The Last Days of Night, page 10
Erastus saw no path to righteousness other than faith. He prayed to a Lord and Savior in whose existence Paul did not even believe. But to confess that to his father would be unthinkable. Whatever secrets he might imagine admitting, his university-bred atheism was not among them.
And so they quadrilled genteelly through their conversation. Paul asked about his sister. She was well. He asked about his mother. She was also well. She’d suffered through the winter with a terrible cough, but the spring seemed to banish it, thank goodness. Erastus opined about the election—he was campaigning aggressively for Harrison, having seen firsthand what economic devastation Cleveland had wreaked. Paul wondered aloud whether Harrison would be able to convince the Mugwumps to rejoin the Republicans in the fall. By eleven Erastus was ready, again, for bed. Paul lay on the floor of his sitting room, half wrapped in a blue cotton sheet. The apartment was hot in the summer, and Paul stayed up for some time, unable to sleep. Only after much tossing and turning was he treated to a series of dreams, one of which indelicately concerned a woman with the face of Agnes Huntington.
—
Paul woke with a start at five-thirty in the morning to find that his father was already boiling coffee on the stove. Looking over the morning papers, Erastus grunted as his son got up and made his way to the sink for a shave.
As soon as Paul sat, Erastus slid a page from the previous night’s Evening Post in his direction.
“Something in the paper there you might want to look at,” said Erastus. “The editorial—it’s on your line of work, isn’t it?”
By the time he’d gotten through the editorial’s first sentence, Paul was apologizing to his father. His presence was required in Pittsburgh immediately. He needed to make haste to the Grand Central Station for the next train.
Erastus said that he understood. He said that he could take care of himself just fine over the coming days; he’d leave the key for Paul at the coffeehouse on Fifty-fourth Street. There were donors to be seen, the future of the college to be secured. Erastus had never seen the spires of Trinity Church, so he would be grateful for the chance to take a stroll.
Paul was out the door, overnight valise in hand, by the time he realized that he’d forgotten to give his father a farewell embrace. He knocked at the closed door of his own apartment, the keys safely inside with Erastus.
Yet Paul’s father did not come to the door. Perhaps he’d gone back to sleep, or was unable to hear the knocking over the clatter of plates as he cleaned up the previous evening’s meal. Paul turned away, down the four flights and off to Pittsburgh.
America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.
—ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
ABOARD A FIRST-CLASS car of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Paul reread the New-York Evening Post editorial yet again.
DEATH IN THE WIRES, blared the headline. THE PERILS OF ALTERNATING CURRENT. The article was attributed to “Harold P. Brown, electrical engineer.” Paul’s first question concerned who in the world Harold P. Brown was. Paul’s second concerned why he had been given such a prominent space to proclaim his absurd opinions.
“Every day brings the news of more lives cut short by the menace of electrical wiring that now dangles above our city. Never in the history of this nation has such a dangerous, poorly understood, and criminally untested technology been thrust so haphazardly into the homes of our families and the playrooms of our children, with no regard for their safety.” The paper went on to mention the tragedy Paul had witnessed on Broadway, as well as other deaths at the hands of faulty electrical wiring. “Several companies who have more regard for the almighty dollar than for the safety of the public have even adopted the new ‘alternating current’ for incandescent light service,” continued the paper. “If arc current is potentially dangerous, then alternating current can be described by no adjective less forcible than ‘damnable.’ That the public must submit to constant danger from sudden death in order that a corporation may pay a slightly larger dividend is simply evil.”
The paper went on to suggest, in language of unvarying vehemence, that alternating current was likely to fry the bones of any child within a hundred feet of its use. Because it ran at twice the voltage of direct current, it was, so Harold P. Brown argued, twice as deadly. There was, moreover, no legitimate scientific reason to prefer alternating current to direct; only the marketplace had caused these devious merchants of death to adopt this crooked technology. And, finally, the paper named the main proponent of this deadly system: George Westinghouse. “A villain who apparently will stoop to new lows to make an extra dollar off the naïve and gullible.
“To prevent the wholesale loss of human life,” concluded Harold Brown’s editorial, “all alternating current, such as that offered by George Westinghouse, must be banned immediately by the legislature of this state.”
—
That evening Paul watched George Westinghouse pace across his laboratory. Gas lamps hung along the walls and washed the cavernous space with a pale orange light. Westinghouse’s engineers feared that electric lights might interfere with their tests on new light-bulb designs. The newest colors on the market—the softest yellows, the wispiest fading whites, the lightest bursting sun flares—were developed here. The colors of the future had to be examined in the dim past.
Identical editorials from Brown had appeared in four other East Coast papers. Westinghouse’s first commercial A/C system, based on Tesla’s ideas, was set to be installed in only a few weeks’ time in Buffalo. The department store Adam, Meldrum, and Anderson had already taken out advertisements touting the 498 A/C-powered bulbs that were soon to shine from its Italianate ceilings. Unless, that is, Harold Brown succeeded in having such a system banned.
“It isn’t true,” said Westinghouse. “A/C is not more dangerous than D/C. Just the opposite. Why would the Evening Post print such a bald-faced falsehood?”
“Do you know who owns the Evening Post?” said Paul.
“I do not.”
“Henry Villard.”
“Who is…”
“Some middling newspaper tycoon. But a middling newspaper tycoon who happens to have quite recently come into possession of some two thousand shares of stock in Edison General Electric.”
Westinghouse stopped his pacing. “Edison gave him shares in exchange for denouncing me on his paper’s front page?”
“We’ll never be able to prove it,” said Paul.
“Can he do this? Can he really get the state legislature to ban my current?”
“It depends.”
“Damned lawyers,” grumbled Westinghouse. “Just give me a straight answer: Can he do this or can he not?”
“I sent inquiries to Albany from the station. It appears that Edison has already gotten a friendly New York state senator to submit just such a bill.”
“I’ll hazard a guess that Edison has found a way to compensate his state senator as well?”
“Having failed to produce a better product than you, he’s now going to use the law to make your product illegal. I’ve already sent a message to my state senator. I’ll argue your case before the legislature myself. He can’t bribe all of them.”
Westinghouse lowered his gaze to the floor. “A/C is better,” he said quietly. “My work is better than his.” Whoever he was talking to, it was not Paul.
“Can you help me to understand it? I’m a layman. Talk to me like a layman. Your alternating current runs at twice the voltage of his direct current. You told me so yourself. Well, to a layman: twice the current, twice the danger. It sounds like common sense.”
When Westinghouse next spoke, his voice was low. “But this is the very thing about electricity. Nothing about it makes any common sense at all.”
Westinghouse summoned Reginald Fessenden for help with a demonstration. After only a few months here, Fessenden appeared to have aged a few years. He seemed exhausted. Whatever work he was doing, and whatever stresses were being placed on him, was quickly graying his temples.
A smallish generator was attached to something Westinghouse called a capacitor. The thing was about six inches long, shaped like a cylinder, encased in a material—rubber?—that was smooth and perfectly black. It looked, to Paul, something like a French dessert.
At Westinghouse’s request, Fessenden gave a few spins to a hand crank at the machine’s side. It whirled with a soft hum.
“And now,” Westinghouse said, turning to Paul, “I’d like you to place each of your hands on one of those leads there. Yes. Those are the ones.”
Paul looked at these “leads”—open-ended strips of cable—with trepidation. He remembered the flaming workman above Broadway.
“Sir…won’t that electrocute me?”
“Yes. When you put your hands on those leads, one hundred ten volts of alternating current will shoot right through your body.”
Paul blinked. This sounded like a certain death.
Westinghouse registered Paul’s fear. “You don’t trust me?”
“It’s not that, but…” Paul looked at the machines. These deathly, futuristic things. Paul took a long, slow breath, and grabbed as hard as he could at the wire leads.
A popping sound.
A sharp yell from deep within Paul’s throat.
And in under a second, it was over.
Paul waved his hands in the air, wriggling his fingers to shake off the sting. The pain was akin to that of catching a baseball without a mitt.
There’d been no flash of light. No spark. No caged lightning unleashed upon his flesh.
“Oww,” said Paul finally, when he remembered to speak.
“So,” said Westinghouse patiently, “what have we learned?”
Paul turned to Fessenden for an answer.
“Voltage,” supplied Fessenden dutifully, “is not the same as power. A/C may run at higher voltages than D/C, but it does so with a variable amplitude. I can show you a notebook full of equations to explain this if you’re curious.”
“Aha!” said Westinghouse. “We’re teaching Paul some science, at long last. Now: What is it about the very nature of alternating current that makes it less dangerous?”
Paul again turned to Fessenden.
“Right,” said Fessenden. “So, it’s called alternating current, you’ll remember, because it literally alternates direction hundreds of times per second. While direct current remains constant. Now, in response to electrical current, the muscles of the human body contract. As yours just did. This is why people are electrocuted to death. They grasp the current, and they can’t let go, because the current contracts the very muscles that are holding on.”
“The brain wants to let go,” said Westinghouse, “but the muscles won’t comply. Just now, as soon as you felt the shock, what happened?”
“I let go.”
“You were able to let go because as the A/C changes its direction each of those hundreds of times per second, there is actually an infinitesimal pause in the current. Think of it like a carriage: It goes in a circle clockwise as fast as it can, then to turn around it has to slow, and then stop, and then speed up again in the other direction. Such is the case with alternating current.”
“Except for the slowing-down part,” corrected Fessenden.
Westinghouse agreed. “Electricity lends itself poorly to metaphor. Gravity, centripetal motion—much easier phenomena to explain by way of literary analogy. If Newton worked in poetry, we’re left to toil in prose. I have pondered this on occasion.”
Paul took in all that he’d been told. How could they explain all of this to potential customers without demanding that each of them try sticking their hands inside an A/C generator to see for themselves?
Having a better system than Edison’s would do no good if they couldn’t explain to the public why it was better. Reality mattered not at all; perception was the whole of business. Edison had realized this before they had. While Westinghouse was using Tesla’s discoveries to develop a superior product, Edison had skipped straight to developing a superior story.
And stories were supposed to be Paul’s expertise.
As if he’d been reading Paul’s train of thought, Westinghouse spoke again. The professorial tenor was gone from his voice.
“Paul,” said Westinghouse quietly, “I rely on you to see this kind of thing coming.”
Westinghouse’s words were a cold breeze. They were so soft as to be almost inaudible, and yet they froze Paul in his place.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Westinghouse,” said Paul. “I knew that Edison was going to respond to our hiring of Tesla and our adoption of A/C. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t think he’d go this far.”
“This is your job,” continued Westinghouse. “You are not, if this situation is to be any indication, doing it as well as I might hope.”
Embarrassed, Paul looked to Fessenden. But the engineer was busying himself with the documents in his hands, conspicuously avoiding eye contact.
“You’ve made the mistake,” said Westinghouse, “of underestimating the villainy of Thomas Edison.”
“I have. And what I can promise you today is that I will never do so again.”
Paul was dismissed a few minutes later. He and Fessenden left the inventor to the quiet of his dark and empty laboratory.
“He’ll get over it,” said Fessenden as they walked side by side toward the mansion, across the moonlit lawns of the estate. The muggy air threatened to burst into a summer storm above the country oaks. “I’ve been on the receiving end of that same look. He has a way of making you feel six inches tall. But don’t worry: He’ll be on to someone else’s failures tomorrow.”
“How’s Tesla doing?” Paul hadn’t heard any complaints about Tesla in a few weeks, which he’d taken as a positive development.
At the mention of Tesla’s name, Fessenden grimaced. “Well…I’m afraid that’s going to be a bit difficult to explain.”
Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
—THOMAS KUHN, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS
IT TURNED OUT that Tesla had presented Westinghouse with a sketch. Something concerning the airless vacuum that filled the light bulbs. Westinghouse had suggested making a few tweaks and then testing both versions to see which operated better, and in response Tesla had gone up to his office and shut the door in protest.
Four days later, Fessenden and his men had still not heard a word from Tesla. He had been scribbling nearly illegible demands for saltine crackers on the backs of Machinery Department requisition forms and then slipping them without ceremony under his door. It had taken a full day for a passing char girl to notice them. The girl brought the papers to the attention of the butler, who then had to figure out some way of bringing the incident to Westinghouse’s attention without causing the old man to break something glass-carved and expensive.
At least they’d been able to fit the saltines under Tesla’s door.
Paul asked Fessenden to lead him to Tesla’s apartment above the private laboratory. Tesla was apparently still locked inside, having reneged on his promise to come out once he’d been delivered his saltines.
Tesla did not answer the door. Paul’s pleas for a brief audience fell against the mute wooden doorway.
As he turned down the hall, Paul saw a slip of white paper flit out from under Tesla’s door. He bent over to pick it up.
“Mr. Paul Cravath” were the first words he read on the Machinery Department requisition form. “It is imperative of me that I am quitting the employ of Mr. George Westinghouse. He is not of an inventing person. I take my leave and will see you in Manhattan, New York, New York.—Nikola Tesla.”
The problems before Paul had just doubled. Not only would he have to manage the public war in print between Edison and Westinghouse, but he would now have to manage the private one between Westinghouse and Tesla.
—
Unexpectedly, it was Tesla who selected the venue for the peace negotiations. Even though he seemed to have no taste for the food, nor the slightest interest in the wine, he appeared to have developed an affinity for Delmonico’s. Not even Tesla was immune to the fragrance of exclusivity. He was merely immune to the expectations of politeness.
So in the same week that Edison’s lawyers trapped Paul into nuisance court appearances in three states over the differences between A/C and D/C, and the New York State Legislature held bloviating sessions about banning A/C altogether, Paul had to beg his own client to travel to New York to share canard aux olives with the man most likely to get them free of it all.
“This gentleman knows neither morsel nor iota of what it means to invent,” sniped Tesla. The Bordeaux that had been generously poured into his glass went unsipped. “He has never so done, and never will he.”
“This is the malarkey I’ve been dealing with for months,” said Westinghouse.
“What I’d like to suggest,” offered Paul impartially, “is that the language we all employ in this conversation take a more soothing tone.”
Tesla was having none of this. “It is Mr. George Westinghouse whose language is sorely incapable of expressing the varied wonders in which I am conversant.”
“My point precisely! Does anyone have even the faintest idea of what he is talking about? He sounds like the only English he’s ever learned is from Chaucer.”
“I have not any such acquaintance,” explained Tesla. “Is he another of your idiotic laboratory mammals?”
“Stop,” pleaded Paul. “Both of you. Stop.”
Paul had not thought this was going to be easy, but he had also not been aware of how personal their disagreement had become. “This is about more than the vacuum-bulb issue, isn’t it?”
“You are in the right,” said Tesla. “The problem I have faced is that Mr. George Westinghouse is not an inventor.”
