In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  THE TESLA DYNAMO COMPANY

  Nikola had arrived with no idea what to expect, and could not believe his eyes. He heard her she was speaking to him at that moment, but the events had left him so disoriented it was difficult to comprehend her.

  “—and if I learned anything from watching my late husband amass his fortune, it is that you always compensate someone who does you a good turn.” She exploded in a girlish laugh and grabbed his arm. “Remember to act surprised when they bring you here in the morning!”

  She pulled him close and spoke in hushed tones. “They will most likely offer you something like two thousand dollars earmarked for laboratory equipment. But I happen to know that they have room in their budget for five!”

  “Five?”

  “Five thousand dollars for necessary equipment, Mr. Tesla. And the salary may not be much, but it will keep you going while you build their lighting system. It’s true that they’re refusing to employ your, ah, ‘experimental’ form of power, but otherwise you have the job. You will be delighted to rise to this occasion, will you not?”

  Only now did he fully grasp that he was standing in front of the reason for the personal note sent by Corinne Watters. It arrived at his hotel that morning and urged him to cross the river into New Jersey and to meet her at this address to “discuss investments.”

  “Listen to me, Mr. Tesla,” Watters hissed, punching through Nikola’s thoughts. “I realize you may have some point of pride about accepting their offer because they want to use Edison’s power generators, but you will still design the system and the lights. So if your pride is going to make me sorry to have done this, well, I can hardly wait until tomorrow to find out in front of the others, can I?”

  “Ah.” It was the best reply he had.

  “I prefer not to be the object of ridicule, Mr. Tesla, whether or not such a thing seems like a bother to you.”

  “Ridicule? Why no madam, I hold no such—”

  “Perhaps you can afford to be eccentric. Truth be told, I rather think that most people expect it. Do you agree? Whiff of madness and all that? My reputation, however, relies upon having my public displays of good works accepted by the beneficiary, you understand. Not rejected as somehow unsuitable.”

  “Yes… Yes! I see now. You wanted to tell me in advance about what these men want to do.”

  “Damn what they ‘want’ Mr. Tesla! They are doing precisely what was suggested to them, and they are doing so without giving it much of a thought. The ability to do that comes from social credibility, Mr. Tesla. Coin of the realm. You and I are here today to protect mine while I boost yours.”

  “Well, I… Good.”

  “The attention you graciously showed my eldest daughter threw so much glory onto her that several men began to show real interest. She is already engaged to a clever fellow who mostly leaves her alone and treats her like royalty when he does not.”

  “You mean…” the daughter’s name was still gone.

  “Yes,” Watters agreed. “And if a woman in my position should fail to secure proper husbands for her own daughters, that would not reflect well upon her social credibility, would it?”

  “No?”

  “Of course not. In one evening, with a single conversation and one garishly dramatic exit, you did for my eldest girl what years of forced elocution lessons could not.”

  “Mrs. Watters, I merely explained—”

  “You showed her to be worthy of attention, Mr. Tesla. Others saw you do that! They saw a man whose mind frightens them turn his attention onto a young women they had not even noticed. They saw that you did not frighten her at all. They saw that you took her seriously. They watched you give her your full attention. For a clever girl like her, that was all she needed.”

  “Well, she certainly did not require—”

  “The other girls are pleasantly plump and soft in the face and not nearly so bright.” Mrs. Watters gave a happy titter. “Give me half a year and all three will be plucked like winter berries!”

  Nikola could think of no adequate response. In six months winter would have passed. All he knew for certain was that the meager amount he had saved during his time with Edison’s company was nearly exhausted and that this woman clearly had some motive of her own for helping him, whether he understood it or not. Watters seemed to consider the value of this marriage to be much higher because of her daughter’s perceived lack of social viability.

  Beyond that point, the number of variables behind Watters behavior toward Nikola grew to such huge proportions that her reasoning struck him as hopelessly complex. He had no idea what else to do but keep his hands folded and solemnly nod every few seconds while she continued her baffling explanations. Winter berries, yes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  One Year Later

  New York

  Edison’s assistant, Harlan Walsh, looked worried while he hurried up to the Manhattan branch of the Edison Company. When he reached the Boss’s office door and peeked inside, the renowned inventor sat alone at his desk. His posture was fixed in an alert position but his eyes were closed and he was sound asleep. Walsh gave a light knock on the doorframe. Edison’s eyes snapped open. He grabbed a stopwatch and switched on a light bulb in a single motion.

  He looked up to see Yes-Man #2, Wallace or Walden.

  “Um, Sir? Sorry for interrupting your—”

  “Timing bulb-life.”

  “Yes.” He took a breath. “Oh. Our man in the patent office says that over in Rahway—”

  “Where?” Edison kept his focus on his study of the filament.

  “Oh. Rahway. Small town on the Jersey side. Not far.”

  “Yes, yes?” The busy inventor clearly had no time to look up from his work.

  “Sir, the, ah, financial backers of Mr. Tesla’s lab announced a public demonstration of that city’s new outdoor lighting system.” He paused to swallow. “For tomorrow night.”

  Edison’s back stiffened, but he kept his eyes on the filament. “Parading for the press is best left to circus clowns.”

  “Yes. Oh. He was contractually obligated to use direct current, which he did. But he has been using it to power new types of lamps, sir. Arc lamps.”

  “Arc lamps are inefficient. Why do people think I work so hard to find the best damn filaments? Arc lamps don’t work.”

  “They never did before…”

  “The amount of power they consume? Just to give off that feeble little spark? Ridiculous.”

  “It always was…”

  “Mark my words, this is some foolish public relations stunt. A hoax.”

  “Um, hoax is probably not the word.”

  “Eh?”

  “Our man confirms that Tesla has just been granted seven new patents.”

  Edison finally turned and glared straight at him. “Will you please speak up?”

  “He-just-announced-to-the-press-that-his-next-power-system-will-be-run-on-alternating-current!”

  There was an ominous pause.

  “No.” Edison spoke in a soft, reassuring voice. “That is not possible. You understand that it is not possible, don’t you? It isn’t even good science. Dangerous, irresponsible—”

  “Certainly! Yes sir! One would think…” His voice dropped to a weaker tone. “But our man says all the components for Mr. Tesla’s new arc lamp system worked on the first try.”

  He reached this dangerous place in the conversation with so much momentum left over that he unwisely continued, “Sir, they say that he gave each of his engineers perfect drawings. Detailed schematics drawn straight from his mind! No sketches.”

  Edison glared disapproval, but Wallace or Wells was a freight train with a stuck throttle. “He claims that before long, a single Tesla powerhouse will light an entire city—using alternating current.”

  This time the Boss’s stare sent a beam of heat straight through him. Yes-Man #2 hit the wall like a spent bullet, emptying the air from his lungs. He
offered a weak smile and disappeared.

  Edison stood abandoned to a tornado of emotions. He sank into the news, dropping down and down into its repercussions. He resumed his head-up posture in the chair and went back to holding himself so still that he could have been asleep again, except for the long ordeal he made out of crushing an experimental light bulb filament between his fingertips.

  * * *

  Nikola was practically a silhouette while he stood in the brisk night air behind the raised and decorated lectern on Main Street in Rahway, New Jersey. His public grand opening was designed with a low-key beginning and this was its bottom moment. A single oil lamp sat atop the lectern and threw off a pale yellow-orange wash. It was one step better than moonlight.

  “Dear ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming out on this chilly evening. I offer my promise to you that none will be disappointed!”

  He maintained rigid composure and delivered his memorized speech to the gathered crowd, but the audience members themselves were mostly dark shapes to him. He counted one citizen for each intermittent puff of steam.

  There were two sets of wooden grandstands, five rows high, lining both sides of Main Street for the event. Many of the little town’s people turned out, so the grandstands were mostly full. In the center of the street, next to Nikola’s fancy lectern, a sawhorse stage held six of the town’s top elected dignitaries, along with their six wives and two mothers-in-law.

  “…everyone on our team joins me in thanking you for the opportunity to—”

  While he forged on with his necessary bit of memorized political speech, he could not fail to notice that his own steaming breath matched that of the others, tempting him to consider the ramifications of regarding the crowd itself as a single, aggregate being—an assembly of conscious steam engines. The raised the question: if they were somehow linked together, how high might the crowd’s total energy output go?

  Spontaneous estimates beckoned to him like streetwalkers, challenging him with energy estimates for the output of each of the adult bodies present. Was a crowd, then, a living engine? He realized that the answer was yes, of course—but that they do not travel well unless you have a good transmission.

  He nearly laughed out loud at that and had to cough to cover up losing his place. He immediately went on, focusing even harder on the speech.

  Several of the dignitaries nervously eyed the bleacher crowd. If the public’s expectations were not met, things were likely to turn ugly for the dignitaries, their wives, and the two mothers-in-law, all of them perched in the midst of the event and right there within easy grabbing reach.

  The mayor had wisely declared the event a “dress-up occasion” and made it an opportunity for the ladies to wear their nicest outfits. Experience had taught the mayor that nothing was more effective at preventing the married men and bachelors with sweethearts from jumping into any kind of brawl than the prospect of damaging the ladies’ best clothing and facing the consequences.

  Still the mayor could not help his apprehension. A combination of chilled night air and early spring darkness was working on the crowd at a bone deep level. The usual drunks were already radiating grumbly boredom; soon the semi-drunks would start getting antsy.

  Now several of the folks on the dignitary platform began noticing that since the non-drinkers among the crowd were likely to do the sensible thing and hightail out of there if the situation went bad, that would leave the dignitaries alone among a drunk and disappointed populace.

  The long anticipated demonstration and the much ballyhooed slogan, “daylight, outdoors— at night!” had raised a vaguely defiant attitude from a skeptical public. Now that the demonstration was about to begin, there was no room for the slightest margin of error on the inventor’s part.

  The dignitaries, their wives, and the two attending mothers-in-law all had reason to suddenly wonder who this Nikola Tesla was, and precisely what was so special about him that he got the job of creating and building this supposed “daylight” system? Most of all, why on earth was he permitted to refrain from giving any sort of demonstration before this night?

  By that point it was far too late for the answers to make any difference. They could only cringe and wait, tentatively shifting their eyeballs in search of the right person to blame. The inventor spoke to the crowd in tailored formal attire. He seemed a cool and confident presence, a tall, almost gaunt young man not yet thirty. His manner of speaking was unusually formal, but full of enthusiasm.

  “—and the full year which your town council gave to us to create the project is actually the reason it succeeded. Since current science had no answers, this entire system had to be invented from the ground up!”

  He stepped to a valve on a thin pipe that led to the gas lamps and closed the shuttlecock. The amber glow of the gas street lights faded. In the darkness, Nikola continued at full voice — “After tonight there will no longer be any need to argue about the proper source of lighting for the future. Tonight I simply demonstrate it for you!”

  Nikola reached for a large iron switch and forcefully pushed it closed. In the next instant, all of Main Street was filled with dazzling white light from rows of electrical discharge arc lamps mounted over the old gaslights.

  A collective gasp rose from the crowd, equal parts shock and wonder. It was followed by several seconds of silence…

  The town dignitaries stared. They glanced back and forth to each other, at everything all around them, trying to make their eyes believe it.

  The sight of the crowd’s astonished reaction filled Nikola with such delight that he felt like half the artificial light was coming from him when Main Street erupted in cheers. No matter how much time he had already spent with this system in his imagination, nothing could compete with the thrill of seeing it out here in the hard world and watch people suddenly understand.

  Relief flooded the faces of the town dignitaries, their wives, and both of the mothers-in-law. They each added their applause to the din. The mayor cued the waiting saloon band, who launched into a fair guess at what an Irish jig would sound like played by musicians who know how.

  By that point the crowd was so intoxicated on pure amazement that nobody cared if the music was good or not. Once the bawdy ones started dancing in the streets it was not long before the proper social animals joined in alongside them. A giddy cloud enveloped everyone as surely as if they had all levitated into the air.

  Daylight outdoors, at night—the first minutes of the never-before-seen bright magic stabbed at their eyes and made them squint while it filled them with elation and charged them with the idea that anything at all was truly possible in this emerging country.

  Every resident was fully aware: nowhere else on the planet was the lantern-lit night made so bright as it was right there in their little home town. An instant metamorphosis of public perception took place in Rahway. It was happening already — the crowd began to move in unison, behaving more like a single being than a group, trying to get closer to this Mr. Nikola Tesla. The same personality traits that branded him eccentric suddenly imparted a compelling mystique. The people swarmed him in an unspoken hope of soaking up some of the unbelievable good fortune emanating from him.

  From a nearby side street covered in shadows, three men watched the reverie of the dazzled crowd. The largest man, the one in the middle, took a few steps forward. Pale moonlight brushed his features—Thomas Edison stood with his gaze locked onto Nikola Tesla. He held it there while the saloon band played a happy waltz, and delighted couples whirled amid the only artificial daylight anyone there had ever seen outdoors.

  Edison was still cringing at the sight of Tesla’s fawning dignitaries when he saw a young couple step up to the inventor. The husband gestured for Tesla to honor his wife with a dance. It appeared to Edison that Tesla was attempting to graciously decline, but the crowd egged him on. Finally he relented with a smile, bowed to her, then waltzed her away. His movements were stiff but poised enough for the Kais
er’s court. It also appeared that every other female present locked her gaze onto the young inventor. The dancing wife was clearly thrilled to be sharing the moment with the man of the hour.

  Edison knew well enough what it was like to be on the receiving end of such nonsense. More irritating than anything else really. He stared from beneath hooded eyes until he wordlessly turned around and walked away into the alley’s darkness. His two companions hurried after him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Immediately Following

  Rahway, New Jersey

  At no time during the year-long labor in Rahway did it occur to Nikola to ask himself if he was prepared for public scrutiny—until one brief moment after his dream came true. He felt a shift in the public gaze; eyes bored into him from every direction, stinging his skin like thin sunbeams.

  His skill set was entirely insufficient to the task. That crash course in proper social behavior assimilated in the company of the Crown Prince was difficult enough to navigate in Europe, but at least over there a person’s public responses were much more predictable. Here in America, Nikola was entirely off balance when it came to maneuvering through a street party among minor politicians and a giddy public.

  He reflexively pulled every bit of himself up into the tiny rocking chair behind his eyes, leaving just enough consciousness behind to run the automaton and get him out of the party environment as quickly as possible. While his body steered its way through the social maze, the rest of him sat curled up before the splendid, wide-picture view and sank into the fascinating notion of considering a human crowd as an organic steam engine, then estimating ratios of caloric intake versus energy burn regarding a potential output expressed in foot-pounds of lifting pressure.

  While he moved through the crowd, bowing and smiling and doing his best not to shake hands, the faces in all directions were looking straight at him, mostly smiling. There were others. From them he sensed a familiar and angry jealousy—an American variation on the same unabashed envy he often saw in Europe. Nikola had no idea what else to do but stride through the crowd, hoping to pacify a few of them with a moment of conversation in hopes it would prevent them from being inclined to turn vicious on him.