The Last Days of Night, page 6
The two men arrived at the corner of Madison Avenue, where before them rose the blocks-long campus of Columbia College. They entered onto the grassy lawns to the echoing St. Thomas Church. Paul had not been back to his alma mater in some time. The sensation, as he stepped between the gray slabs of Greek Revival buildings, was one of time travel. He walked past the former Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. The property had been bought by the savvy trustees of Columbia years earlier. New wings were being added to nearly every building as the college expanded. The law school lay closer to Forty-ninth Street, on the north end of the campus. As Paul gazed at the unkempt students on the lawn, he felt impossibly old. Was it only a few years before that he had been this young?
To be a stranger in the place of your coming-of-age, to be an old man to your peers but a young man to your partners—these were the signs of generational displacement endemic to the young and successful. Paul felt an instinctive desire to be back here, to be a student again with so much to prove. And yet he remembered how tense and unhappy those years had been. He had found himself the poor Tennessee boy among the moneyed children of New York royalty. He’d thought he’d met a well-to-do crowd—sons of merchants and railroad men—at Oberlin, but that was only because he’d never met the truly affluent. He had never felt poor before Columbia.
As Paul led Westinghouse into the engineering school, he noticed he was far from the only postgraduate walking under the new stone archway. Clearly the publication of Tesla’s designs had served as some advertisement that tonight’s lecture would be far from ordinary. Whatever “ordinary” might mean in an organization so young as the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and in a field so untested.
As he and Westinghouse settled into two empty seats near the back of the long hall, Paul saw a familiar face several rows closer to the podium. Charles Batchelor winked as their eyes met. And then Batchelor turned away, lost in the sea of engineers.
So Thomas Edison was tracking Tesla too. Of course he was.
The schematics that Thomas Martin had published in Electrical World a week before were incomplete. They suggested the beginnings of some new device, but gave little indication as to its function. Yet evidently whatever Tesla had sketched had the potential to be quite revolutionary.
No one knew precisely what Tesla was to unveil. Westinghouse had said that, based on the schematics, it could be one of a hundred different electrical devices. The mystery only served to increase the potential.
They waited for half an hour. The longer the delay, the greater the expectations became. The chattering of the tightly packed crowd grew louder and more insistent with every minute in which Tesla failed to appear. The seats creaked under the weight of their gossip.
Finally the main doors opened to reveal Thomas Martin—identified by Westinghouse—leading a man who could only be Nikola Tesla into the hall. Tesla was shockingly thin, easily six and a half feet tall, with a delicately curled mustache and a part dead in the center of his slick black hair. Paul’s first thought was that he must be on loan from P. T. Barnum’s circus. Tesla appeared immaculate in his stiffly pressed suit and thickly greased hair, and yet utterly uncomfortable as he was literally yanked to the stage by his host. Martin deposited Tesla awkwardly into a reserved seat in the front row before immediately stepping up to the podium.
Everyone settled in for the evening’s performance.
“I will begin by stating the obvious,” said Martin with a commanding voice. “Our guest of honor does not want to be here.”
The joke was greeted by a warm chuckle from the crowd. Martin was as close to an éminence grise as New York’s engineering community possessed. Science was becoming a young man’s game, if the composition of this audience was any indication, and the white of Martin’s beard made clear that he no longer was one.
“Nikola Tesla is a genius,” continued Martin. “And like many geniuses, he is a deeply private man. However, he has allowed himself to be convinced that on this one night, he should share his particular genius with us. Discoveries such as his, I am sure you will shortly realize, were never meant to remain in the dark.” Paul could read the satisfaction in Martin’s slight smile. Ownership, that’s what Martin was imparting upon the crowd. Tesla was his discovery. By extension, whatever it was that Tesla would bring into the world, Martin was laying a claim to as well.
“Gentlemen,” continued Martin, “if you’ll permit me one last unorthodoxy, I will not bore you with further introduction of your guest of honor. He has requested that the details of his life before this moment go unmentioned, as they have little bearing on tonight’s proceedings. So I will honor his wish, and without further ado, I present to you my friend and colleague Nikola Tesla. He has something he would not like to show you.”
It took a moment for the applause to catch up with the speech. Martin had already bounded away from the podium. Tesla ascended toward the great chalkboard at the front of the room, then turned to face the crowd. He kept his hands in his pockets as he stared off into the distance. The applause died down, but Tesla seemed not to notice. He placed no notes before him on the lectern. He did not reach for the chalk, or do anything else that might convey to an observer that he was in fact about to deliver a lecture.
Tesla continued staring into a vague and uncertain distance. Whatever world this man occupied, he was its only inhabitant. He seemed completely unaware of the existence of the hundreds assembled before him, prepared to hang on his every word if only he’d be so kind as to utter a few.
“Please pardon my face,” came Tesla’s high-pitched and thickly accented voice. “My pallor is white as pale. My health is in a condition dishabille.”
Between the muddle of his Serbian accent and the bizarre nature of his syntax, it took Paul a few moments to determine that Tesla was in fact speaking in English. It was soon clear that his command of the raw materials of the language—words, short phrases—was deep, and yet his use of its intricacies—grammar, sentence construction—was haphazard. It was as if Tesla tossed up into the air all the words he knew on a given subject, and then walked away before he could see where they landed.
“Laboratories are better-fit places for machines than personages,” continued Tesla. “But I am digressed. The notice I received for tonight’s lecture was rather small, and I have not been able to treat the subject so extensively as desired. My health, I have said. I ask your kind indulgence, and my gratification shall be in your minor approvals.”
And with that, Nikola Tesla marched out of the room.
Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: There will always be some who misunderstand you.
—KARL POPPER
THOMAS MARTIN DID his best to calm the crowd. From the aggrieved look on Martin’s face, it seemed to Paul that this stunt was but the latest in a long line of Tesla’s rebellions.
If Martin’s intent had been to claim Tesla as his own, this disaster in progress served to convey precisely the opposite impression. Tesla belonged to no one.
And then, quite suddenly, Tesla burst back through the wide double doors. He entered as quickly as he’d departed. But this time he pulled behind him a four-wheeled cart, atop which hung a long black cloth. From the uneven protrusions along the surface of the cloth, it was clear that something strange lay underneath. Something that Tesla intended to display at the right moment. Paul couldn’t help but be reminded of a magician setting up a trick.
“The subject on which I have the pleasure of carrying to your notices is a novel system of electrical distribution and power transmission.” Tesla’s words were delivered at a volume more suited to luncheon with an old friend than to a lecture hall of hundreds. The audience members hushed one another as they struggled to make out what he was saying. Paul looked to Westinghouse. Could the old man even hear a word?
“Alternating currents are the basis of my system’s use, as they afford advantages particular over the direct currents common to the terrain in this age and day. I am confident that I will at once establish the superior adaptability of these currents to both the transmission of power and to the ways of motors.”
The recently won quiet of the audience broke instantly. Shouts of disbelief came from all corners of the lecture hall. “Alternating current?” came the first cry of many. Whatever Tesla was saying seemed deeply controversial.
Tesla yanked away the black cloth, revealing three metal devices underneath. To Paul’s eye, these devices, each about twice the size of a typewriter, looked to be collections of wire coils, hollow tubes, and strange wheels.
“Forgiveness for me,” said Tesla. As he’d failed to raise his voice, his gentle insistence was lost on most of the audience. “It would seem that explanations are ordered.”
Tesla finally went to the chalkboard and began scribbling equations. It looked to Paul like chicken scratch, but whatever he was writing had a hypnotic effect on the engineers. When Tesla would reach the end of one line and had to pause as he slid the ten feet leftward to begin writing a new one, there were audible gasps. Paul quickly turned his attention from Tesla to the faces of the crowd. He saw their wrinkling brows as they struggled to piece together what Tesla was showing them. More than a few took out pencil and pad. The product of their own scribblings seemed only to confuse them further. They would look back up at the board and squint their eyes, as if to make sure they weren’t hallucinating.
“Do you know what this all means?” asked Paul of Westinghouse. Paul turned and saw that his client’s mouth was literally agape. “Sir?”
“I’m not sure anyone does,” replied Westinghouse, entranced by the display of mathematical acumen at the front of the hall. “Is he multiplying ‘K’ by the cosine of—what is that? A ‘U’?”
“Afraid you’re asking the one man here who doesn’t know what a cosine is.”
At the front of the room, Tesla scribbled on, giving what appeared to be a very animated lecture into the chalkboard as he did so.
“Look,” said Paul, “can you give me the big picture here? What are those machines? Generally speaking.”
“For God’s sake—that one is a generator. Over there is a motor. And the middle is a stepping-down transformer, looks like.”
“Why such a fuss, then?” Paul was relatively certain he’d heard of all these things before.
“It’s the current,” said Westinghouse. “He’s made—well, he’s saying he’s made, I can’t tell right now—a closed system of currents in alternation.”
Westinghouse furiously scribbled in his notebook. Around the lecture hall, dozens of other engineers were engaged in similar conversations, trying to make sense of the demonstration.
“What’s alternating current?” inquired Paul.
“There is a part of me that almost feels some measure of satisfaction at your finally asking me for a scientific education. But most of me just wants you to hush.”
Westinghouse tore the top page from his notebook and began to sketch a simple diagram. “There are essentially two varieties of electrical current. Continuous, sometimes called direct, which has been the standard in use since Faraday. And alternating, which is actually just as old but isn’t to be found anywhere outside of a laboratory. Because it’s useless.”
“Useless?”
“Do you know how electricity is generated?”
“Yes!” answered Paul enthusiastically. “A generator.”
“Dear God…I mean do you know how a generator works? How it generates current?”
“Oh…No.”
Westinghouse gestured to his diagram as he explained the components he’d sketched. “Simply, and do understand that I’m excising a number of salient details in the name of brevity, there is a magnet, and then a coil of wire rotating around that magnet. One moves the coil with a hand crank, typically, or a steam engine in bigger systems, and as the coil moves through the magnetic field, current is generated. Got it?”
“I suppose. But why? Why does spinning a wire coil through a magnetic field create electrical current?”
“Nobody knows.”
“What do you mean ‘nobody knows’?”
“I mean that no one knows. Electrical energy is a force. It just happens. Only God himself knows where it comes from. For us mere mortals, and for us particularly bright mortals who call ourselves scientists, all we know is how to make the stuff. Would you like me to continue?”
“Very much.” While Paul hoped that Westinghouse would not get impenetrably technical, any explanation he provided would still be more comprehensible than the buckshot of white chalk lines Tesla continued to spread across the blackboard.
“Every time the coil passes around the magnet, it creates a burst of electricity. Zoop! Zoop! Like rifle fire with every spin. Though please note: It’s actually nothing like rifle fire; I’m employing a metaphor so you’ll understand. Now, in order to properly power a device, these bursts are fed into something called a commutator. The commutator smooths these bursts of energy out into an even stream. Like a dam in a river.”
“That makes sense.”
“I’m thrilled to hear it. Because now it gets more complicated. All electric systems must be closed loops, correct? Part and parcel of the strange force. Electricity will only flow in a complete circuit; a partial one will not do. So a generator, as I said, summons the energy from God knows where and then sends it to a commutator for smoothing out—think of turning a series of distinct water droplets into a gentle flow. The commutator then sends this flow to whatever device it’s powering, let’s say a motor, or a lamp. Then, to complete the loop, the lamp is connected back to the commutator, then back to the generator.”
Westinghouse showed Paul his hastily sketched diagram. It depicted a circle, with a box marked “generator” on one side, a box marked “commutator” connecting in the middle, and a box marked “motor” on the far side. Westinghouse moved his finger clockwise around the circle to indicate the path of the electricity. “The current flows continuously, constantly, directly around this loop. Like a circular river. Clear enough? D/C, we call it.”
“I’m following,” said Paul with moderate confidence.
Westinghouse gave a short humph, seemingly unconvinced. “There’s another way to build this circuit. It’s the same circuit, only a different type of generator. Remove the commutator. Now, instead of sending current around constantly like before, it’s sending it in bursts, yes? Bap! Bap! Bap! And due to an oddity of generator design that’s too subtle for you to understand, instead of sending current around the circle only clockwise”—Westinghouse traced his fingers around the circle to further elucidate his point—“these bursts of current switch directions. A burst goes clockwise, then stops, then reverses itself and goes around counterclockwise. Then stops, reverses again, et cetera. It makes these reversals hundreds of times every second. The current ‘alternates,’ you see. A/C. And I hope you realize that when I say clockwise and counterclockwise, I’m again speaking in metaphor, since electricity is not strictly speaking directional. You appreciate the use of metaphor?”
“So who cares? Direct, alternating—D/C, A/C—why does it matter?”
“It doesn’t. Unless of course you wanted to run your home on electrical current. Then it would matter very much indeed. Alternating current runs at considerably higher voltages than direct because it doesn’t have a commutator smoothing it out, compressing, so to speak, its power. It’s more efficient.”
“So why don’t we use it?”
“Because it doesn’t work. Think of one of my light bulbs. It’s powered with direct, continuous current. That’s what makes the light so smooth, so even. Now imagine if it were fed with alternating current. The light would flicker on and off, on and off, a hundred times per second. It would be horrible. Moreover, imagine trying to power a motor with the thing. On and off, on and off, on and off. Terrible, right?”
“Right.”
“The only thing is that an alternating current would be stronger. So if you could somehow make the thing work…well, your lights would last longer. Your motors would spin faster. Oh, and, by the by, the distance you could send this electricity would be far greater.”
Paul looked up from the diagram. “The distance problem? Alternating current is the solution.”
“Alternating current might be the solution. It’s hard to tell just yet, because I’m teaching you basic physics instead of listening to Tesla.”
An engineer from the row in front hushed them. Rather than take offense at the man’s rudeness, Westinghouse appeared too engrossed in Tesla’s demonstration to respond. Paul turned to the front of the room in silence as Tesla finished with his equations and, at last, activated his machines. He turned a wheel on one of the devices and a mechanical hum spread forth into the room. He then turned a wheel on an adjacent machine, releasing a hum of a lower pitch. They sounded to Paul like the groans of distant beasts.
The machines whirred steadily. Their smooth hums were almost pleasing to the ear. The wheels of the motor spun without pause. “Tesla’s figured out how to make this alternating current work, hasn’t he?”
Westinghouse did not respond. He didn’t need to.
Paul leapt to his feet. The war between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse was about to take a decisive turn. A new weapon had just made an appearance on the battlefield. And Paul knew that Westinghouse must have him on his side.
I do not care so much for a great fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.
—THOMAS EDISON
BEFORE WESTINGHOUSE COULD ask him what he was doing, Paul had shuffled across the row of seats. Engineers scowled as his coat dragged against their scribbling pencils. Reaching the aisle, Paul climbed the steps toward the rear, where, he knew from his student days, a service entrance awaited. The service door led Paul to a back staircase, which he took in three-step strides.
Within minutes Tesla was going to be the most in-demand inventor in the country. Charles Batchelor would assuredly attempt to rehire him instantly. Paul hadn’t a clue whether Tesla’s machines could be made to help Westinghouse. But he knew that he could not let Edison have them. And he knew that he did not have much time.
