T. C. Martin was impressed with Tesla’s newfound authoritative presence, and he knew it was especially difficult because the majority of the electricians and engineers in attendance were opposed to alternating current. At the time of the lecture, Thomas Edison had already launched his campaign to promote DC and at the same time publicly scorn the effectiveness and safety of AC. There had been a few champions of AC—including the forerunner in the AC market, George Westinghouse—and the War of the Currents had already begun. The players in the war, though, had yet to fully surface.
Now here came Tesla Electric Company, which held the fundamental patents for Tesla’s functional system, and people were watching with a skeptical eye. After all, only weeks earlier Thomas Edison had commented about George Westinghouse, saying, “Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size … It will never be free from danger.”
With the odds stacked against him, Tesla used diagrams, mathematical calculations, and carefully selected words to describe the oft-publicized problems with AC, which he followed with detailed, clearly stated solutions. As he presented his visuals and calculations, the engineers in attendance nodded in agreement, in shock that they had not thought of the very concepts Tesla was sharing with them. With his audience captivated, Tesla transitioned to a demonstration that showed how synchronous motors could be reversed in an instant. “A characteristic feature of motors of this kind is their capacity of being very rapidly reversed.”
He also detailed his data on single-, two-, and three-phrase motors and even explained how they could easily be adapted with a DC apparatus. Never before had anyone displayed the manner in which AC could be used with DC machinery.
T. C. Martin looked on with pride. The sight of Tesla owning the stage was like seeing a masterful work of art that had once been a blank canvas. Without T.C.’s skilled use of his palette, this exhibition would not have been possible. Tesla continued while the attendees murmured excitedly—fully engaged.
Drawing showing the function of Tesla’s high-frequency single-wire lighting
Tesla’s AC induction motor patent sketch
After Tesla completed his lecture, William Anthony added support by claiming that his independent tests had shown Tesla’s polyphase motors worked at slightly more than 60 percent efficiency. Anthony also noted that the direction of the current could be reversed “so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell when change took place.” This ability to reverse the current swiftly was the key to sustained electric service without interruption and allowed AC to maintain the strength and output of the electricity. This was a complete contrast to DC, where the current fed in one direction from one circuit to the next, weakening the output the farther away from the power source you got.
By the conclusion of the lecture, Tesla had detailed his entire system with perfect clarity, spoken with authority, commanded the respect of the audience, and had an esteemed expert validate his claims. Nikola Tesla had had himself a very good day and confirmed his professional status.
* * *
Tesla’s fame soared immediately following the lecture. Among the most interested and enthusiastic attendees was a group of engineers who worked for George Westinghouse. Their boss had already been entertaining the idea of purchasing Tesla’s patents, but when his engineers came back from the AIEE conference in awe of what they’d just witnessed, Westinghouse began negotiations in earnest with Brown and Peck.
Only six days after the lecture, Westinghouse sent his vice president Henry Byllesby to the Liberty Street lab, along with his lawyer Mr. Kerr. Although Byllesby admitted the science was beyond his intellectual grasp, he concluded that Tesla was a “straight-forward, enthusiastic” man. Fully impressed but at the same time conscious of business tactics, Byllesby and Kerr kept the meeting short to feign disinterest. As Byllesby and Kerr shook hands with Brown and Peck, the two Tesla Electric Company partners explained that they needed a decision by that Friday because there was an eager businessman in San Francisco they were negotiating with.
Westinghouse trusted Byllesby and Kerr, but he did not fall for the bluff of the mysterious San Francisco contact. Instead, he spent the next six weeks checking the validity of Tesla’s work, sending different Westinghouse Electric representatives to test Tesla’s machinery. Finally, at the constant urging of Thomas Kerr, Westinghouse concluded, “If the Tesla patents are broad enough to control the alternating motor business, then Westinghouse Electric Company cannot afford to have others own the patents.”
The terms of the sale vary from source to source, with some claiming Westinghouse paid an even one million dollars for the patents, some claiming he paid one hundred thousand, while still others claiming he spent just over two hundred thousand. Regardless, all experts agree that Westinghouse spent a substantial sum of money for the outright possession of the forty patents, and it is unanimously confirmed that Tesla was supposed to receive royalties of $2.50 per watt produced from his motors.
And yet, even with the business matter settled and Tesla’s patents in the hands of Westinghouse, these two great men had not even met in person. To rectify that, Tesla was invited to Westinghouse’s Pittsburgh laboratory, where he agreed to stay for an indefinite amount of time to help develop and effectively launch the AC system.
Tesla was in the middle of the happiest and most gratifying period of his life. The visions he’d seen in his mind throughout his childhood were now coming to life before his eyes. Nikola Tesla was a proud parent, alternating current his treasured child.
Nikola Tesla
George Westinghouse
Even better, Tesla was highly impressed with his new partner. In fact, he was in awe of the imposing George Westinghouse, taken by the six-foot-tall man with a thick swathe of hair and equally full sideburns that led down to his signature walrus handlebar mustache. Upon their initial meeting, Tesla admitted that his “first impression [was of a man with] tremendous potential of energy … A powerful frame, well proportioned, with every joint in working order, an eye as clear as crystal, a quick 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.”
This high opinion was not limited to Nikola Tesla, as Westinghouse had gained a flattering reputation over the course of his adult life. But nothing Westinghouse had gained—reputation included—had been simply handed over to him. Instead, Westinghouse was a true self-made man who had earned respect and trust and with it, great success.
9 EARNED SUCCESS
With Westinghouse not only in the fold but now leading the charge to introduce alternating current to the world on a grand commercial scale, Edison and his financiers, namely J. P. Morgan, realized they had an imminent threat at hand. After all, George Westinghouse was loved and respected by many and viewed—like Edison—as a self-made man.
From the day he came into the world in Central Bridge, New York, on October 6, 1846, George Westinghouse Jr. was prone to fits of frustration and stubbornness. While his tantrums as an infant included crying hysterically, they turned into more physical displays as he grew older, becoming so severe that he would beat his head against the wall until he got his way.
“I had a fixed notion that what I wanted I must have,” George would later conclude. “Somehow, that idea has not entirely deserted me throughout my life. I have always known what I wanted, and how to get it. As a child, I got it by tantrums; in mature years, by hard work.”
As a boy, his fits would earn him a reputation around town and in school, and he was soon fighting any of the many boys who called him crazy, even those bigger than him. After one such fight, George Sr. took his son to the barn to beat him with a switch as consequence for the altercation, and upon the weak switch breaking in half (George Jr. was big for his age), the young boy recommended to his father that he instead should use a leather harness that was hanging nearby, claiming it was stronger and wouldn’t b
reak. The beating ended, but George Jr.’s problem-solving and intuitive sense of invention had begun.
George Jr. showed little interest in school but was intrigued by all things mechanical. His father owned a machine shop, and soon—at the urging of an inspirational clergyman who believed his mechanical inclinations should be embraced, not shunned—George, at only thirteen years old, was given a full-time apprenticeship in the shop. The boss’s son, George learned, needed to work even harder to earn respect, so he exerted all his energy in the shop to gain the respect of his senior colleagues.
One day, as the temperature soared near one hundred degrees, George Sr. had decided to give his employees the Saturday afternoon off. However, an order came in soon after that required a number of pipes to be cut to a specific size. Young George, being the lowest-ranking employee, was given the job and told to stay and work until it was finished. George fumed at first, promising to himself that if he ever ran his own business, he would give all his employees every Saturday afternoon, and even Sundays, off—a practice he started later in life, which not only began a Westinghouse business custom of having weekends off, but contributed to it becoming a national custom as well.
As George began dragging pipes to the sawhorse—still mad about the extra work his father had assigned him—he eyed the steam engine and the lathe.
An idea struck him.
George mounted the pipes to the lathe and used steam power and the saw to slice through the pipes like butter. Although it would have taken him the rest of the day to cut the pipes with the saw by hand, with the steam-powered lathe the job was done in less than an hour. He returned home to a furious George Sr., who did not believe his son’s claim that the job was done. But after he returned to the shop with young George and saw the pipes were all perfectly sized, the two walked home with the elder’s arm firmly around the smiling youngster. An inventor had been born.
In the years that followed, George toyed with minor inventions—including a rotary engine that would garner his first official patent—until everything came together with two of the most important inventions in his young career: the car replacer and the air brake.
The idea of the car replacer came to twenty-year-old George when he was en route from one of many trips from Central Bridge, New York, to other locations in New York to secure contracts for his father’s company. As he was returning from a trip to Albany, he was delayed by a train accident ahead of his location.
George inquired about the delay, and a friend explained that two or three rear cars had jumped the tracks and needed to be placed back on the rails. After witnessing the long and monotonous task of getting the cars back on the tracks, George commented that “they could have done the whole thing in fifteen minutes by clamping a pair of rails to the track, and running them off at an angle like a frog [a device used to allow trains to switch across tracks easily], so as to come up even against the wheels of the nearest derailed car. Then, by hitching an engine to the car, they could have shunted it back into place.”
George immediately drew up plans and created a model, which he showed to his father. George Sr. was not impressed enough to offer financial backing, so George was forced to seek investors outside his family. The salesman in George came out, and he soon formed a partnership with two financiers. More important, this invention and experience brought him into close dealings with the railway, leading to the invention that would establish him as an influential person in the business world: the air brake.
Similar to the car replacer concept, the idea for the air brake came about on a trip, this one from Schenectady to Troy. Again, a rail accident delayed George’s trip, an accident that was more severe than the previous one and had resulted in two freight trains crashing into each other and creating a massive mess in their wake.
This accident, thankfully, hadn’t brought about any casualties, but George knew that had the cars been passenger locomotives, the cost would have been deadly.
As was his nature, George asked railway officials why this accident had occurred. The weather was clear and there were no signs of obstruction or faulty tracks. He learned that it had been due to the fact that you “can’t stop a train in a moment” because the method of stopping a train was hand-braking, which consisted of different brakemen applying brakes in each car, leading to uneven brake distribution. George quickly decided the problem was the gap of time between the engineer sounding the stop whistle and each brakeman applying the brakes on the wheels.
If the engineer could be the one to apply all the actual brakes and not just ring the alarm, a uniform braking system could be created that would be much safer.
George experimented with ways to apply brakes simultaneously and settled on the idea of a long chain that would run under the train and be secured in one burst, quickly hitching the brakes on each wheel at the same time. The remaining problem was how to distribute the power from the front to the back of the train.
One day while he was sitting at his desk, a woman approached George with a magazine, asking him to purchase a subscription to help her pay for training to be a teacher. George quickly said no and told the woman to try others who actually read magazines, but the woman said she had. George looked at the woman’s face and was captured by a charitable feeling. He opened the magazine to a random spot, and that’s when he saw an image that would lead to a successful air brake invention.
This image involved the Mont Cenis Tunnel—known today as the Fréjus Rail Tunnel—which runs through an elaborate mountain chain in the European Alps. It wasn’t the image itself that captured Westinghouse’s attention; it was how the tunnels were created. As he thumbed through the magazine, George learned that Italian engineers used compressed air as a motor to propel a locomotive up a steep mountain and had later decided that compressed air in conjunction with a drilling machine would allow them to bore their tunnel through the mountains. “The result has been a perforating machine,” George read in awe, an epiphany forming in his mind, “moved by common air compressed to one sixth its natural bulk, and consequently, when set free, exercising an expansive force equal to six atmospheres.”
Mont Cenis Tunnel entrance
Westinghouse decided that if compressed air could force pipe through the solid stone of a mountain, it could certainly power the length of a train to set brakes from the front to the back in an instant. He’d found the answer he’d been looking for in a magazine, of all things.
Complicated problems, like that of a braking system for trains, engrossed George and forced him to examine every angle. He worked out the kinks of the air brake and developed a functional system that would be much safer than the hand brakes.
Westinghouse air brake
Through his natural sense of careful inspection and deduction, George developed his air brake system. Trials were run and improvements were made. George was ready to sell it and get his air brakes in steady use. Not only did he expect to make a profit, he also expected to make the railway safer. However, getting the brakes put to use wasn’t easy. After waiting and waiting to meet the legendary “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, George was brushed off like lint, Vanderbilt laughing at the idea that “wind” could stop a train. Westinghouse struggled to find backing, but when he did and the air brake succeeded in trial runs for investors, Vanderbilt resurfaced and launched a campaign to smear George Westinghouse and the air brake in the public eye.
Vanderbilt ironically appealed to the demographic Westinghouse most often endeared himself to in his later business dealings: the workingman. With air brakes, there was a need for only one operator to apply the entire system, as the brakes worked simultaneously in all cars. With rail brakes, there was the necessity for multiple operators to apply them in each car (many operators meant many jobs, which meant many employed men). Vanderbilt went directly to the workforce, showing them that this silly “wind-powered” system would eliminate their jobs. Westinghouse, Vanderbilt claimed, didn’t care about people: either in terms of the safety of the comm
on man (as he claimed air brakes were flawed and dangerous) or in terms of valuing the workingman.
Westinghouse offered rebuttals, explaining that jobs would be created by his system, but Vanderbilt was too loud to silence, and he continued to portray Westinghouse in a negative light. To Westinghouse, ethics were as important as the inventions themselves, and Vanderbilt’s unethical actions led George to vow never to stoop so low in his career.
In the end, a major tragic derailment of Vanderbilt’s prized train, the Pacific Express, opened the door for Westinghouse—still only twenty-two years old—and he came into prominence and great financial success after he was issued his first air brake patent on April 13, 1869.
But George did not rest with the fully functional brake he had, and instead he perfected it and made it safer—better. The Pittsburgh-located Westinghouse Air Brake Company was established soon after, where George and his team would continually modify and perfect the system until it was an automatic air brake, which was patented in 1872. In the following years, Westinghouse made adjustments to his invention, steadily improving his product. Business boomed as more trains employed the air brake, which made it safer to travel on the rails.
It took just under a decade, but by the fall of 1881, Westinghouse’s air brakes had been installed and utilized in the majority of the locomotives in the world. Westinghouse, now only thirty-five years old, had earned respect for his work ethic and attention to detail and also earned a reputation as a good employer, having regular dinners for his workers, giving away turkeys at Thanksgiving, and issuing bonuses. He kept to his word and gave weekends off, and he also introduced “piece work,” the concept of being paid based on the work you do, not on a set pay, allowing his employees to earn more through increased production.
For George Westinghouse, much of what he invented came about because of reading. Just as he had come up with the idea for the air brake while reading a magazine, he would have an electric epiphany after reading a story in Engineering about an alternating current system on display in London. Like one of Tesla’s flashes of light, a vision came to Westinghouse. He knew that this secondary generator mentioned in the article—that would come to be called a transformer—was the key to powering electric devices at different voltages over a wide span of territory.
The Electric War Page 8