than ten thousand [dollars]" was in a Governor Clinton Hotel box and that about 80 trunks of plans existed; the FBI confirmed the hotel held Tesla property against a $400 debt but did not examine it. [read: FBI files 1 and 2, Prodigal Genius, Death Ray essay]

  6. Priority and discovery claims made for Tesla by his admirers: cosmic rays, artificial radioactivity, the atom smasher, the electron microscope, X-rays, fluorescent and neon lighting, radio, the vacuum tube and the induction motor. O'Neill and Valone state these; the documents cited for them are Tesla's 1891-1892 lectures, which describe electrode "disintegration", moving phosphorescent spots on the glass and a "very special radiation", and O'Neill concedes the experimental records "are not available". The rotating-field motor and polyphase system are documented and mainstream. Related priority items in the record: the 1898 telautomaton (US 613,809) for radio control; the 1907 Tesla-Poulsen priority letters and John Stone Stone's testimony that Tesla first saw the role of the upper atmosphere. [read: Prodigal Genius deep read, 1891 lecture, Martin 1894, Tesla Said digests]

  7. Tesla received periodic signals from another planet in 1899 and later proposed signalling Mars and beyond. Tesla's own words: Collier's, 9 February 1901 ("Talking with Planets"), the Colorado changes came "periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me", he "could not decipher their meaning", and "the feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another"; 1919 (Herald, 12 October) the signals "might have come from Mars"; 1921 (Electrical World) "a regular repetition of numbers" that "must have emanated from Mars"; the Century article of 1900 ("interplanetary communication has entered the stage of probability"); 1937-38 a device to flash energy "through interstellar space to any distance without the slightest dispersion" (with a prize application to the French Academy). In 1921 Tesla attributed other people's 1919-21 "planetary signals" to transmitter undertones. The Corums read the 1899 signals as Jovian radio emission (Corum 2003; untested). The Notes contain, under 8 December 1899, the text of a statement Tesla sent at I. Hawthorne's request to the North American (Philadelphia): wireless power may let man make changes on the globe like those "now being wrought by intelligent beings on a neighbouring planet" (line 17147-17149; a press statement copied into the diary, with no measurement behind "to all evidence"), and no record of number-like signals has been found in the pages read. [read: Tesla Said deep read, Century 1900, Prodigal Genius deep read; Corum 2003 in research/files not read in full]

Corrections to earlier documents

(Recorded here for the orchestrator and later steps, from QE and the deep readers' findings.)

  • Tesla's 1900 "sink" argument (arbiter claim 4, primer 4.4 and the evidence table: "not refuted; consistent with the second law"). Wrong. The earlier review quoted Tesla's caveat ("We do not know of any such absolutely perfect process of heat-conversion") and stopped. The paragraph continues "necessitating continuous pumping out. But evidently there will be less to pump out than flows in ... some energy will be gained from the medium ... what is converted is clear gain" [read: Century reprint p.21]. That claims a partial net gain from one ambient reservoir; the Mathematician's Carnot calculation (work gained Q_h(1 - T_c/T_h) equals the cost of pumping the unconverted heat back up) rules it out. Thermodynamics2's deep read had flagged this and was not carried forward. Nichelson's reading is closer to Tesla's text than the primer said, and the primer's lesson that later readers "drop the caveat" needs rewording: Tesla argued the partial-gain version himself.
  • Primer 7, "his diary was more cautious than his press articles." Incomplete. The 3-4 July 1899 entry's caution concerns only where the waves were reflected; the Notes for 1-7 January 1900 already say the stationary waves prove "the feasibility of the project almost beyond any doubt" and that communication "with any point of the globe irrespective of distance, is very near its practical solution". The earlier statement that the Notes and the 1904 article are "not in the folder" is also out of date (they are in research/files/).
  • Claim 6 and primer 4.6 ("no apparatus, drawing, parameters or test exist"). Overstated. Written descriptions were abstracted in 1943 (Exhibits F, H, J, Q); no apparatus or test is on record.
  • Arbiter "Absence of evidence" item 2 ("no primary record of Project Nick"). True of the name only. The FBI file records the 1945 photostat shipment to Wright Field's Equipment Laboratory ("never returned"), the 26 October 1945 Wright Field visit, the 1960 Air Force caller and the 1981 DoD memo.
  • Turbine efficiency band. Primer 4.5 and 6 ("29-52 per cent", "14-52 per cent") should read about 25-52 per cent (QE's memory-based 27 per cent superseded by the IAPWS-IF97 recomputation, arbiter QE revision E). The primer also uses "Professor C. D. Richards"; Lowenstein's text says C.D. but Hayes elsewhere prints C.B. Richards (unresolved).
  • facts.json how_read for Valone and FBI 02 understated the deep reads (Valone also covers Tutt, Corum and Corum ch.12, Rauscher and Van Bise, Van Voorhies, Grotz and Flowers; FBI 02 pp.43-60). Corrected 2026-10-08. FBI 02 pp.47-48 had been only skimmed earlier; they are now read.
  • Century article summary in facts.json said "movements of about 100,000 volts" and "12 million volts in the Fig. 1 photograph"; the text says about 100,000 horse-power, and "over twelve million volts" is the Fig. 10 caption (which also gives "seventy-five thousand horse-power" and 130,000 alternations per second). Corrected.
  • O'Neill (Prodigal Genius). p.157 dates Tesla's stationary-wave article "May 5, 1904"; the correct date is 5 March 1904 (O'Neill's own pp.176 and 185, Valone's reprint). p.172 has Tesla returning to New York "in the fall of 1899"; the Notes have entries to 7 January 1900. pp.170-171 say the Colorado records "never will be told"; the Notes (published 1978) overtake this. His 100 and 135 million volts are 5-10 times Tesla's own figures (12 million in 1900; about 20 million in 1917). His "more than 135 feet" spark is longer than Tesla's own "probably more than one hundred feet". The 26-mile test has no source (see claim 1b); the later 26-mile mentions in Valone (pp.112, 138) cite O'Neill and are not independent.
  • Valone, cavity Q. The Corums' own table gives Q 3.8-7.8 (accepted) and 3.2-6.4 (Tesla-derived); the "up to 1000" is Sutton and Spaniol (1988), reported second-hand by Van Voorhies. Flowers's "Sketch B" is an electrical 300 m ring model, not the balloon test (the balloon is described only in the quoted text); the Bureau of Standards' H. L. Curtis is not Tesla's friend Leonard E. Curtis. Van Voorhies's "about 11% less loss than a 200 kV power line" does not match his own figures (0.25 against 1.15 dB per megametre is 78% less).
  • FBI file. The "1959" Air Force geophysics caller is dated 6 December 1960 (memo "12-6-60"). The 1970 letter about junk men does not name Wardenclyffe. The "wall of force" phrase (1957 memo) is the FBI's paraphrase of Tesla's 1934-40 claims. Trump's abstracts list Exhibits A-Q, not A-L. The FBI's own 1981 statements disagree on whether the papers were released to Kosanovic in February 1943 or still stored in 1945. The Snigier article is in Design News (1976) and the covering letter's writer is redacted, so he must not be named Golka. In Tesla Said, the 1901 Collier's text does not say the signals were "numbers" (that is the 1921 letter); the 1921 letter's "1889" for Colorado is a slip for 1899.
  • Collected patents. US 723,188 is incomplete in the PDF (p.415 duplicates p.414); its claims are not in the folder.
  • Earlier corrections kept from the first version:
  • "Wheelwork of nature" and "hitch our wagon to a star": any file that places these in the 20 May 1891 AIEE lecture is wrong. The "wheelwork" sentence is in the 1892 London lecture as printed in Martin's book (printed p.236, PDF p.261). The "wagon" phrase was not found in any extracted Tesla book; its source is unknown.
  • Digests of Hayes attach Lowenstein's "superior to the best guarantee" remark to the first table (53.4 lb per bhp-h); the source puts it after the second (35 lb). Hayes dates the Stockbridge article "March 1920"; internal evidence dates it 1910-11.
  • Cairns did not test a 9.75-inch turbine; he gives a design and two no-load speeds for a half-size model. Do not merge his 200 hp (18-inch) and 110 hp (9.75-inch) figures.
  • Voltage-gain paper: 0.18 and 0.97 are measured peaks; the calculated gains are about 25,000 and 14,000; "929%" should be 946%; "14/24" is 14/25. In Thermodynamics2 the text says "several orders of magnitude" but its Fig. 6 shows a ratio of about 5.
  • Nichelson Fuelless: "1.6 x 10^11 J" should be 1.6 x 10^10 J; the dated clipping is the Herald of 9 June 1902.
  • Valone (Nichelson chapter): the 7.5 Hz frequency is Valone's insertion after Corum 1986; Eq. (5) loses "per second", so "19-190 MV" rests on a unit error; the Bass chapter's "longitudinal" waves have E parallel to B and zero energy flow.
  • Famous Scientific Illusions, Fig. 7: Tesla's (1/4)^30 of 1000 kW is about 0.9 picowatt, not "115 billionth of a watt".
  • Tesla Said, Mars article: the printed "16,400,000,000" ratio is inconsistent with the 250,000 sq ft mirror and Tesla's own 27,400,000 moon ratio (consistent value 1.64e13); "fifteen one-thousandth of a horsepower" should be about 0.15 hp; Mars gravity "two-thirds" should be about 0.38.
  • FBI statements: "The FBI had no involvement" overstates the file (the New York office inquired in January 1943; Washington told it to approach the State's Attorney and Surrogate Court). "The FBI seized the papers" is contradicted by the file (the Custodian sealed them on 9 January 1943). The date of death is 7 or 8 January in different FBI papers. The FBI cites O'Neill's p.277; in the 1994 edition held here the sentence is on p.244. A 1981 FBI letter says the papers were examined by OAP, OSRD, ONI and NRL and released to Sava Kosanovich.
  • Lindemann: Gray's "Efficient Power Supply" is printed 4,595,975 (p.55) and 4,595,977 (p.73); Tesla's "Electrical Transformer" is 593,138. His "impulses shorter than 100 nanoseconds are cold" is not in Vassilatos's text. Gray's birth year is 1923 (contents) or 1925 (biography) in the same book.

  • Names: the WPAFB expert "Butler" is unrelated to Butler Library (Columbia). The "Fitzgerald of the Alien Property Custodian" in the January 1943 teletype is not necessarily the informant engineer Bloyce Fitzgerald.

  • (Revision F, 2026-10-08) The Kerr, Page & Cooper opinion: arbiter.md (Absence of evidence item 1), primer.md (section 6, "Where the record goes dark") and contrarian.md (line 206) say the firm called Tesla's patents "controlling" and worth "not less than $5,000,000". The 1904 file holds only Tesla's covering letter: "you will see that they are controlling" is Tesla's reading of an enclosure whose text is not in the scan, and the $5,000,000 is Tesla's own sentence, not attributed to the firm [read: research/files/tesla-papers-1904-rankine-letters_djvu.txt lines 307-311; deep/further-R3.md]. The catalogue lists the firm's reply (research/2026-10-08-archive-org.md line 43), so a fuller scan may hold it.

  • (Revision F) The 6 August 1899 "water-pipe stationary waves" (qe.md lines 42 and 237, research/2026-10-08-archive-org.md, contrarian.md line 203, mathematician.md line 151): the diary lists the experiment as omitted and gives only the 550 ft distance; no measurements survive.
  • (Revision F) The January 1900 lamps (arbiter QE revision B, primer 4.1 and evidence table): "tens of feet from the primary" and "one to five lamps at about 60-100 ft by near-field induction" merge two set-ups. The 1 January field lamps were in an ungrounded loop about 60 ft from the primary (magnetic coupling); the 2 January table lamps, which carry the "through the ground" and "feasibility" text, were fed by a grounded quarter-wave coil at an unstated distance.
  • (Revision F) The planetary line in the Notes (claim 8, arbiter, primer 4.7: "a draft note/passage") is the copy of an 8 December 1899 press statement to the North American, not a laboratory draft.
  • (Revision F) Stale copy: claim 5 still said "about 27%" for Lowenstein's first test after the orchestrator's fix of line 40; now 25%.
  • (Revision F) Century diagram b: "a cylindrical enclosure" (physicist.md line 70; Nichelson's summary in facts.json) uses a word printed in square brackets in the reprint, probably an editor's insertion; Tesla's text says "an enclosure T".

Remaining reads (for the orchestrator)

Done in QE remediation: Century 1900 (full text, by the fact-finder), Prodigal Genius pp.153-185 and 209-221, Valone Van Voorhies/Grotz/Flowers and Corum, Rauscher and Tutt chapters, Complete Patents pp.404-448, Tesla Said planetary and globe claims, FBI 02 pp.43-60, FBI 01 pp.70-133, Free Energy Secrets pp.1-19 and 141-156.

Done 2026-10-08 (revision F): Century pp.15-24 deep read (retry); Free Energy Secrets pp.137-156 (retry); further reads R1 (Colorado Springs Notes entries and Marincic), R2 (1916 interview ch. VI and Appendix III), R3 (1904 Rankine file).

Not yet done: - Century 1900 pp.25-33 and pp.1-14 as a deep read (the retry covered pp.15-24; the text-layer read by the fact-finder stands in for it): Opus. - Colorado Springs Notes: the 3-7 January 1900 diary text (lines 19446-20600) and the 3 July 1899 "signals" entries that the planetary claim is usually tied to; the printed pp.115-116 and p.348 against a scan, for the OCR slips R1 flags. - Martin 1894, PDF pp.417-430 (J. J. Thomson exchange) and pp.505-520 (oscillators): Sonnet; question: Tesla's reply on vacuum-tube discharge and the mechanical oscillator claims. - Records to obtain: the Kerr, Page & Cooper opinion itself (Smithsonian / Tesla Papers original or a fuller scan); Sutton and Spaniol 1988; Corum, Corum and Spaniol 1988; Golka's Wendover reports and Radio-Electronics, February 1981; Flowers's 1925 proposal and any Bureau of Standards reply (National Archives, NBS records); Trump's full exhibits; US 723,188 claims from the patent office.