Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (7 page)

The competition was fierce, and Edison’s financial backers were running scared. They suggested to Edison that they purchase the Sawyer patents and combine the two companies. Edison had not yet settled on carbon as a filament and was exhausting his working capital in experiments with boron, iridium, magnesium, platinum, silicon, and zirconia. At the same time, he had also sent explorers to the Amazon, Bolivia, Japan, and Sumatra in search of rare forms of bamboo, which he was also considering. It would not be until 1881 that he finally settled upon a form of carbonized paper.

During this time, however, and without Edison’s knowledge, Sawyer and Man approached Lowery. Their lamp was superior to Edison’s; it was patented, and it worked. Lowery tried to bring Edison in for a four-way discussion; however, Edison sent an emissary who “dared not relay to Edison all Lowery had said. But Edison heard enough to be jolted from his indecision…Cursing and spraying tobacco juice, he exclaimed it was the old story—lack of confidence!”
³⁹

Edison was adamant about not joining with Sawyer or Swan or anyone else. He continued rash publicity campaigns which announced “a veritable Aladdin’s lamp…[It is] Edison’s light, the great inventor’s triumph.”
⁴⁰

With the backing of Wall Street moguls, Edison began to illuminate Menlo Park and the private homes of the wealthy in New York City. The
first was that of J. Pierpont Morgan, at Thirty-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue. The year was 1881.

To run the generator Edison designed a steam engine and boiler and placed the power plant under the stable in a newly dug cellar at the back edge of the property. Wires were connected to the new incandescent lights placed in the gas fixtures of the home via a brick-lined tunnel which ran the length of the yard just beneath the surface. “Of course, there were the frequent short circuits and many breakdowns on the part of the generating plant. Even at the best, it was a source of a good deal of trouble for the family and neighbors. who complained of the noise of the dynamo. Mrs. James M. Brown next door said that its vibrations made her house shake.” Morgan had to pile sandbags around the inside of the cellar and place the machinery on heavy rubber pads “to deaden the noise and the vibrations. This final experiment restored quiet and brought peace to the neighborhood until the winter, when all the stray cats in the neighborhood gathered on this warm strip in great numbers and their yowlings gave grounds [from the neighbors] for more complaints.”
⁴¹

The following year, on September 4, 1882, the new Central Station at Pearl Street opened. It provided electric lighting to many Wall Street buildings, including Morgan’s office.

Tesla’s ship dropped anchor in New York in late spring of 1884, just as the monumental decade-long project the Brooklyn Bridge was being completed and the last components of the Statue of Liberty were being hoisted into position. Twenty-eight years old, “tall and spare, [with] thin, refined face”
⁴²
and sporting a mustache, Tesla still had the look of an adolescent.

His first impression of the New World was that it was uncivilized, a hundred years behind the lifestyle of the great European cities. Deferring his planned meeting with Edison one day to look up an old friend, Tesla had the good fortune to pass by “a small machine shop in which the foreman was trying to repair an electric machine…He had just given up the task as hopeless.”
⁴³
One rendition of the story has Tesla agreeing to fix the machine “without a thought for compensation.”
⁴⁴
On a separate occasion, Tesla revealed that “it was a machine I had helped design, but I did not tell them that. I asked…‘what would you give me if I fix it?’ ‘Twenty dollars’ was the reply. I took off my coat and went to work, [and]…had it running perfectly in an hour.”
⁴⁵
The story is important because, depending on the rendition, two different Teslas emerge, one motivated by money and one not.

In either case, Tesla was shocked by the rough character of the New World.
⁴⁶
He proceeded cautiously to Edison’s new laboratory, a former ironworks at Goerck Street, situated only a few blocks from the central
lighting station Edison was constructing at Pearl Street.
⁴⁷
Batchelor probably met Tesla and introduced him to the inventor. “I was thrilled to the marrow by meeting Edison,” Tesla said.
⁴⁸

Possibly aware of the proximity of Transylvania to Tesla’s birthplace and a resurgence of interest in the tales of Vlad Dracula, the fifteenthcentury alleged vampire who lived in the region, Edison inquired whether or not the “neophyte…had ever tasted human flesh?”
⁴⁹

Aghast at the question and Edison’s “utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene,”
⁵⁰
Tesla replied in the negative and asked what Edison’s diet consisted of.

“You mean to make me so all-fired smart?”

Tesla nodded.

“Why, I eat a daily regimen of Welsh rabbit,” Edison replied. “It’s the only breakfast guaranteed to renew one’s mental faculties after the long vigils of toil.”

Wanting to emulate the grand wizard, the neophyte took on the peculiar diet, “accepting as true, in spite of a protesting stomach, the jocular suggestion.”
⁵¹

Tesla’s various accounts of this meeting differ markedly, depending on his mood at the time of the telling and his awareness of the size and shape of the audience. For in his autobiography, published in six installments of Hugo Gernsback’s futuristic magazine
Electrical Experimenter,
Tesla wrote that ‘the meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life. I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries…and felt that most of my life had been squandered.”
⁵²

It wasn’t long before Tesla realized that his academic training and mathematical skills had given him a great engineering advantage over Edison’s plodding strategy of trial and error. In a bitter moment of reminiscence, at the time of Edison’s death in 1931, Tesla said: “If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search…I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor…Trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense…the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.”
⁵³

It was little wonder that Tesla was completely unsuccessful in describing his new AC invention to Edison and had to settle for Batchelor’s suggestion that he redesign the prevailing DC machinery instead. According to Tesla, “the Manager had promised me $50,000 on completion of
this task,”
⁵⁴
and so Tesla set himself to work, “experiment[ing] day and night, holidays not excepted,” as was the custom of the factory.
⁵⁵

Thomas Alva Edison was an extremely complex fellow. Ornery, ingenious, determined, and unyielding, he was a fierce competitor and the single most important inventive force on the planet. He had descended from a grandfather, John Edison, a Tory who had been tried for treason during the American Revolution and banished to Canada, and a father, Samuel Edison, who had tied his son to a whipping post and beaten him publicly after young Al, as he was called then, had started a fire in a barn which threatened the rest of the buildings in the community.
⁵⁶
He had scrapped with and outwitted others on his way to Wall Street and had outdistanced competing inventors numerous times. Notches on Edison’s belt of “better mousetraps” included the telephone transmitter (microphone), an electrical pen, a musical telephone, and the duplex, an ingenious device which enabled a telegraph to send four messages in two directions simultaneously.

Edison was known to curse and swap jokes with his men at his research and development center, the world’s first invention factory. He kept his business free of cockroaches with a protective electric grid lining the edges of the floor and “electrifried larger varmints” with his “rat paralyzer”; he even occasionally wired the washbasin to keep his men on their toes. Edison was a trickster, a storyteller, and a con artist. The use to the consumer and the cost of production or “the market test [was] the sole test of achievement…Everything he did was directed by [that] realization.”
⁵⁷

In an entirely different realm of invention, besides being a better technician than anyone else, Edison was a
creator;
his most original work was a machine that talked: the phonograph. With this device, Edison had entered the realm of the immortal; he was the “Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Inviting the public to his laboratory on a number of occasions, Edison amazed people at all levels of society with machines that sang and reproduced the sound of birds, artificial lamps that changed the darkness into a light cherry red, and various other mechanical contrivances to make one’s workload easier.

The invention of the electric light was to Edison not only a new, clever technology; it contained the seeds of a new industry. His mere presence in the field drove the stocks of the gas-burning companies into the grave. Yet Edison planned to utilize their pipes by channeling copper wire through them instead of dangerous gas and to replace flame by electricity. He moved the center of his operation from New Jersey to New York City. There Edison rented a town house for his wife and family in celebrated Gramercy Park, the abode of such luminaries as authors Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, architect Stanford
White,
Century
editor Richard Watson Gilder, and publisher James Harper.
⁵⁸
Edison later described his plans for orchestrating a revolution in home illumination: “I had the central station in mind all the time…I got an insurance map of New York City, laid out a district [bounded by] Wall Street, Canal, Broadway [and the] East River, [and purchased] two old bum buildings down in Pearl Street. They charged us $75,000 a piece. I tell you it made my hair stand on end.”
⁵⁹

Edison’s financial problems were numerous. Not only were there expensive start-up costs, there were also problems with the extreme inefficiency of the DC system and court battles on invention priorities and marketing battles against such competitors as Brush Electric, Consolidated Electric, Sawyer-Man, Swan Incandescent, Thomson-Houston, United States Electric, and the Westinghouse Corporation.

“Tell Westinghouse to stick to air brakes. He knows all about them,” Edison complained;
⁶⁰
but Westinghouse would not listen.

Edison’s other major competitor was Elihu Thomson. With Edison embroiled in a legal contest with Sawyer, Thomson used the ambiguity of the moment to appropriate the incandescent lamp Edison had given him and make it the template for ones produced and sold by the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. On October 8, 1883, the patent office ruled that William Sawyer had priority over Edison “for an incandescent lamp with carbon burner.”
⁶¹
This decision, though later overturned in Edison’s favor, enabled Thomson to continue his piracy. Due to Sawyer’s priority, Thomson now saw himself as “ethically in the clear”
⁶²
as no clear-cut inventor had supposedly been established.

Edison thus came to vigorously dislike Thomson, a man who had betrayed his trust, and Westinghouse, who was now siding with Sawyer. For safety, aesthetic, and practical reasons, Edison was a proponent of underground cables and DC. “Nobody hoisted water and gas mains into the air on stilts,” he said.
⁶³
He publicized the fact that electricians were dying on the dangerous overhead wires of his competitors, but this battle eventually became transformed into DC versus AC; Edison stayed with DC, while Thomson and Westinghouse began to experiment with AC. As AC utilized much higher voltages, Edison warned the public against it. A long legal battle with Westinghouse ensued and ran into the millions of dollars. Thomson again managed quietly to avoid the courts while he expanded his business.

Francis Upton, Edison’s mathematician, graduate of Helmholtz’s laboratory, and contemporary of Tesla’s in terms of European education, had calculated in 1879 that to light 8,640 lamps for only nine city blocks, the cost would be $200,812 for the 803,250 pounds of copper required. Through clever wiring, improvements in lamp design, and “an invention corollary to the parallel circuitry,” Edison had cut copper costs almost 90
percent, but no matter what he did, a power station could never reach beyond a radius of one or two miles.
⁶⁴

Upton, whom Edison affectionately referred to as “Culture,” suggested that they look into the new advances in AC, and so he was sent, in 1884, to Europe to negotiate with Karl Zipernowski, Otto Blathy, and Max Deri, three Hungarians who had greatly improved the Gaulard-Gibbs AC transformer. Edison even paid $5,000 for an option on this “ZBD” system, but it was mostly to placate Culture. The wizard did not trust AC, and if his “damn fool competitors” were in it, he certainly didn’t want any part of it. Twenty years of experience, ingenuity, and doing the impossible with DC had to be worth something. The “bugs” could be worked out.

Yet at the same time that Edison constructed DC generators to make the earth tremble
⁶⁵
and competitors stole his ideas or fashioned other primitive electric-lighting devices, a Serbian genius in his very midst had designed a system which made this prevailing technology
obsolete.

According to W. L. Dickson, one of Edison’s earliest biographers and longtime employee at Menlo Park and Goerck Street, “Nikola Tesla, that effulgent star of the scientific heavens, even then gave strong evidence of the genius that has made him one of the standard authorities of the day.” Tesla’s “brilliant intellect” had held Dickson and the other workers “spellbound” as he “alternately fired [us] with the rapid sketching of his manifold projects or melted [us] into keenest sympathy by pictures of his Herzogovinian home…But like most holders of God’s intrinsic gifts, he was unostentatious in the extreme, and ready to assist with counsel or manual help any perplexed member of the craft.”
⁶⁶