The Last Days of Night, page 24
But he still didn’t die. Not this second time, to the embarrassment of the warden and to the great horror of the witnesses. Nor did he die on the third try either.
By the fourth attempt, the protests from the guests had grown forceful. “My God, man,” said one of the physicians. “You must make this stop. This is torture.” It was impossible to disagree. Even the reporters had joined in, pleading with the warden to end this barbarism. But this was the law. The warden’s duty was to follow its letter. He had instructions from the office of the governor himself. He intended to carry them out.
Harold Brown got up and approached the warden. They shared a brief whispered conversation. It seemed as if Brown was offering to consult. He was ever eager to play the role of inventor. But the warden shook his head and quickly sent Brown back to his seat. This was an affair of the state.
The current again entered Kemmler’s body. The prisoner raged against the leather straps with such force that his skin began ripping off. His mouth and eyes grew black from char. Blood no longer dripped from his hand, but rather poured in a bright gush. Dark smoke rose from his head.
And then, quite suddenly, blue fire shot from Kemmler’s mouth. Paul watched as the same blue hellfire he’d seen above that street in Manhattan incinerated Kemmler’s skull, lit his hair on fire, and then washed across his body. It stripped the skin from his bones.
The guests jumped to their feet as the blood flew across the basement. Paul was among the men sprinting for the door.
In the prison yard, the first thing Paul did was vomit. Without food in his stomach, what came up was just a bitter clot of bile. He knelt in the dirt, spitting the taste from his lips.
Paul looked up at his fellow witnesses. He wasn’t the only one being sick. The physicians, more accustomed to gore, had lit cigarettes. They were talking animatedly, trying to figure out what they had just witnessed. They’d never seen a body do that before. Their personal horror was tinged with professional curiosity.
The reporters were scribbling in their notebooks. Paul realized that within minutes they would file reports of what they’d witnessed, a scene they would paint for the many newspapers across the country. The Westinghouse system of alternating current had just proven itself to be a spectacularly poor instrument of murder. If Edison and Brown had wanted to demonstrate the stubborn safety of alternating current, they could have done no better job.
Paul still felt ill. But for the first time in a long while, he also felt like his side had won something.
Paul turned to see Brown exiting quickly through the prison gates. He thought he could make out dark stains on Brown’s linen jacket. And on his hands as well.
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE WAS in his shirtsleeves when Paul burst through the double doors of his private study. Paul felt a little bashful about his excitement, considering the previous day’s events. And yet an unrepentant axe murderer had been punished, and his death had exposed to the public the extent of Edison’s lies about alternating current. No one could now believe that alternating current was particularly lethal. The question was already being asked in the papers: Had Brown been simply mistaken? Or had he been lying? And if the latter, why?
Paul had not often been able to relay such good news to his client.
“Mr. Cravath?” Westinghouse checked his pocket watch.
“Sir, I telegrammed. The news from Buffalo—surely you’ve seen it?”
Proudly, Paul removed the day’s New York Times from his coat pocket. He slapped the paper down on Westinghouse’s desk.
The headline blared in forty-eight-point type across the top of the thin broadsheet: ELECTRICAL ATROCITY IN BUFFALO—IS EDISON TO BLAME?
“The papers are all looking into Edison,” said Paul. “They all are reporting that Brown was a fraud and someone had to have put him up to it.”
Westinghouse said nothing. He looked down at the newspaper, taking it into his hands and giving the headlines a long, hard stare.
“This is good,” said Westinghouse.
“Yes, this is good,” said Paul. This wasn’t quite the reaction he had hoped for. “Your current is too safe to be of any use in executions. They could barely kill a man with the stuff when they tried. Every newspaper in the country is reporting the story in the same terms: A/C is too safe. The scandal is no longer about the worrisome dangers of your current—it’s about your current’s worrisome safety.”
“We’ll sell more units.”
“We’ll sell a lot more units.” Paul was perplexed by his client’s muted response. Sales of A/C systems had been slowing of late. This was just the thing to reinvigorate buyers. This should have been a long-awaited moment of triumph. But Westinghouse looked as if the two men were at a wake.
“We’ll need to,” said Westinghouse as he set the paper down and sat back in his chair. “We’re bankrupt.” He said it so abruptly that Paul wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
“What?”
“Well, not quite yet. But soon. Very soon.”
“I don’t understand…” Sales had slowed, but they hadn’t slowed enough for that.
“Perhaps you’ve been reading the wrong papers,” suggested Westinghouse as he took a folded paper from under some letters on the other side of his desk. He placed the thin newspaper down on top of Paul’s New York Times. It was The Wall Street Journal.
WHEN LONDON TREMBLES…NEW YORK QUAKES. The subheading was less sensationalistic and more descriptive: “Rumors Spread Across Atlantic of Baring Bros. Collapse.” The second subhead then added helpfully: “Banking House Among World’s Oldest May Fall on Argentine Bond Loss—What Does This Mean for U.S.?”
“It is the damned Argentines,” said Westinghouse. “Everyone thought it was a solid bet at the time.”
Paul took The Journal from the desk and quickly scanned the left-hand column. From what he could gather, the reporting was nothing more than hearsay. Unidentified and unsourced rumors. Certain “suggestions” had “grown louder” in recent days. And these suggestions were that the Baring Brothers bank in London might soon crash. Since this was an institution that had withstood 120 years of financial turmoil, if Baring Brothers had a problem, it was likely not alone. “If the Bank of England itself were to be questioned,” the article said, “it could not carry a more severe shock.” There was more technical information about the nature of the Argentine deal—a South American recession, a bubble in Brazil, a ripple on one continent that would become a tidal wave when it reached another.
“How does this spell our bankruptcy?” asked Paul. “The Barings don’t own this company.”
“But how many of our creditors are now soon to be theirs?”
Paul began to understand the problem.
“Your creditors are going to demand repayment of their loans sooner than anticipated.”
“A lot sooner than anticipated,” replied Westinghouse as he gestured toward a letter on his desk. “That’s from A. J. Cassart. He would like his loans repaid by this coming Friday.”
“Christ…It’s Tuesday.”
“Did you read that in the paper too?”
“How much?”
“Hard to say. But this letter will not be the last of its kind that I receive this week. I have been going over our numbers….It’s no secret that we operate at a loss. Under normal circumstances, this is not a problem. Most growing businesses employ the same tactics.”
“How much debt are we in?”
“You, Mr. Cravath, are not in any debt at all. I am in debt for approximately three million dollars.”
“And what are the assets of the company?”
“All told? Approximately two and a half million.”
Paul began to pace the room, considering the problem. “So we’ll need to raise at least five hundred thousand in capital in order to convince your creditors not to seize the company.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve been practicing your mathematics.”
Paul stopped pacing by the ceiling-high bookshelves on the far side of the room. He turned to face Westinghouse.
“It’s not you who is in debt. It is your company. So that’s the first thing. It’s not on you alone.”
“You’re mistaken,” said Westinghouse.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve put up this house and everything in it as collateral. It might not be worth a full half a million, but it’s no tenement.”
Paul knew George Westinghouse had always taken the affairs of his company quite personally. It was named after him, and he treated the corporation as an extension of his own corpus. But it was one thing to do so emotionally; it was another to endanger the roof over his wife’s head.
Seeing the expression on Paul’s face, Westinghouse smiled with a stubborn naïveté.
“You think this is a grave mistake,” suggested Westinghouse.
“Sir, it’s your family,” said Paul.
“Am I in for one of your speeches? They’re quite good, kid, I’ll give you that. But if your aim is to convince me to simply let my company fall without placing every ounce of weight I have underneath it as support, well…not even you are that eloquent.”
Paul knew his argument would lose. The first thing he had learned about persuading others was how to determine when—and of what—they were capable of being persuaded. On that day, he knew Westinghouse would not be moved. And so he also knew that the only way to save his client was to stave off this bankruptcy himself.
You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Paul and Westinghouse took turns making penitent pilgrimages to the most moneyed of the New York moneymen. The stations of their cross were formed by Wall Street, Union Square, and Madison Square. Not a millionaire was spared their devotionals. Westinghouse forswore his company’s sins. The financial promiscuity would come to an end. The firm’s governance was pledged to frugality. In their pleas, the men asked for more than mere blessings. They asked for absolution.
Research into newer and more elaborate products would be halted, with a focus fixed solely upon improving the manufacture and cost-effectiveness of existing devices. They were without the bottomless war chest that J. P. Morgan provided Edison, and so their culture was naturally quite different. They did not aim to be some manner of pie-in-the-sky idea factory. Westinghouse worked. The company would continue to make things, and they would be the highest-quality electrical products in the world. That had always been their goal, and it always would be.
Even the program to develop a new light bulb far afield of Edison’s would be abandoned. They could not continue to afford the manpower on a task that had, after a year, borne no progress at all. Westinghouse’s engineers were good, but they were expensive, and not one of them was Nikola Tesla. The immediate survival of the company was at stake.
They would need only a moderate injection of capital to keep things going through the coming winter. The few hundreds of thousands of dollars they required to maintain operations were small beer compared to the fortunes to be generated by electric light.
But every time Paul and Westinghouse concluded their practiced supplications, they were reminded by the apologetic millionaires across from them that this all depended on a victory over Edison. From the safety of their glazed oak desks, the bankers were quick to suggest that if direct current became the standard of the day, then the Westinghouse Electric Company would play little part in the prosperity. The problem was not with the frugality or operational efficiency of the company—it was with the fragility of its very existence. Who would profit from providing expensive medicine to a man whose illness was already terminal?
They did experience moments of success. Fresh investments were secured from Hugh Garden, A. T. Rowand, and William Scott, extending the company’s life by a few frenzied weeks. Carter and Hughes lent their extensive connections to the cause, producing a much-needed $130,000 just a week into the crisis; it bought them another month. Paul was able to scrape together a few days of survival here and there through his Columbia network. These were the terms in which they now measured—not in dollars and cents, but in weeks, days, even hours. A million dollars could buy a year. A thousand dollars barely afforded a day.
By a unanimous vote, the firm of Carter, Hughes & Cravath decided to defer their legal fees until after the crisis was over. To be sure, the dues owed them continued to mount. They dutifully recorded their labors in the leather-bound ledger they kept for such a purpose, scribbling every meeting, every letter, every late evening beneath the office gas lamps. The right-hand column of their book filled with imaginary dollars. Who knew if they would ever be paid? As the firm—as Paul—built a theoretical fortune, the men remained all too aware that these paper riches might never become real. Paul continued to manage his “associate attorneys” in secret in the hopes that they might uncover another hole in Edison’s patent. Paul paid them from a combination of his own rapidly depleting savings and whatever scraps he could surreptitiously borrow from the firm’s meager accounts. No day ended with a promise of the next.
—
One September day Agnes Huntington strode into his office. Four months had passed since their goodbye in Nashville. She hadn’t made an appointment.
He hadn’t written to her. He hadn’t known what to say. Seeing her in front of him, he still didn’t. He knew her secret. She knew his heart. They were in this way intertwined by the impossibility of their predicament.
“Miss Huntington.” Once again the name felt foolish on his lips after what had passed between them. But what else was he to call her?
“Good morning, Paul,” she said as she shut the door behind her.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. He was telling the truth. “Will you take a seat?”
The humid September air wafted in through the open windows. It had rained only that morning, and the breeze was damp.
“How is Nikola?” she asked.
He told her what he knew. He’d instructed his father not to use the inventor’s name in letters, since they couldn’t be sure if anyone was reading Paul’s mail. Erastus was to speak only of the Tennessee sunflowers in their garden. As his father described the sunflowers, Paul would know that what he was really describing was Tesla. The old man hadn’t liked this subterfuge, but he understood its necessity. His most recent letter had said that the flowers were blooming nicely. Not as tall as he’d hoped, but they were showing their color.
Agnes complimented Paul on handling this with typical cleverness. Paul was proud to be clever in her eyes. Between them, they’d spent a lot of time in the company of geniuses over the past year. Clever would do just fine.
“And how is Mr. Jayne?” Paul asked. He still wasn’t sure just why she’d come to see him. But this was the figurative elephant in the room. He couldn’t go without mentioning it.
“He’s invited me to journey with him to Paris next month. Three weeks of traveling and sightseeing through France. I haven’t been since last I sang there. His family—well, they have their house in the city, in Paris. And a summer cottage farther south. Near Lyon.”
Of course they did. “Are you to be married?” The question was difficult to voice. But he had to know.
She swallowed. “Paul…I…” She stopped herself. When she tried again, her voice was lighter. “I believe the purpose of the trip is so that he might propose.”
“Of course.”
“He’ll offer me his grandmother’s ring in Paris, I’d imagine. Then we can celebrate through the countryside for a few weeks, before returning to Manhattan and Philadelphia to tell our respective families what they assuredly already know.”
“And you’ll accept his proposal?”
“Paul…”
“What does he think of your performing at the Met? Surely he’ll want you to stop?”
“Henry is a good man,” she said. “You think I must be compromising myself for his money. Well, let me tell you, he’s a better man than most, and any woman would be lucky to have him. Just because he comes from money doesn’t make him callow. And if you knew how much I’ve wanted to stop singing professionally, or how many times I’ve almost quit…It is not the constant jockeying for position and stature that I love. I can sing for anyone. Henry doesn’t have such a poor voice himself.” Her voice was firm. But her eyes were wet.
“I understand,” he said. “I respect your decision.”
“You haven’t written me.”
“Nor you me. I’ve been trying to win this suit—or at least not to lose it.”
“So we’re both playing games. You cannot blame me for winning mine just because you’re losing yours.”
They were silent for a moment. Paul wondered if she too felt like a pawn on someone else’s board.
“I didn’t come to tell you that,” said Agnes finally. “I came about your case. About Westinghouse. I know you’ve been to every investor below Fourteenth Street, trying to scrounge up funds. And I know it’s not going well.”
“How do you—” Paul didn’t need to finish the sentence before he realized the answer. “Jayne.”
“Of course he knows that you’re my attorney. And he told me about your troubles. That every banker in town knows of them. But he told me something…well, something that not every banker in town knows. He told me why you’re having such a hard time.”
“Why is that?”
“J. P. Morgan.”
“Morgan owns sixty percent of Edison General Electric,” said Paul. “Personally.”
“Yes,” she said, “but think of what else he owns.”
His mind raced to see the implications of her suggestion. In addition to his controlling shares in EGE, Morgan possessed a piece of nearly half the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. This was the very reason that Westinghouse had hired Paul in the first place.
“Morgan’s people have been visiting all of our prospective investors ahead of me. Morgan has been threatening them. ‘Invest even a dollar in Westinghouse’s company, and you’ll be punished.’ ”
