Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (10 page)

I have been thinking over this motor question very considerably, and am of the opinion that if Tesla has a number of applications pending in the Patent Office, he will be able to cover broadly the apparatus that Shallenberger was experimenting with, and that Stanley thought he had invented. It is more than likely that he will be able to carry his date of invention back sufficient time to seriously interfere with Ferraris, and that our investment there will probably prove a bad one.

If the Tesla patents are broad enough to control the alternating motor business, then the Westinghouse Electric Company cannot afford to have others own the patents.
⁵¹

Concerning the sticky point of royalties, which the Tesla syndicate placed at the audacious figure of $2.50 per watt, Westinghouse wrote, “The price seems rather high, but if it is the only method for operating a motor by the alternating current, and if it is applicable to street car work, we can unquestionably easily get from the users of the apparatus whatever tax is put upon it by the inventors.”
⁵²
Thus, in no uncertain terms, Westinghouse writes here the portentous statement that royalty payments could be passed on to customers, a concept he would be forced later to conveniently overlook.

[My] first impression [was that of a man with] tremendous potential energy of [which]…only part had taken kinetic form. But even to a superficial observer, the latent force was manifest. A powerful frame, well proportioned, with every joint in working order, an eye as clear as crystal, a quick and springy step—he presented a rare example of health and strength. Like a lion in a forest, he breathed deep and with delight the smoky air of his factories.

N
IKOLA
T
ESLA ON
G
EORGE
W
ESTINGHOUSE
¹

A
lthough George Westinghouse had made his fortune with the invention of air brakes for trains, he was not just a railroad man. He was a descendant of the aristocratic Russian von Wistinghousen family; his father was also an inventor, with six fundamental patents of farming machinery. With his brother Henry (who later became his partner), George early on was introduced to such devices as the battery and the sparking leyden jar (a glass jar lined with foil and used for storing an electric charge). Having been a cavalry boy and, later, a navy engineer during the Civil War, George Westinghouse had experience and vision; he knew that the future was in electricity.

In late July 1888, Tesla took a train to Pittsburgh to meet with George Westinghouse and finalize the sale of his patents. It may have been the middle of summer, but oddly, the inventor welcomed the intense heat. He looked forward to the meeting.

Considerable in stature, with a walrus-sized mustache, Chester A. Arthur sideburns, and a remarkable wife of equal proportion who wore a bustle that jutted three feet to the rear, Westinghouse greeted the lanky
inventor. A garrulous man, George Westinghouse subsumed those around him with his geniality and unbounded confidence. He took Tesla to his home and then on a tour of the plant. With nearly four hundred employees, Westinghouse’s electric company was mainly producing “alternators, transformers and accessories for equipping central stations for supplying incandescent lighting.”
²
Barrel-chested and physically expansive, Westinghouse counterbalanced in appearance the spindle-legged foreigner, who walked as “straight as an arrow, [with his] head erect…but with a preoccupied air as if new combinations were crystallizing in his brain.”
³

Tesla said:

Though past forty then, [Westinghouse] still had the enthusiasm of youth. Always smiling, affable and polite, he stood in marked contrast to the rough and ready men I met. Not one word which would have been objectionable, not a gesture which might have offended—one could imagine him as moving in the atmosphere of a court, so perfect was his bearing in manner and speech. And yet no fiercer adversary than Westinghouse could have been found when he was aroused. An athlete in ordinary life, he was transformed into a giant when confronted with difficulties which seemed unsurmountable. He enjoyed the struggle and never lost confidence. When others would give up in despair he triumphed.
⁴

Known for his foresight and courage, Westinghouse had already
quadrupled
the sales of his electric company, from $800,000 in 1887 to over $3 million in 1888, even though he was in the midst of expensive legal and propaganda battles with Edison.
⁵
Extraordinary in his ability to generate enthusiasm in his workers and a decisive man of action, he immediately gained the respect of those he met, particularly Nikola Tesla.

Westinghouse offered Tesla $5,000 in cash for a sixty-day option, $10,000 at the end of the option if they elected to purchase the patents, three notes of $20,000 at six-month intervals, $2.50 per watt in royalties, and two hundred shares of stock in the Westinghouse Company. Minimum payment on the royalties was calculated at “$5,000 for the first year, $10,000 for the second year, and $15,000 for each succeeding year thereafter during the life of the patents.”
⁶
Westinghouse also agreed to pay for any legal expenses in litigation on priority issues, but a clause for lowering payments was added should any suits be lost. Calculated out, for fifteen years, this figure, minus the stock, came to $75,000 in initial outlays and $180,000 in royalty payments, or approximately $255,000.
⁷

Tesla owned four-ninths of his company, the balance shared by Peck and Brown, presumably three-ninths to the former partner and two ninths
to the latter.
⁸
Concerning total amounts paid out by Westinghouse, Tesla also referred to European patents, especially in England and Germany.
⁹
Thus, it is hard to determine exactly how much Tesla received for his forty patents. Westinghouse was not only getting a simple induction motor but also a variety of synchronous and load-dependent motors as well as armatures, turbines, regulators, and dynamos. Tesla may have sold additional inventions later on in separate agreements; the value of his stock holding is also unclear.

A decade later, Tesla wrote to another financier, John Jacob Astor, that “Mr. Westinghouse agreed to pay for my rotating field patents about $500,000, and, despite…hard times, he has lived up to every cent of his obligation.”
¹⁰
Since Tesla was trying to raise money from Astor, he may have exaggerated the sum. Two years earlier,
Electrical Review
noted that the Westinghouse annual report listed the purchase of the patents at $216,000,
¹¹
which is a figure that corresponds roughly to the Byllesby memorandum above, minus a few years’ worth of royalty payments. If this was the case, then Tesla probably received for himself about half that figure, or $100,000, the entire amount paid in installments during the years 1888-97.
¹²

During the negotiations, Tesla agreed to move to Pittsburgh to help develop his motor. It is quite possible that he received no salary for his stay there, for he had a peculiar “principle, ever since I devoted myself to scientific laboratory research, never to accept fees or compensations for professional services.”
¹³
Tesla had been paid for his patents and was receiving royalties (or payments against royalties), so there was an income. Further evidence that no additional daily or weekly compensation was received is implied in a signed agreement by George Westinghouse, dated July 27, 1889, substantiating that Tesla worked in Pittsburgh for one year and that during that time he was paid with “one hundred and fifty (150) shares of Capital Stock.” In return, Tesla promised to assign any patents to the Westinghouse Company which were directly related to the development of his induction motor patents. Other compensation was received from Westinghouse, however, for other contributions. For instance, when Tesla discovered that Bessemer steel created a vastly superior transformer than ones made out of soft iron, Tesla was paid approximately $10,000 for the idea.
¹⁴

Tesla gave up his garden apartment in New York and moved into one of several hotels in Pittsburgh, including the Metropolitan, the Duquesne, and the Anderson.
¹⁵
Hotel living would become a lifestyle which he never departed from.

His talk, just two months old, had already catapulted him to fame. “About the middle of August 1888 in the Westinghouse testing room at Pittsburgh,” Charles Scott, his assistant to be, remembered: “I had just
come with the company and was assistant to E. Spooner who was running the dynamos testing room at night. He called me and said, ‘There comes Tesla.’

“I had heard of Tesla,” Scott continued, having “read [Tesla’s] paper on the polyphase induction motor which my former college professor had pronounced as a complete solution of the motor problem. And now I was to see Tesla himself.”

Fair-haired, with round, rimless glasses, Scott had only learned “that there was such a thing as alternating current” the summer before, in 1887. “I had…graduated from college two years earlier, and I wondered why I had not heard of such things from my professors.” His only introduction was an
Electrical World
article by William Stanley, which was “a fascinating…key to many mysteries.”
¹⁶
Now, a year later, he was to meet Nikola Tesla, the man who so elegantly solved all the puzzles proposed by Stanley. “There he came, marching down the aisle with head and shoulders erect and with a twinkle in his eye. It was a great moment for me.”
¹⁷

Scott, who later became an engineering professor at Yale University, was “Tesla’s wireman…in preparing and making tests. It was a splendid opportunity for a beginner, this coming in contact with a man of such eminence, rich in ideas, kindly and friendly in disposition. Tesla’s fertile imagination often constructed air castles which seemed prodigious. But, I doubt whether ever his extravagant expectations for the toy motor of those days measured up to actual realization…for the polyphase system which it inaugurated…exceed[ed] the wildest dreams of the early day[s].”
¹⁸

Scott was not only Tesla’s assistant, as time went on and against the opinion of many colleagues, he became a champion of Tesla’s cause, a bearer of the truth, that is, that Tesla was the inventor of the induction motor. Another staunch supporter was Swiss immigrant Albert Schmid, coauthor of two AC patents with Tesla. Even though Westinghouse himself was also an ally, there was a bevy of other workers who tried seriously to strip Tesla of the crown. Major adversaries of the early period included Oliver Shallenberger, inventor of the AC meter, and his helpmate Lewis B. Stillwell, inventor of the Stillwell booster, which operated somewhat like the Tesla coil. At a later period, the key antagonist was Andrew W. Robertson, Westinghouse’s chief executive officer.

Yet another opponent was William Stanley, the first American to have ever successfully instituted an AC system in the country. Stanley had split off from the Westinghouse Corporation (circa 1892-93) in order to sell his own polyphase motors, which were clear patent infringements on the Tesla system. This position was supported by the courts a few years later, and Stanley was forced to purchase the Tesla motors from Westinghouse.
¹⁹

To fathom the depth of hostility that existed within the Westinghouse camp against Tesla, one need only read Lewis B. Stillwell’s chapter on the
history of alternating current, written forty years after the fact in a text entitled
George Westinghouse Commemoration.
Edited by Charles Scott, the book was widely distributed by the corporation and reissued in 1985. In the introduction to Stillwell’s chapter it is recounted

how Westinghouse brought the Gaulard-Gibbs system to America, how it was modified, and then given practical demonstrations by Stanley…and what has happened since.

In 1888 came Shallenberger’s brilliant invention of the induction meter. In the same year Nikola Tesla was granted his United States patents covering the polyphase motor and system. Westinghouse promptly secured the American rights. Tesla came to Pittsburgh to develop his motor. He made vain attempts to adapt it to the existing single phase, 133-cycle circuits…The
obvious advantages
[emphasis added] of direct connection of engines and generators called for a lower frequency…Two were selected as standard, namely 60 cycles for general use and 30 cycles for conversion into direct current.
²⁰

If we analyze the structure of this Stillwell quote, we note that although the topic sentence refers to Shallenberger, the entire paragraph is about Tesla. The word brilliant is used to describe an accidental discovery that a spring reacted to alternating currents
²¹
when no adjective is used to describe the inventor of an entire power system!

Tesla refers to the same situation in his autobiography: “My system was based on the use of low frequency currents and the Westinghouse experts had adopted 133 cycles with the object of securing advantages in transformation [because their Gaulard-Gibbs system operated at that frequency]. They did not want to depart from the standard form of apparatus and my efforts had to be concentrated upon adapting the motor to their conditions.”
²²

With 120 power plants set up at 133 cycles per second, one can understand the predicament Tesla was placed in. Since Shallenberger’s meter was compatible with the prevailing 133-cycle single circuit, it appeared logical that Tesla’s polyphase motor could be made compatible as well.

In December 1888, Edison’s propaganda battle against Westinghouse peaked when Edison began to allow H. P. Brown (who was not an Edison employee) to come to his Menlo Park laboratory in order to electrocute various animals with AC. A few months earlier, Brown had experimented in electrocuting animals at the School of Mines, a division of Columbia University, in New York City. Brown, an electrical engineer who lived on Fifty-fourth Street, had become upset over the many accidental deaths of his colleagues. He had collected a list of over eighty casualties, and
although many of the men died because of DC, Brown decided that AC was the real culprit. Within two years, Brown began to manufacture electric chairs for various prisons which he sold for $1,600. He also planned to get paid to be the executioner. During the summer of 1888 the
New York Times
reported that he “tortured and electrocuted a dog…First try[ing] continuous currents at a force of 300 volts…when the shock came the dog yelped…At 700 volts he broke his muzzle and nearly freed himself. He was tied again. At 1,000 his body contorted in pain…‘We will have less trouble when we try alternating current,’ Mr. Brown said. It was proposed that he put the dog out of its misery at once. This was done on an alternating current of 300 volts killing the beast.”
²³

A number of cities had adopted electrocution to rid the streets of unwanted canines, but the state of New York went a step further and set up a commission in 1886 “to report…on the most humane method of capital punishment.”
²⁴
Under the auspices of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, Brown arose as chief spokesman.