The Last Days of Night, page 7
Paul burst out of the building into the cool night. The evening breeze washed over his face as he ran to the other side of the engineering school. He stopped on the long stone steps. And he waited.
If he had things figured correctly, Tesla was not the type to relish the spotlight. Martin would shield him from the horde of eager engineers and lead him out of the school, by way of the very door where Paul was waiting. What could he say in only a few short seconds that would attract Tesla to his cause? He’d never before had to craft such a concise argument.
Half a minute later, out walked Tesla and Martin.
“Mr. Tesla!” Paul called out.
Seeing Paul, Martin grabbed at Tesla’s coat sleeve, pulling him along.
“Mr. Tesla,” continued Paul, approaching the pair. Up close, Tesla was inches taller than Paul, who was unaccustomed to being without a height advantage.
“Pardon…apologies…,” mumbled Tesla. Martin continued to lead him away.
“Mr. Tesla,” said Paul, “I work for George Westinghouse. And we’d like to offer you a very special partnership.” At the name “Westinghouse,” both Tesla and Martin turned their heads. Paul had his target before him.
“I’m told you’ve had some unpleasant experiences with Thomas Edison in the past,” continued Paul. “How would you feel about the opportunity for revenge?”
As Tesla’s lip began to curl into a curious smile, Paul knew he had him.
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
—KARL POPPER
AN ARRAY OF silver knives glittered on the table. The gaslight threw shadows against the white tablecloth. Oil paintings hung from the walls: placid landscapes, quaint rural scenes. Every man in the smoky chamber beneath William Street was there for battle of one kind or another, taking their places behind the sharpened cutlery with which they would joust. Paul Cravath, stiffly shifting in his dinner jacket, peered down at his crustaceous second: the softest, most butter-soaked lobster upon which he’d ever laid eyes.
The lobster on Paul’s plate had been caught off the coast of Maine—possibly that very morning—before it had been shipped in a densely packed smack to the Fulton Street fish markets. Purchased personally by the chef, Charles Ranhofer, this lobster was then dropped alive into a pot of hot water and boiled for a full twenty-five minutes. The claws had been cracked, the tail sliced open, and all the wet meat had been removed from the shell and fried in a cast-iron pan of clarified butter. Fresh cream had been poured over the browning flesh, and then, after the liquid had been reduced by half, a cup of Madeira had been added to the mixture. The flame had been reinforced beneath the pan as the liquid had been brought to boil a second time, burning off the fortified wine. A tablespoon of cognac had been mixed in, along with four large egg yolks. Chef Ranhofer had sprinkled the faintest snow of cayenne pepper over the top before a retinue of servers delivered the tender meat to Paul’s plate. This was lobster à la Newburg, the spécialité de la maison.
Three courses into dinner, and they were still only on the lobster. He had no idea how he was going to get all of this food into his already bloated belly. The buttons of his trousers, newly purchased at R. H. Macy’s, felt ready to rip. His never-worn white shirt was growing damp with sweat. His bow tie pressed his wing-tipped shirt collar into his neck as if to pop his head clean off, like a boiled shrimp. Business dinners such as this were pure blood sport: How much meat and wine could a man pour down his gullet while still managing to conduct himself in even a slightly professional manner?
At Delmonico’s, the most elegant and fashionable restaurant for New York’s ruling class, delicacy of cuisine was defined not as much by complexity as by volume. Too much? There was no such thing. Quails, cakes, cardamom, and coins—there would never be enough to go around. If Paul could be blamed for any of this, it was only that he was a man of his time. It was with a tinge of longing on his wet tongue that he had to admit, if only to himself, that he genuinely loved the taste of sauce béarnaise.
Paul took a sip from his port and gestured to the identical plate of lobster à la Newburg that lay before his dinner companion.
“Have you had this lobster before, Mr. Tesla?” said Paul. “It’s the best in New York.”
This was not a lie per se. It might very well be the best lobster in the city, even though Paul had never eaten it before. Carter and Hughes had taken clients here frequently, but Paul had never been invited along.
Paul’s goal this evening was to make an impression. The night before, after Tesla had quickly accepted his offer to dine, Paul had found Westinghouse at his hotel and they had hatched their plan: Westinghouse and his team would analyze Tesla’s newly acquired A/C patents. If they could modify the bulbs that the company was selling to work on alternating current, they would gain an undeniable technological advantage over Edison. Their lights would not only be powered more efficiently, but they could be powered over far greater distances as well. At the same time, Paul would let Nikola Tesla know on which side his bread might be buttered, rather literally speaking.
“I have not tasted this crustacean,” replied Tesla. “Fish is not welcomed by my palate.” Tracing his finger in a circle around the plate, Tesla continued with an odd question: “How many centimeters do you think? Thirty?”
“Excuse me?”
“The plate. Thirty-five centimeters? Yes, I think thirty-five. And four centimeters deep.”
“I suppose so…”
“Quite a bit, is it not? One hundred and forty cubic centimeters of this smelling-sweet broth, minus the broth dispositioned by the tail of lobster. So only…” Tesla paused as he measured the length of the lobster meat with his finger, counting the knuckles. “Yes, one hundred five cubic centimeters.”
“You’ve a good head for figures,” replied Paul. He could not tell precisely what the topic of conversation was, so this seemed as good a shot as any at remaining on it. “I’d imagine that’s a valuable trait in your line of work.”
“It is the unevenness of the shape, that is what makes difficulty in calculation. I could be otherwise greater in precision.” Tesla stared at his food.
“Might you like to try eating it?”
“I cannot.”
“Because you don’t enjoy shellfish?”
“Because it is not one hundred five cubic centimeters, Mr. Paul Cravath; I think that we both know. And approximations are worthwhile only to the degree of their precision. That is saying not at all.”
“You can only eat the lobster once you’ve accurately measured its cubic dimensions?”
“Well, of course not; please do not mistake me for a crazy. I can only ingest a dinner the cubic volume of which adds to a number divisible by three.”
To think that Paul had once found Westinghouse difficult to talk to.
Four waiters worked in tandem to slide ris de veau onto the table as Paul launched in. “What my client can provide you is a laboratory and a staff in which to pursue your devices. You have built some marvelous inventions, but you’ve not yet developed them into products for the marketplace, have you? Westinghouse possesses the resources to do just that. It sounds like a beautiful marriage. And as its humble clergyman, I’d advocate a spring wedding.”
Tesla gave no indication of being either moved or unmoved by what Paul had said. He seemed in a different place entirely.
“Products?” said Tesla, as if even pronouncing the word felt wrong.
“Yes. Your designs. The wonders you’ve theorized. George Westinghouse is in a position to build them. To make them real. To bring them to life.”
Tesla frowned. “It matters not at all whether these things are built. I have seen them in my mind. And I know that they work. Whether they are products in your markets—what concern is that to me?”
Paul wasn’t sure how to respond. What creator did not live to see his creations brought to life?
Paul had to change tactics. Whatever animated Tesla, whatever spirit moved him, was a force unknown. But no matter how otherworldly Tesla might be, Paul hoped that he might at least possess some of the baser instincts known to all men.
“And Thomas Edison?” asked Paul. “Would you like for him to see your designs brought to life?”
“Mr. Thomas Edison would be unable to understand the designs I have done if even they were built before his eyeballs. He is not inventing. He is not science. He is a face for the photographs. An actor on the boards.”
“What happened? Between the two of you?”
The expression on Tesla’s face was one that he might make tasting rancid milk. That is, if Tesla even drank milk.
“I ventured Europe as a young man, after departing Serbia. By ’82, I’d journeyed to Paris, France, where I made the meeting of Mr. Charles Batchelor. He’d been delivered to oversee Edison’s manufacturing in Paris, France; the gentleman gave me a hiring there. He remained for a few of months, and as he looked over my still humble tinkerings, told me to look up to him if I ever made it to New York City, America.”
“So you did.”
“So I did. I moved to New York City, America, with a nickel inside my pocket. I marched right to Edison’s offices. My first meeting with the great Mr. Thomas Edison. It was…Have you ever met Mr. Thomas Edison?”
“I have. It’s not an experience I’d recommend to the faint of heart.”
“He laughed at me. ‘Who is this Parisian tramp and what is he saying?’ That’s what Mr. Thomas Edison said. My accent is wide. Perhaps you have been noticing. Mr. Charles Batchelor told him I was a clever one, but he did not believe. So I offered him a demonstration. They had a ship in the harbor of New York City, America—failure of its engines. It had been supposed to bring materials to London, England, but couldn’t leave port. Their fixing person was in Boston, America, but would not be down to repair it for two days. So I said I would take it in my care.”
Tesla gazed at his veal rounds. With his silver knife, he sliced the ris into halves. And then quarters. And then, with infinitesimal precision, further into eighths.
“Engines are not complicated things, Mr. Paul Cravath. People seem so fearful of them. A fear of digging one’s hands inside. ‘Too many moving parts!’ I am quite brilliant, you know, and yet while I would wish for this tale to illustrate my brilliance, it doesn’t. Because any one of persons can fix an engine. All you do, you see, is you take the first part. You study: What is this piece doing? To what is it connected? And then you follow along: What is this next piece? To what is it connected? An engine is a chain, and all chains are made of linkings. Mr. Charles Batchelor could have done the same himself if he’d possessed the patience.”
“But he didn’t,” replied Paul. “You did.”
“Edison was…impressed, perhaps. I went to work for him the next day, at his laboratory in New Jersey, America. It was filthy.”
“Filthy?”
“Not only would he have the laboratory cleaned unoften, but Edison’s men worked as pigs in a pool of slop. Commutators here, gears there, all the screws in one big pile in the center of the table so that to find two matched ones, God forbid, would be as if finding two needles simultaneously in the same haystack. Edison is a slob. He is a bull in a shop. What is it?”
“China.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s a china shop,” said Paul. “With the bull. Harder to explain than would be worth your time.”
“I appreciate your honesty. That laboratory is a place I will not return to, do you understand? It’s not only the filth. It’s the absence of vision. Let’s say you want to do something…say, all right, say you wanted to build a table. So you would set out the top, and then Edison would say, Let us try building it with two legs! And a reasonable man would respond, But a table clearly should have on it four legs. Let us build that. And Edison would say, But we must experiment. That was the word he loved—‘experiment.’ He was experimenting always. Every possibility, every variation, every useless, no-point, waste-of-time modification he could devise. So the two-legged table, it would not work. And I would say, Might we now build our four-legged table? And Edison would say, No, let us try a three-legged table! And he would build it. And then, at long length, six months later, you would finally be granted permission from Lord Sir Thomas Edison to build a table of four legs. You have wasted half a year on a task that should have cost you but a day. Edison General Electric’s lab is not designed to foster invention. It is designed to foster tedium.”
“So you left,” said Paul, as a waiter refilled his glass of Montrachet.
“At the end of that year, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-four, I requested of him for a raise. Another seven dollars a week. It would have brought my salary to a princely twenty-five dollars per week.”
“And Edison said no to such a reasonable request?” soothed Paul. To be sure, twenty-five dollars a week was a very decent salary—and yet it was nothing compared to what Edison had made from the patents created at that lab.
“He laughed at me. Again. I will never forget his laughter. ‘The woods are full of men like you, Tesla.’ That is what he said to me. Those were his very words. ‘The woods are full of men like you, Tesla. And I can have any number of them for eighteen dollars a week.’ I walked out of the door to his office on that day and I have not seen him since.”
“It sounds like the time is right for getting even.”
“So it is that you have suggested, Mr. Cravath. But how is that to become occurrence?”
“Why don’t I show you?” said Paul as he reached, with some flourish, for his billfold. He removed a check, drawn from Westinghouse’s bank.
It was, of course, not Paul’s own money that he slid across the table. And yet he felt a thrill at the ability to command such a fortune with his fingertips.
“That’s fifty thousand dollars.” His dinner companion glanced down at the check. “Do you know what the best revenge is, Mr. Tesla?”
Paul motioned for the waiter to bring two glasses of champagne and settled back into his armchair.
“Success.”
Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson….He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal.
—STEVE JOBS
TESLA FORGOT TO take the money.
That’s what bothered Paul most as he stirred fitfully beneath the sheets in his two-room apartment on East Fiftieth Street. Tesla had left the money on the table. The servers had delivered his overcoat and Tesla had made it halfway through the front door before Paul saw the promissory note on the table. Sitting there under a knife, the slightest stain of red wine grazing its top edge.
Paul had run to return it. He’d been thanked halfheartedly.
Tesla had come to New York with five cents in his pocket, and now, four years later, he’d absentmindedly left a check for fifty thousand dollars on a restaurant table.
Paul had come to New York with a bit more than a nickel, though not much more. He could recite the precise contents of his account at First National to the penny. He had earned each of those pennies, and he was proud of them. Granted, people never spoke of such things. This was difficult for him, sometimes, with his friends. He made a good living, and he wanted to shout to his closest allies, Look at what I’ve accomplished! But the word “dollar” itself seemed rude.
Paul did not understand people who did not like money. What motivated their dreams? What comprised their desires? Could happiness be “purchased,” as they say? Well, of course not. But it was not as if it were free either.
It seemed to Paul that the people who did not care about money came in one of two varieties. The first were the blithely wealthy. Born to privilege, they had been so rich for so long that the question of money had honestly never occurred to them. They might be aware of their good luck, but the concept was purely theoretical. They knew in the abstract that they had things that others didn’t, but—or perhaps because of this—they seemed always to be conjuring up purely hypothetical desires that remained abstractly unfulfilled. They imagined other people far richer, and took great care to delineate their differences from such genuine excess. If only one could make the trip to Europe every year, they might say, like the So-and-So’s. That sort of thing. Then they weighted themselves with their humdrum family dramas, with the tragic intrigue of wastrel brothers and unmarried sisters. The daily slights and indignities of familial melodrama allowed them the freedom to imagine themselves burdened. Such people could afford to choose for themselves what to be miserable about.
The second variety was, ironically, the unknowing poor. They hadn’t a dime, they’d never had a dime, they weren’t likely to have a dime, and while they liked the notion of dimes in principle, they had no idea quite how much pleasure a dime could purchase. They were not happily poor—that would be a condescending caricature. Being poor did not make anyone happy. It was only that some people managed to be both.
Paul’s father was closer to this second type. He wasn’t after money. He wasn’t after a station, an appointment, a jeweled career. He was after justice, and he’d tell you about it plain as day. He wanted to build a more just world because the God he worshipped had taught him to love laboring for it. Sometimes Paul envied the simplicity of his father’s perspective. To seek only the light of the Lord’s grace was a far simpler thing, or so Paul thought, than his own demands. Paul wished that he might share his father’s beliefs. And yet try as he might, the God of Erastus Cravath could not be forced by act of mental will into his son’s heart.
Tesla’s relationship with money was spookier. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t care for money. He’d accepted Paul’s offer. Yet money was clearly not the thing that he wanted. Which suggested the question that kept Paul up that night, as the spring air grew warm enough that he’d flung the heavy sheets from his bed:
