I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success...Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything
Tesla said this out loud, to a newspaper interviewer, in the spring of 1896. It appears in a syndicated interview printed as “Chat with Tesla” in the Evening Star of Washington, D.C., 6 June 1896 ↗, and in at least three other papers that same month. One caution: every 1896 printing reads “some creation of his brain,” not “the brain,” and the familiar “…” hides a whole clause.
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of his brain unfolding to success, as he watches some crucial experiment prove that through months of waiting and hoping he has been in the right. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, sickness, friends, love—everything.” Nikola Tesla, interviewed in "Chat with Tesla," Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 6 June 1896
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Evoking the world of Nikola Tesla — Serbian-American inventor & electrical engineer. Theme: "I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success...Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The source we found
Article
“Chat with Tesla” — Some Experiences in Handling the Electric Fluid
Published
Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 6 June 1896, image 15 — the earliest printing we could locate in the Library of Congress newspaper archive
Byline
Unsigned in the Evening Star; the Atlanta Constitution’s 22 June 1896 reprint carries a byline printed as “Cleveland Moffitt”
Form
Newspaper interview — Tesla speaking to a reporter at his café table at about eleven at night, not writing
When I was a student I have known what it is to sit at the gaming table forty-eight hours at a stretch. I thought that an intense emotion, the fascination of play, and I believe many people regard it as the strongest emotion, but I can tell you that for many years all the allurements of the game would have seemed tame and insipid to me compared with the tremendous, overmastering excitement of my life in the laboratory. I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of his brain unfolding to success, as he watches some crucial experiment prove that through months of waiting and hoping he has been in the right. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, sickness, friends, love—everything.
1896 interview
Transcribed from the Library of Congress scan of the Evening Star; obvious OCR slips have been corrected against the Atlanta Constitution and Indianapolis Journal printings of the same interview. Note the variant: the Evening Star and the Atlanta Constitution include “sickness” in the final list; the Indianapolis Journal’s reprint ↗ does not, and it is that shorter list which survives in the modern quotation.
A full-text phrase search of the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper archive returns exactly four matching pages, all from June 1896 ↗ — the Evening Star (6 June), the New York Sun (7 June), the Indianapolis Journal (19 June) and the Atlanta Constitution (22 June).
The earliest of the four, the Evening Star of 6 June 1896 ↗, runs the interview under the headline “Chat with Tesla” and prints the sentence inside Tesla’s own quoted speech.
Wikiquote ↗ still files this line under “Attributed”, citing only a 2008 secondary book. The 1896 newspaper text supplies the primary source that listing is missing.
✓Public domain
The interview was first published in United States newspapers in June 1896 — far earlier than 1931 — so the text is in the public domain in the United States. The images linked here are Library of Congress scans of those same 1896 newspaper pages.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
Right man, drifting words
This one is not stolen from another author — Tesla really did say it. What has gone wrong is the wording, the medium and the sourcing.
✕
Wording“the brain” for “his brain” misquoted
Every 1896 printing we located reads “some creation of his brain unfolding to success.” The modern circulating form says “the brain”, which flattens a personal boast into an abstraction. Compare the Evening Star scan ↗.
✕
The ellipsisa clause quietly dropped elided
The “…” in the popular version stands in for a real half-sentence: “as he watches some crucial experiment prove that through months of waiting and hoping he has been in the right.” It is printed in full in the Atlanta Constitution ↗.
✕
Medium“that year he wrote” spoken, not written
A Scientific American piece reproduced by Tesla Universe introduces the line with “That year he wrote” ↗. The 1896 papers present it as speech — a reporter’s transcription of Tesla talking at a café table.
✕
Sourcinga 2008 secondary book under-sourced
Wikiquote ↗ lists the quote in its “Attributed” section, sourced to a 2008 book by Tim O’Shei rather than to anything from Tesla’s lifetime.
✕
Venuethe New York Herald wrong paper
At least one write-up traces the quote to an “1896 New York Herald interview” ↗. The reprint it cites — the Indianapolis Journal of 19 June 1896 — carries the credit line “New York Sun” on its own page.
✓Genuine Tesla, spoken rather than written, and one word off: the 1896 papers say “some creation of his brain” — see the Evening Star, 6 June 1896 ↗.
Context
A bad night in a café
The interview opens badly. The reporter finds Tesla at his usual café table around eleven at night, “looking tired and haggard,” and is told at once: “I am afraid you won’t find me a pleasant companion tonight. The fact is, I was almost killed today.” Tesla then describes taking a shock from one of his machines, a spark jumping three feet through the air to his shoulder.
The mood matters, because the famous sentence is not a boast delivered from a podium. It arrives at the low point of the talk, after Tesla has described the fire that destroyed his New York laboratory — Wikipedia dates that fire to 13 March 1895 ↗ — and admitted to spells of depression. The thrill of invention is what he offers as the thing that outweighs all of it, including, a few lines later, marriage: an inventor, he tells the reporter, should not marry.
Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, sickness, friends, love—everything.
The four June 1896 printings, and how they differ
The Evening Star (6 June) headlines it “Chat with Tesla”; the New York Sun (7 June) and the Indianapolis Journal (19 June) run it as “Tesla’s Everyday Views”; the Atlanta Constitution (22 June) gives it a decorative display heading over the byline “Cleveland Moffitt.”
The only difference that touches the quoted sentence is in the final list. The Evening Star and the Atlanta Constitution print “food, sleep, sickness, friends, love”; the New York Sun and the Indianapolis Journal print “food, sleep, friends, love.” The shorter list is the one that reached the internet. Elsewhere the Sun/Indianapolis text is lightly abridged rather than merely variant — on marriage, for instance, the Evening Star has an artist “led by her love to finer achievement” where those two print “their love.”
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist and inventor, best known for his work on alternating-current power systems, induction motors and high-frequency electrical apparatus. By 1896 he was a celebrated figure in the New York press, giving late-night interviews between laboratory sessions. Because that fame long outlived him, his name is now one of the internet’s most reliable magnets for invented quotations — which makes the lines that can be tied to a dated page worth marking.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this source
“Chat with Tesla,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 6 June 1896, image 15, Chronicling America, Library of Congress; reprinted as “Tesla’s Everyday Views,” The Sun (New York), 7 June 1896, and—bylined “Cleveland Moffitt”—in the Atlanta Constitution, 22 June 1896.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success...Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything’?” Last verified 27 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-do-not-think-there-is-any-thrill-that-can-go-through-the/