Widely credited to Tesla, and consistent with his documented position that Marconi’s wireless rested on his patents — but no contemporaneous record exists. The exchange survives only as engineer H. Otis Pond’s recollection, first documented in print in 1972, some seventy-one years after the December 1901 remark it describes.
“Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents” attributed to Nikola Tesla, December 1901, as recalled by Wardenclyffe engineer H. Otis Pond. Earliest documented in Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981), p. 161, citing a July 1972 Seattle Sunday Times column. No contemporaneous source is known.
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In context
Evoking the world of Nikola Tesla — Serbian-American inventor & electrical engineer. Theme: "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents". 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.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Where the words actually appear
Alleged occasion
December 1901 — on news of Marconi’s first transatlantic signal
Earliest text examined
Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981), p. 161
Cheney’s cited source
Don Duncan, “Driftwood Days,” Seattle Sunday Times, July 1972 (ch. 16, nn. 1–2)
Reported witness
H. Otis Pond, an engineer who helped build Wardenclyffe
They were together on the day in December 1901 when Marconi sent the first transatlantic signal. “Looks like Marconi got the jump on you,” he said. “Marconi is a good fellow,” replied Tesla. “Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.”
First documented in 1972 — 71 years after the fact
Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time, p. 161. Note the framing Cheney gives a few lines earlier — “Years later Pond was to say”. This is not a transcript or a diary entry; it is a recollection, and Cheney’s endnote for the passage points to a single newspaper column published in 1972.
1944 — the silence that matters. John J. O’Neill’s Prodigal Genius, the first major Tesla biography, was written by a journalist who was a close friend of Tesla, whom he had met as a boy ↗. A word-search of the complete online text ↗ turns up neither this quip nor any mention of Otis Pond — in a book that dwells at length on Tesla’s wireless priority.
July 1972 — the earliest source anyone names. Cheney’s reference notes for Chapter 16 list only one source for the Pond material: “Seattle Sunday Times, Don Duncan’s ‘Driftwood Days,’ July 1972” ↗, and note 2 is simply “Ibid.” The trail stops there. I was not able to examine that column itself.
1981 — the wording enters the canon. Cheney’s Tesla: Man Out of Time prints the exchange in the form that now circulates everywhere. Page 161 ↗ is, as far as I can establish, where the modern quote comes from.
Today — hedged by the people who track it.Wikiquote files the line under “Attributed” ↗, not “Sourced” — the quote sites that present it as documented fact are more confident than the reference works they draw on.
This is not a case of the wrong name on someone else’s words. Tesla plausibly said something like this, and the sentiment matches his documented grievance exactly. What’s wrong is the confidence — the line is served up as documented history when its paper trail is a single second-hand newspaper recollection from 1972.
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The sourcingQuote databases — and Wikiquote’s own citation Circular
Wikiquote’s entry cites PBS’s “Who Invented Radio?” ↗ and Daniel Blair Stewart’s Tesla: The Modern Sorcerer (1999), p. 371. Neither is a primary source: the PBS page is an undated web feature with no citations — and one that misdates Marconi’s Nobel Prize to 1911, when it was awarded in 1909 ↗ — and Stewart’s book is a 1999 popular biography ↗ published 56 years after Tesla’s death and 18 years after Cheney. Cite either one and you are citing a retelling, not a record.
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The wording“17” vs. “seventeen” Drift
The number is rendered inconsistently as the reader picks it up second-hand. InformationWeek prints “He is using 17 of my patents” ↗ with no source cited at all; Cheney’s text spells it “seventeen.” Loose variants with other patent counts also circulate online. No source we found explains where the number seventeen came from, or which patents it counts.
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The framingTesla’s biographical literature generally Caveat
✓The honest statement: a named, real witness — Wardenclyffe engineer H. Otis Pond — is reported to have recalled Tesla saying this in December 1901, but the recollection surfaces only in a 1981 biography citing a 1972 newspaper column ↗. It may well be true. It is not documented.
Context
Why the jab lands
Whatever Tesla did or didn’t say on the day, the substance of the boast was not empty. Marconi’s first American application, filed in November 1900, was turned down ↗, and his revised applications were repeatedly rejected over the next three years on Tesla’s priority; by 1903 the Patent Office was noting that the term “Tesla oscillator” had become a household word on both continents. Marconi had used a Tesla oscillator in his own early demonstrations.
Then, in 1904, the Patent Office reversed itself and granted Marconi a radio patent — a reversal that has never been fully explained, though Marconi’s financial backing in the United States is the usual suspect. Marconi took the Nobel Prize in 1909 ↗, shared with Karl Ferdinand Braun. Tesla sued in 1915 and could not afford to pursue it. So the remark — calm, generous, and devastating — is the version of the story Tesla’s admirers want to be true: the man who lost the credit, unbothered, counting his patents in the other fellow’s machine.
It may well be true. It is not documented.
Why a 71-year gap matters
A gap between an event and its first written record isn’t automatically fatal — plenty of genuine remarks were only written down decades on. What makes this one unresolvable is the combination: the sole witness is recalling a single sentence spoken 71 years earlier; the recollection appears in a local newspaper column rather than an interview transcript or archive; and the person best placed to have recorded it in Tesla’s lifetime — his friend and first biographer John J. O’Neill, writing in 1944 — never mentions the exchange or the witness at all.
That last point is the strongest evidence available in either direction, and it cuts against the quote without killing it. O’Neill’s silence is an argument from absence: he could simply never have heard the story. But he wrote a whole book partly devoted to Tesla’s stolen radio priority, and this would have been his best anecdote.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Nikola Tesla pioneered the alternating-current system that powers the modern world, along with foundational work in wireless transmission, radio, and remote control. His patents on tuned wireless circuits predated Marconi's American filings — the U.S. Patent Office initially rejected Marconi's applications on exactly that ground before reversing course in 1904. Tesla died in a New York hotel room in 1943, largely broke and long since eclipsed in public credit by the men who commercialised his ideas — a biography that has since made him the magnet for admiring quotes he never demonstrably said.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
Earliest documented in Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981; repr. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 161, citing Don Duncan, “Driftwood Days,” Seattle Sunday Times, July 1972. No contemporaneous 1901 source is known.
MLA (9th ed.)
Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man Out of Time. 1981. Barnes & Noble, 1993, p. 161.
APA (7th ed.)
Cheney, M. (1993). Tesla: Man out of time. Barnes & Noble. (Original work published 1981)
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents’?” Last verified 14 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/marconi-is-a-good-fellow-let-him-continue-he-is-using