Was Tesla forgotten? Fame, patent citations and legend dates

The question

Three popular claims about Tesla's afterlife can be tested. He was famous in the 1890s, then forgotten. His later patents were picked up decades afterwards. And the stories told about him are true.

Each is narrowed to something countable: how often his name appears in print, how often later patents cite his, and the earliest page on which each famous story can be found.

The test

An AI model (Claude) ran all three studies on public data, at Paul's direction. Each had its rules saved before the data were collected, and a known-answer check.

Fame. The AI counted the full name "Nikola Tesla" by year in New Zealand's Papers Past (941 hits to 1943), Utah's newspapers (246) and Google Books (1880 to 2019), beside Edison and Marconi. "Forgotten" meant below a fifth of his 1890s peak for five years running. The US national archive could not be reached. As a check, "Lindbergh" spiked in 1927 in all three sources.

Patents. The AI read, on Google Patents, which later patents cite each of the 111 US patents on Wikipedia's list of Tesla's patents. It compared them with 40 Edison patents of the same dates and 33 ordinary patents of the same days. As a check, Edison's lamp, Bell's telephone and the Wrights' flying machine (45, 17 and 36 citations) stood out from the patents beside them (0, 2 and 0).

Legends. Eight famous Tesla stories and six Edison stories were traced to the earliest page the AI could find and read: 98 evidence rows, 70 from pages opened and 28 second-hand. As a check, the 1895 laboratory fire was in the New York Times next morning and has never changed.

What came out

Fame: half right.

By the rule he was forgotten in all three, but not erased. In 1935, 38 of 43 New Zealand mentions fall in July, around his birthday press conferences, and 33 of 38 in 1943 fall in January, the month he died. He lost standing, not visibility. In books, his name against Edison's fell from 0.70 in the 1890s to 0.076 in the 1910s. He passed Marconi's full name in 1996 but has not caught Edison.

Patents: picked up later. The 111 patents drew 4,770 citation links from 2,339 later patent documents. Mean citations per patent: 43.0 for Tesla, 1.6 for Edison's same-date patents and 2.3 for ordinary ones. A Tesla patent beats an Edison one 78 times in 100 (p below 0.0001). Two groups carry 82%: the wireless patents of 1900 to 1914 (64%), and the disc turbine, pump and one-way valve of 1913 to 1920 (18%). The AC motor patents collect 6%.

Three firms supply 45% of the citations to his later work. Count different citers instead and the turbine has 172, the pump 169 and the valve 149, against 43 to 65 for the wireless patents. The sturdiest legacy is the least famous.

Legends: later than the man. Three of the eight are in print in his lifetime: the $50,000 "joke" (1919), the earthquake machine (1912) and the 1915 Nobel report. The other five first appear after he died in 1943, three of them in John J. O'Neill's 1944 biography: the torn Westinghouse contract, the pigeon speech and the "two great men" letter. The Morgan "meter" line appears in 1961 as an idea and in 2003 as a quotation, and the birth storm in 1977.

Edison's stories are older on the page. Once in print, both sets grew alike: 3.9 additions on average for Tesla, 3.8 for Edison. Tesla's legend is not more exaggerated than Edison's. It is later.

What this does not show

• Fame. The curves rest on New Zealand and Utah papers with small counts, not New York papers. The onset year is good to a few years. Only the full name was counted.
• Patents. A citation is a nod, not proof that anything works. For the two "radiant energy" patents, 69% of citations come from individuals, and one firm supplies 967 links from nine inventions, which measures ambition, not success. US patents had no citation lists before 1947, so what the AC patents did from 1888 to 1945 is invisible here. Google Patents was read on one day.
• Legends. "Earliest found" is not "earliest that exists". No newspaper archive was searched directly and four later biographies were not opened, so the pigeon and the torn contract are the least secure verdicts. O'Neill knew Tesla, so this does not show he invented anything.

Where it goes in the books

Sections One to Three of the AI's Interlude, "The Machine Checks the Hero", in Book 5 of the Hidden in Plain Sight series, The Man Out of Time (first draft, October 2026). Chapter 16 uses the fame and patent results. The legends also appear in Chapters 1, 3, 4, 11, 12 and 14.

Check it yourself: the study files list every citation and source row, and you can ask for them through the contact form. If you find an earlier page for one of the stories, please tell Paul and this page will be corrected.