He dispatched a repair crew, sucked a gulp of cold coffee from a mug, and tried to think what to do next. The telephone rang. Edison tilted the receiver to his good ear.
The manager of the shipping company that owned the S.S. Oregon sarcastically demanded to know if he had any plans for getting the dynamos repaired for his lighting plant. The liner had been tied up for days past sailing time and was losing bundles of money.
What could Edison say? He had no engineer to send.
He thought enviously of Morgan. Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan employed a full-time engineer just to run the private boiler and steam engine that was set into a pit below the garden of his Murray Hill mansion. It was so noisy the neighbors were threatening to sue. But that didn’t bother Morgan; when things got too sticky, he could simply pack a supply of his favorite black cigars and set off for a nice long cruise on his yacht, the Corsair.
“I’ll send an engineer over this afternoon,” Edison promised the shipping magnate.
Morgan was the major financial backer of the Edison Electric Company, whose direct-current wires were festooned in localized, horse-frightening, malfunctioning webs above the streets of New York. Although electricity was still little understood by the average financier or industrialist, a few like Morgan could see that it was easily the most promising development to have come along since Archimedes invented the screw. Everyone needed energy. And soon everyone would want Edison’s incandescent lights.
Electrical engineering was the field for a gifted person of scientific or inventive bent to enter, offering not only financial reward but the seductiveness and danger of an almost unexplored frontier.
Cornell University and Columbia College were among the few schools in the country to boast fledgling departments of electrical engineering. America had only a handful of homegrown experts beyond such giants as Edison, Joseph Henry, and Elihu Thomson. Industrialists therefore would be glad to draw upon the foreign talent pool: Tesla, Michael Pupin, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Batchelor, and Fritz Lowenstein, among others.
Yet it was primarily thanks to Edison’s rough-and-ready ingenuity that the lights were flickering on (and off) in New York City. Only the year before, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt had staged the epic ball that signaled peace at last between the feuding Astors and the Vanderbilts, and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt had sailed down the grand staircase of the family mansion dressed as “The Electric Light,” an apparition in white satin and diamonds that few at the ball would ever forget.
So glamorous was the new energy source that a manufacturer advertised at Christmas urging fathers to “Surprise the whole family with a double socket.” Equally exciting—if puzzling—gifts guaranteeing to put one ahead of the Joneses were an electric corset for Mom and a magnetic belt for Dad. Yokels at county fairs were paying for the joy of getting a shock from a storage battery.
Edison had no sooner promised his nonexistent engineer to the shipping company and cradled the telephone receiver that June day than a breathless boy dashed into the shop to report trouble at Ann and Nassau streets. A junction box that had been wired by one of the inventor’s inexperienced electricians was leaking. The boy vividly described how a ragman and his horse had been catapulted into the air and then had disappeared down the street at an unbelievable clip.
Edison bellowed for his foreman: “Get a gang of men, if you can find any. Cut off the current and fix that leak.”
He glanced up and became aware of a tall dark presence hovering just inside his office.
“Help you, mister?”
Tesla introduced himself, speaking in careful accented English and a little louder than usual, for he knew of Edison’s hearing problem.
“I have this letter from Mr. Batchelor, sir.”
“Batchelor, eh? What’s wrong in Paris?”
“Nothing that I know of, sir.”
“Nonsense, there’s always something wrong in Paris.”
Edison read Batchelor’s brief note of recommendation and snorted. But he gave Tesla a penetrating look.
“‘I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man!’ Hmph! That’s some recommendation. What can you do?”3
Tesla had rehearsed this moment many times on shipboard. Edison’s reputation impressed him deeply. Here was a man who, without formal education of any sort, had invented hundreds of useful products. He himself had spent years digging away at books, but for what? What had he to show for it? What use was all his education?4
Quickly he began to describe the work he had done for Continental Edison in France and Germany. And then, before Edison could even respond, he moved smoothly into a description of his marvelous induction motor for alternating current, based upon his discovery of the rotating magnetic field. This was the wave of the future, he said. A smart developer could make a thousand fortunes with it.
“Hold up!” said Edison angrily. “Spare me that nonsense. It’s dangerous. We’re set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it’s all I’ll ever fool with. But maybe I could give you a job. Can you fix a ship’s lighting plant?”
Tesla boarded the S.S. Oregon that same day with his instruments and began to make the necessary repairs. The dynamos were in bad condition, having several short circuits and breaks. With the aid of the crew he worked through the night. At dawn the next morning the job was finished.
As he walked back along Fifth Avenue toward the Edison shop, he met his new employer and a few of his top men just going home to rest.
“Here is our ‘Parisian’ running around at night,” commented Edison.5
When Tesla said that he had just finished repairing both machines, Edison looked at him in silence, then walked away without another word. But the Serb with his acute hearing heard him remark at a little distance, “That is a damn good man.”
Edison later told him about another important European scientist’s arrival in the United States. Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the brilliant German dwarf, was almost deported as an indigent alien. He somehow squeaked through and went on to become the resident genius of General Electric’s first industrial research laboratory at Schenectady. He would later strive to develop an acceptable alternative to Tesla’s alternating-current system when Edison and General Electric needed to play catch-up.
Tesla’s skills were quickly appreciated by Edison, who gave him almost complete freedom in working on the design and operating problems of the shop. He regularly worked from 10:30 in the morning until 5:00 the following morning, a regimen that won from his new boss the grudging comment, “I have had many hardworking assistants but you take the cake.”
Both men had the ability in an emergency to go without sleep for two or three days while ordinary mortals crumpled around them. Edison’s workers always claimed, however, that he sneaked catnaps.
Before long Tesla observed ways in which the primitive Edison dynamos could be made to work more efficiently, even though limited to the production of direct current. He proposed a plan for redesigning them and said it would not only improve their service but would save a lot of money.
The astute businessman in Edison brightened at the mention of the latter, but he realized the project Tesla had described was major and would take a long time. “There’s fifty thousand dollars in it for you—if you can do it,” he said.6
For months Tesla worked frenziedly, scarcely sleeping from one day to the next. In addition to redesigning the twenty-four dynamos completely and making major improvements to them, he installed automatic controls, using an original concept for which patents were obtained.
The personality differences between the two men doomed their relationship from the start. Edison disliked Tesla for being an egghead, a theoretician, and cultured. Ninety-nine percent of genius, according to the Wizard of Menlo Park, was “knowing the things that would not work.” Hence he himself approached each problem with an elaborate process of elimination.
Of these “empirical dragnets” Tesla later would say amusedly, “If Edison had
a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.”7
The well-known editor and engineer Thomas Commerford Martin recorded that Edison, unable to find Tesla’s obscure birthplace in Croatia on a map, once seriously asked him whether he had ever eaten human flesh.
“Even the most cometic genius has its orbit,” Martin wisely wrote, “and these two men are singularly representative of different kinds of training, different methods, and different strains. Mr. Tesla must needs draw apart … for his own work’s sake.”
In so basic a matter as personal hygiene they could not have been more different: Tesla, afraid of germs, fastidious in the extreme, once observed of Edison, “He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene…. [I]f he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect….”8
The irreconcilable differences, however, went beyond personality. Edison sensed the talented foreigner’s threat to his direct-current system, erroneously thinking DC was vital to the manufacture and sale of his incandescent light bulbs. It was the old story of vested interest. At the beginning Edison himself had met with violent resistance from the gas monopolies. He had beaten down the gas companies with his natural gift for propaganda, putting out regular bulletins in which he gleefully described the dangers of gas-main explosions. His salesmen were sent out to cover the country, reporting every incident of “industrial oppression” in which workers’ health allegedly had been “injured” by gas heat or their vision damaged by gaslights. Now it looked as if he might have to lash out against an even newer technology than his own.9
Tesla, in the odd moments of spare time he could grasp, was absorbing the history, literature, and customs of America, relishing new friendships and experiences. He already spoke English well and was even beginning to understand the American sense of humor. Or at least he thought he did. As events would prove, Edison still had a few things to teach him about that.
He enjoyed walking the streets of New York where the new, electrically powered trolleys brought congestion and not a little excitement to already jammed thoroughfares. Half the time the central dynamos were broken down. When the trolleys ran, they scared pedestrians as much as the passengers. The editor of a newspaper solemnly warned that anyone who rode on them might expect to be stricken with palsy and should look for no sympathy.
Brooklynites, who for some reason felt especially singled out for attack by vicious trolleys, banded together under the slogan of “Trolley Dodgers.” Later, when the borough acquired a baseball team of its own, it seemed natural to call them the Brooklyn Dodgers.
It took Tesla the better part of the year to finish redesigning Edison’s dynamos. When at last the job was done, he went to his boss to report complete success and, not incidentally, to ask when he might receive his $50,000.
Edison swept his high black shoes from his desk and fell forward openmouthed.
“Tesla,” he exclaimed, “you don’t understand our American humor.”10
Once again it seemed that the Serb was to be deliberately cheated by an Edison company. Angered, he announced he would resign. Edison offered a compromise: a $10 raise of his princely salary of $18 per week. Tesla picked up his bowler hat and walked out.*
In Edison’s view Tesla was “the poet of science”—his ideas “magnificent but utterly impractical.” He warned the young engineer that he was making a mistake—and so it appeared for a time. The country was still deep in the gloom of financial crises with jobs hard to find.
Edison, completely in Morgan’s grip, was himself having frustrating financial problems. While the inventor ached for full-speed-ahead, the banker insisted on a go-slow policy. He denied Edison even the most modest loans for expansion while the House of Morgan’s capital was being poured into gigantic railroad acquisitions.
The process of “Morganization” had become standardized. Of everything he touched, the financier soon controlled 51 percent, and he insisted on being on the board of directors, however anonymously. Morganization meant the steady acquiring of companies engaged in a similar line of business, the sale of watered stock, and the centralizing of power through the elimination of “destructive competition.”
Morgan, in his forties and near the peak of his power, was truculent, arrogant, feared, a loner who cared nothing for his associates, his underlings, or the public. He was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and because of an unfortunate skin disease, his nose glowed like one of Edison’s newfangled light bulbs. Still, such is the power of power, he was a Don Juan whose conquests were openly flaunted.11
His veneer of culture required frequent art-collecting trips to Europe, where he was more discriminating than many parvenus who amassed the treasures of the Old World. A staunch supporter of the Episcopal Church, he often left his Wall Street offices in the afternoon to spend a happy hour booming familiar hymns to the rafters at St. George’s Episcopal Church, accompanied by his favorite organist.
Plagued by such evils as railroad rate wars and labor riots that threatened his rolling stock, he welcomed opportunities to escape from his desk. When traveling in America he rode in a $100,000 “palace car” attached to the train of his choice. More humble wheels were shunted from his path.
Like Edison he was noted for his pithy sayings. One that Tesla would have reason to recall was: “A man always has two reasons for the things he does—a good one and the real one.”
The financial panic of ’84 had caused such insecurity that thousands of small investors all over America were going broke. Businessmen turned to the powerful House of Morgan, rather than to government, for salvation. It looked to the financier as if all his careful plans for the centralizing of control over the economic machine might be wrecked by labor troubles and the rate wars among the overly expanded railroads.
It was clear to anyone that far too many railroads had been built for speculative purposes and that many were facing bankruptcy. There would have to be a merger. But Morgan was not a man to be pushed or to act rashly. Let his competitors sweat. He would visit the spas of Europe and collect art.
By midsummer of the year Tesla arrived in America, Morgan’s leisurely travels had brought him to England, there to receive still more unpleasant reports from home of “railroad wrecking” and panic. Finally he consented to return and put his formidable brain to work for the sake of the Nation.
Morgan’s solution was simply to summon all the quarreling capos to a peace conference aboard the Corsair.12 All of one day he and the captive industrial barons cruised up and down the bay and the East River. This was no war of individuals but of competing oil, steel, and railroad interests locked in oligarchic struggle. Before the night fell, Morgan had “reorganized” them all in such a truly masterful way that through clever mergers he had reduced “destructive competition” to a minimum. This was the essence of the Morgan touch, a touch that would soon make itself felt in the promising new field of electrical utilities.
Meanwhile, Tesla, whose engineering reputation was beginning to be favorably known, was approached by a group of investors and offered a chance to form a company under his own name. He leaped at it. At last his great alternating-current discovery could be presented to the world. Humanity, as he saw it, would be freed from its burdens. Unfortunately, his backers had something more modest and practical in mind. There was a big market for improved arc lights for streets and factories, and this would have to come first.
The Tesla Electric Light Company was formed, with headquarters at Rahway, New Jersey, and a branch office in New York. One of the men involved in this firm was James D. Carmen, who was to be a behind-the-scenes ally of Tesla�
��s for twenty years or more. He and Joseph H. Hoadley would serve as officers in several of Tesla’s companies.
Working in his first laboratory on Grand Street, the Serb developed a Tesla arc lamp which was more simple, reliable, safe, and economical than those in current use.13 The system was patented and first put to work on the streets of Rahway.*
Tesla’s compensation was to have been shares of stock in the firm. Now, to his painful surprise at the ways of American commerce, he found himself being eased out of the company. He wound up with a handsomely engraved stock certificate which, because of the newness of the firm and the recurring economic crises, had little redeemable value.
Exit Tesla for the third time.
The slump became a depression, and he was unable to find an engineering position. From the spring of 1886 until the following year he went through one of the more depressing periods of his life. Toiling as a laborer on New York street gangs, he barely managed to survive. Tesla seldom referred to this painful experience afterward.
Nevertheless he had made some progress: his arc-lighting innovations resulted in the granting of seven patents, and in addition he obtained other light-related patents, two of which are particularly interesting.* They involve using the loss of magnetism in iron at temperatures above 750 degrees Celsius, for transforming heat directly into mechanical or electrical energy. Like a number of Tesla’s inventions, they found no immediate use and were forgotten. But quite recently in the twentieth century a similar process has gained attention, without recognition being given to Tesla’s prior inventions.
Four years had passed since he had discovered the rotating magnetic field and constructed his first alternating-current motor at Strassburg. He was beginning to wonder whether the green pastures and golden promise of America would continue to elude him. Humiliated by recent disappointments, he again brooded upon what seemed like his wasted years of education.
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 6