Both sentences are Tesla’s own, from the closing paragraph of his signed, first-person essay “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” in The Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900, pp. 175–211. He repeated the whole passage 34 years later in Modern Mechanix and Inventions, July 1934, which is the printing the quote sites cite. The one-liner in circulation is word-for-word accurate but stitches together the paragraph’s first and fourth sentences, silently dropping the two in between.
“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes …” Nikola Tesla, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," The Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900, pp. 175–211. The final sentence continues "… with the poet who says:" into Goethe's "Hope"; Tesla restated the passage, ending on "hopes.", in Modern Mechanix and Inventions, July 1934. Verified via Quotle.info
Can you use it?
✓ Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Nikola Tesla — Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer. Theme: "The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way". 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 "The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way". 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
The June 1900 essay
Source
The Problem of Increasing Human Energy
Published in
The Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900, pp. 175–211
Byline
Nikola Tesla — his own signed, first-person essay
Position in text
The essay’s closing paragraph, which runs on into Goethe’s “Hope”
Restated in
Modern Mechanix and Inventions, July 1934, pp. 40–42 and 117–119 — bylined “as told to Alfred Albelli”
Thus, a mass which resists the force at first, once set in movement, adds to the energy. The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes with the poet who says:
Closing paragraph, 1900
This is the 1900 essay’s closing paragraph, and its fifth sentence does not stop where the quote sites stop it: “He lives and labors and hopes with the poet who says:” runs straight into Goethe’s “Hope,” which ends the essay. In the July 1934 restatement the same sentence ends at “hopes.” and the verse is gone. (For that 1934 printing, Wikiquote gives the magazine’s title as Modern Mechanics and Inventions and Tesla Universe as Modern Mechanix and Inventions; it carried both names at different points in its run.)
Wikiquote carries the whole five-sentence passage among Tesla’s quotes and cites it to “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World” in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934) — not to its Misattributed or Disputed lists. That citation is to Tesla’s own later restatement, not to the passage’s first printing, which Wikiquote does not give. See the entry ↗
The first printing is 34 years earlier: Tesla’s signed essay “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” The Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900, pp. 175–211, where the identical five sentences form the closing paragraph. Three independent full texts carry them verbatim — Tesla Universe (the same archive that holds the 1934 piece, with page scans), Wikisource, and tfcbooks.com. Read the 1900 essay ↗
Tesla Universe also reproduces the 1934 restatement — bylined “Nikola Tesla, as told to Alfred Albelli,” Modern Mechanix and Inventions, July 1934, pp. 40–42 and 117–119 — with the passage as its closing paragraph, introduced by “Today I repeat again what I said to contemporary scientists of those earlier pioneering days.” That sentence is a pointer back to the 1900 essay. Read the 1934 article ↗
Quote Investigator has not investigated this line: a site search on 29 July 2026 returned no article on it — only two unrelated pieces — so the paper trail here rests on the 1900 and 1934 printings themselves rather than on a QI finding. The search results ↗
✓Public domain
The passage was first published in June 1900, in The Century Illustrated Magazine — long before 1929, and so comfortably clear of this site’s conservative United States cutoff, which treats anything first published in 1931 or later as protected. It is public domain in the United States. Tesla’s July 1934 restatement in Modern Mechanix and Inventions reprints words he had already published 34 years earlier, so no copyright in that later issue reaches these sentences. The 1900 essay in full ↗
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.
Fact-check
What goes wrong with this one
No rival claimant here — every aggregator that carries the line credits Tesla, and the credit holds. What goes wrong is the shape of the quote, not the name on it.
~
The wordingThe two-sentence version in circulation spliced
The familiar one-liner welds the first and fourth sentences of a five-sentence paragraph together, dropping “He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future” with no ellipsis to mark the cut. Every word is Tesla’s; the sequence is not. Read the paragraph whole ↗
~
The byline“As told to Alfred Albelli” as the origin of the wording 1934 only
The Modern Mechanix version is bylined “Nikola Tesla — as told to Alfred Albelli,” which invites the thought that a staff writer shaped the prose. Not these sentences: Tesla had already published them himself, word for word, in his own signed first-person essay of June 1900 — 34 years before Albelli came near them. The wording is Tesla’s own writing. The 1900 printing ↗
~
The dateJuly 1934 as where the line comes from restated
Tesla introduces the 1934 passage as something he had said before — “Today I repeat again what I said to contemporary scientists of those earlier pioneering days” — and the earlier saying is findable: the identical five sentences close “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” The Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900, pp. 175–211. Sites that date the line to 1934 are 34 years late. The 1900 essay ↗
~
The paper trailQuote sites that print it bare unsourced
The line travels the aggregators with a name and nothing else — no publication, no date, no page — which is why it reads like an orphan aphorism. Wikiquote at least supplies the 1934 citation; the one that actually locates the passage is the 1900 essay. The sourced version ↗
✓Genuine Tesla, precisely located: the closing paragraph of his own signed essay “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” The Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900, pp. 175–211. Quoted whole it runs five sentences, and in 1900 the fifth does not stop at “He lives and labors and hopes” — it continues “… with the poet who says:” into Goethe’s “Hope.” It is the July 1934 restatement that ends on “hopes.” Read it in place ↗
Context
Why he was saying it
Tesla was forty-three when The Century Illustrated Magazine gave him pp. 175–211 of its June 1900 issue for “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” — a long, unhurried essay on human progress, the harnessing of the sun, and his own experiments. The passage sits at the very end, immediately after he concedes that readers “unprepared for these results, which, through long familiarity, appear to me simple and obvious, will consider them still far from practical application.” Read the closing pages ↗
Read in place, then, this is not a detached maxim about the scientific temperament. It is Tesla answering the objection he has just anticipated — a defence of the long-horizon inventor, placed so that Goethe’s “Hope” can close the essay on his behalf. He thought well enough of it to repeat the whole passage 34 years later, in a wireless-power piece for Modern Mechanix and Inventions, where he was by then an outsider selling predictions his contemporaries were not buying — and where the passage stops at “He lives and labors and hopes.” with the verse dropped. The 1934 restatement ↗
His work is like that of the planter — for the future.
A note on the citation
Almost every quote site cites the 1934 restatement rather than the 1900 essay, which is why the later date has stuck. Two archives even describe that 1934 printing differently: Wikiquote names the magazine Modern Mechanics and Inventions; Tesla Universe, which reproduces the issue and its page scans, names it Modern Mechanix and Inventions and gives the pagination as 40–42 and 117–119. Wikipedia’s history of the title confirms the magazine used both forms at various points from its 1928 debut, without dating the changes, so neither citation is wrong — but we quote the form used by the archive that shows the pages. The magazine’s title history ↗
The “as told to” byline on the 1934 piece is worth keeping in view, but it does not reach these sentences. Tesla’s popular-press articles of the 1930s were routinely produced that way, with a staff writer — here Alfred Albelli — shaping the inventor’s talk into copy. This passage, though, was already in print under Tesla’s own byline in 1900, so the polish of the sentences is his and not a magazine writer’s.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1856–1943 · Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist and inventor who emigrated to the United States in 1884 and went to work almost immediately at the Edison Machine Works in New York. His designs for alternating-current machinery reshaped how electricity is generated and distributed, and in June 1900 The Century Illustrated Magazine handed him some thirty-five pages for the sprawling philosophical essay this passage closes. He repeated the same lines in 1934, by which time he was an elder outsider in the field he had helped create, publishing predictions through popular magazines rather than technical journals.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Nikola Tesla, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," The Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900, 175-211. Restated in Nikola Tesla, as told to Alfred Albelli, "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World," Modern Mechanix and Inventions, July 1934, 40-42, 117-19 — the printing most quote sites cite.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-scientific-man-does-not-aim-at-an-immediate-result-his/