Nikola Tesla Reads My Inventions
“The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.”
About this work
My Inventions is Tesla's own autobiography, written as a six-part series for Electrical Experimenter magazine in 1919. In it he recounts his childhood in the Austro-Hungarian frontier, the vivid visions and obsessions that shaped him, and the breakthrough moment in a Budapest park when the principle of the rotating magnetic field came to him whole — along with the Tesla coil, the magnifying transmitter, and his dreams of telautomatics.
Hearing it in Tesla's restored voice turns a technical memoir into something intimate: the inventor narrating his own mind, with all its flashes of genius and strange interior weather. It is the rare chance to listen to the modern age being imagined, in the first person.
Who was Nikola Tesla?
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was the Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose alternating-current system, induction motor, and pioneering work on radio and wireless power helped build the electrified world. A showman of physics and a tireless visionary, he held hundreds of patents and imagined technologies decades ahead of his time.
Brilliant, eccentric, and ultimately impoverished, Tesla described seeing entire machines fully formed in his mind before he ever built them. He died alone in a New York hotel in 1943, a figure equal parts engineer, prophet, and legend.
About the voice
Although Tesla lived into the recording era, no confirmed, usable recording of his voice is known to survive. This audiobook is therefore read by a professional narrator in a voice shaped to evoke him; it is an interpretive restoration, not archival audio of Tesla, and we do not claim it is literally Tesla speaking.
Provenance: Professional narrator. We label every voice honestly — restored, narrated, or disputed.
Questions
What did Nikola Tesla sound like?
We have only secondhand accounts. Contemporaries described a tall, courtly man with a Central-European accent and precise, almost poetic English. No verified recording of his voice survives, so any rendering of it is informed interpretation.
Is this really Tesla's voice?
No. Despite persistent rumors, no authenticated recording of Tesla is known to exist. A professional narrator reads My Inventions in a voice crafted to evoke him — a respectful restoration, not the inventor himself.
Is My Inventions in the public domain?
Yes. First published in 1919 in Electrical Experimenter magazine, My Inventions is in the public domain and freely available, which is why it can be offered as an audiobook here.
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