In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  December

  Menlo Park, New Jersey

  In the late evening of Christmas Eve, 1887, Thomas Edison paced his Menlo Park office like a hungry bear, ranting in fury at his number one Yes-Man, what’s-his-name, sounds like Holbert or Kolbert. “Why can’t anybody tell me what’s going on there? The man has the audacity to put a new lab directly down the street from my Manhattan location, and after seven months I still can’t find out what he’s working on?”

  “It’s a closed lab, sir.”

  “I am damn sick and tired of everybody around me mumbling all the time!”

  Yes-Man #1 forged on. “So we sent two private investigators to pose as job seekers, but he interviews everybody himself, so we—“

  “I do the same thing. It’s a good idea!”

  “Yes, but he realized what they were up to, sir. He said to tell you. . . that he means no disrespect, but the Tesla system will light the world.” Yes-Man #1 quickly leaned closer and spoke with reassuring confidence. “We’re all sure such a thing won’t really happen, sir.”

  “I already know what he wants to do! Did the Great Dreamer explain how he plans to actually carry out such a massive undertaking? An entire field of science and enterprise, constructed from the ground up?”

  “He only mentioned something about, um—” He paused and sighed, knowing what was coming— “having a ‘destiny.’“

  “A what.”

  “Destiny, Mr. Edison.”

  “A destiny,” He scoffed. “Oh, I see.” Edison turned his back on what’s-his-name until the hapless fellow got the hint and left the room. For a long time after that he stood in silence, glowering out the window.

  Nikola huddled in the tiny rocking chair while he focused most of his energy out the picture-window eyes and onto the object of his concentrated vision. He sat high on a tall accountant’s stool before a tilted drafting table while he applied finishing touches to his current rendering: a single white six-inch by five-inch page filled with the cutaway view of a large battery. He left just enough consciousness to his automaton so that his hands could accurately reproduce the detailed scale-model drawing hovering in his mind.

  He raised the automaton’s eyes and shifted its gaze back out into the room, where his vision of the large battery hovered in the air no more than an arm’s length away from him. The battery was split in half to show a clean cutaway view, but a moment later the image rotated and moved closer to him, providing a clear view of the detail while he matched it to the schematic. Nikola watched his pen hand make a small correction on the drawing, then he lifted the drawing from the table and turned slightly to the side, handing it to a female assistant in a clean white lab coat. She accepted it with a nervous smile and backed away from Nikola for a few steps before turning toward the laboratory floor.

  He glanced around in a quick check up on the lab work. Several male assistants were hard at work at constructing a giant “Tesla coil.” It was only half completed so far, but already filled much of the lab—a wooden fence, ten feet high, had been formed into a circle twenty feet in diameter. A carefully weighed inch-thick copper strand of insulated wire was wound around the wooden circle in several ascending rows, then tied off until it could be finished.

  The iron core was already braced into place. In the middle of the wooden circle, a tall metal pole rose to a height of twelve feet over the floor. The tip had been painstakingly affixed with a shiny copper globe that provided the coil’s discharge surface.

  Next to the Tesla coil, another assistant worked on a nearly-finished hard world copy of the large battery that Nikola had drawn from his imagination. Tesla’s female assistant handed another fresh detail drawing to the worker, then sneaked a glance back toward him—he was already absorbed in the act of drawing another schematic, while yet another assistant waited nearby.

  She continued watching while Nikola looked up every few seconds and stared intently into empty space, then returned to his drawing. The process went on until the young woman saw Nikola’s spine abruptly straighten while a startled look flashed over him. She saw him sneak a quick glance around as if he had just sensed someone’s presence close by. But just as abruptly, he stopped himself with a shake of his head. He took a deep breath and went back to his drawing, checking the empty space in front of him for reference, while the young male lab assistant working next to him politely waited for the next drawing and pretended to be interested in something else.

  * * *

  The year of 1888 had not yet brought full recovery to the American economy’s deep slump, nevertheless an extraordinary Victorian-style office building in New York City was being occupied by the financial offices of J. Pierpont Morgan, where he comfortably rode out society’s lean years astride a mountain of polished stone, beveled glass, and a tradition of family banking he did not intend to disappoint.

  The crowning corner office declared itself via richly polished woods carved into intricate scrolls, fine leather furnishings, and heavily gilded decor. It was the Lair Of The Alpha Male for nineteenth century America, an appropriate place for a man of these times to contemplate his domain while he relished his power.

  Morgan was in his graying fifties, stocky of build, and while he had no trouble relaxing in this place, his visitor, Thomas Edison, nervously paced the floor. Morgan reclined in a huge desk chair while Edison sputtered in barely-controlled frustration.

  “The man is mentally incapable!”

  “I do not agree,” Morgan amiably replied.

  “I meant incapable of capitalizing on his own work!” Edison corrected himself. “How could a man like that be any real help to you?”

  Morgan smiled. He shrugged in a practiced gesture calculated to indicate nothing. “My people in the U.S. Patent Office tell me that he was granted a total of forty new patents, just before Christmas. Forty. That’s a large number, isn’t it? For patents? I tell you, Thomas, it sounds like a lot of inventing to me, in a very short period of time, on the work he’s done just since he opened that new laboratory. Down the street from yours.”

  “It isn’t forty. It’s not that many.”

  “Well yes, he only asked for seven. I’m aware of that. But my little birdies also tell me that when the boys at the Patent Office saw what ground-breaking concepts Tesla was outlining, they made him break it up into forty individual patents—and then they granted every one of them.”

  Morgan sat forward in his chair and lowered his voice to a specific tone meant to indicate that good fortune would not follow if his listener failed to cooperate. However he also smiled, for his own amusement, just to confuse Mr. Lightbulb with mixed signals.

  “They tell me he could be grinding out an entirely new field, Thomas. They are calling it ‘Undiscovered Science.’”

  “He’s not right in the head! He could never organize anything so vast. His blasted ‘genius’ is half speculation! His so-called ‘undiscovered science’ is unproven science, that’s what it is! Where’s the proof?”

  Morgan smiled again. He puffed lightly on his excellent cigar, like a man who had all the time in the world and most of the money. “Doesn’t a patent require proof, Thomas?”

  Edison glowered but before he could reply, a butler pushed a wheeled food cart to the door. Morgan glanced over and waved him in. Edison watched in confusion while the butler pushed the cart over behind the desk. It carried a sumptuous layout and was only set for one. Morgan’s face lit up at the site of the meal. He rubbed his hands in anticipation.

  “Mm-hmm. Now here we go! Oh, look at this! This is why you get out of bed in the morning!”

  He grinned up at Edison and then gazed around at the food items while he rubbed his belly.

  “And look at this—these little things, they’re toasted, I think! Morsels! One of the greatest things about being rich is eating too much. I tell you that as a solid fact, my friend! When you feel yourself slowly covering up in a thick blanket of too
much good food, why, you know you’re doing something right in this world. You must be! Or you wouldn’t be able to put on that much weight in the first place!” He laughed at himself, then glanced over to the butler and spoke in a practiced monotone, “Wait over there. You can take this back when I’m through.”

  Morgan dove into the platters with obvious relish, a gourmand at his leisure. He seemed to forget Edison was even in the room.

  “…Mr. Morgan. If we could please—”

  “Thomas!” Morgan interrupted with a slight wave of his fork. “Worry is not good for a man. It ruins his digestion.”

  “I’m not eating. You are.”

  “Rest easy! Rest easy.” Morgan leaned a bit closer to Edison without actually looking up and paused in forking the food long enough to say, “Just don’t speak another word about an increase in your funding…” (Scoop, lift, chew, swallow. Scoop, lift, chew, swallow.) “…and my support will remain with you.”

  Edison’s throat clenched with outrage. “Mr. Morgan, it is vital to my work that—”

  “Our work.”

  “Yes of course. Our work.”

  “For now.”

  “For…?”

  “Now. You know; ‘for the time being.’ All that.” (Lift, chew, swallow. Sip, chew, sip, chew, swallow.)

  “Mr. Morgan!” Edison nearly shrieked in frustration. He stopped himself and lowered his voice. “Mr. Morgan. My company is poised to become the nation’s leading source of electric power.”

  But Morgan was again consumed with the fascinating task of plundering his private feast. His mouth was full to bulging, which seemed to require that he take another long sip of wine. Thus occupied, he gestured with his free hand for Edison to run along.

  Edison nearly choked on his need to scream while he fought to keep his voice even. “All right! All right, then. The increase…”

  “Yes, yes, the increase?” prompted Morgan while he slathered butter on a roll.

  “…is not necessary.”

  Morgan nodded without bothering to look up from his meal. He lifted his fork and twirled it in a “run along now” gesture and then returned it to the task at hand, leaving Edison nothing else to do but turn and stride out of the room, mindful of not making too much noise.

  As soon as Edison was gone, Morgan tossed down his fork with a grin, picked up his cigar and relit it, saying, “Mmm. I love that one…” He waved in the butler. “All right, take this back down to the kitchen and freshen everything back up. It should all be steaming hot for my next appointment — I need to persuade George Westinghouse to run a little errand.”

  The Butler gave a slight bow and turned to wheel the cart toward the door.

  “Three minutes after Westinghouse enters,” Morgan added, “bring it in again. Three minutes sharp.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Wait,” Morgan called out. He make a quick mental calculation…

  “Make it two.”

  The butler nodded, whisking the cart from the room, and the fragile peace and quiet returned. Morgan basked in such rare times as this; leaning deeper into his unapologetically comfortable chair, he took another deep pull on his cigar.

  J. Pierpont Morgan was acutely aware that a man in his position had no choice but to love his life if he was right in the head. And Morgan loved his life, all right. Not just the myth of it as it existed in public perception, but also the truth of it as it really was: sour with indigestion, stiff with arthritis, paunch across his beltline, bald skin stretched across his graying skull.

  He loved the life he had built for himself because it allowed him to drain the blood of satisfaction out of every single day. The process fueled itself in that the more power he got over others, the more it seemed foolish to waste compassion on them. His digestion remained good and his sleep restful.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  May, 1888

  Manhattan

  For three nights in a row, Tesla’s laboratory assistant Nelle Whitaker was still at work when the midnight hour chimed. An old grandfather clock stood in a far corner of the lab, and in spite of her fatigue she found its musical tones reassuring.

  For Nelle, the clock’s hourly chimes were the only things about the place that were familiar to her; otherwise, Mr. Tesla’s electrical laboratory was unlike anything she had ever seen.

  The first and most striking example was its sources of light. The night outside was pitch black with no moon out at that moment, but the laboratory was filled with brilliant white light, so strong that it illuminated every detail. It was nothing like anything Nell had ever seen, as bright inside of there as if the building had no walls, no roof, and it was not the hour of midnight but high noon.

  The ceiling over the entire length of the room was strung with arc lamps mounted at precise intervals. They were a second generation, designed using lessons from the Rahway project. Unlike that city’s massive generators, the whirling machines that powered this lighting system were tiny. These Tesla motors were built to run on the “impossible to control” alternating current, and they were more efficient, by a factor of thousands of percent.

  The lab’s bright light always made her eyes more tired after the first twelve hours or so. No matter, she was resolute in her determination that if Mr. Tesla intended to outwork every single one of his employees, so be it, but she would positively be the last one to give out. It was partly a matter of professional pride for her, but just partly; the truth was that the gloom in her empty apartment was relentless. She had nothing else to do but face the drudgery of a mounting stack of boring personal errands. And in recent months the thought of spending time with a possible sweetheart seldom even crossed her mind. She saw what mattered and she was where she needed to be.

  Nelle was acutely aware that since she had reached the age of twenty-seven without once hearing a marriage proposal, her romantic prospects had dwindled to the point that to even speculate now was an indulgence she could not afford. The aftermath of such flights of girlish conjecture always consisted of a blue mood and the sudden sensation that she was carrying around a lot of extra fat. This happened despite the fact that she was no more than what people would call “pleasingly plump” except for sometimes, she reminded herself, during the Christmas holiday when she tended to add ten or twenty pounds, which she mostly lost again over the summer.

  Nights like tonight were the fruit of Nelle’s willingness to sacrifice for Mr. Tesla, if sacrifice is what it truly was—she didn’t really know anymore. She knew that the life of a spinster was “supposed” to be dry and brittle and boring; Nelle figured that it might indeed be that way if she were in the same spot as most women her age. But on nights like this night, it was freeing to have no social agenda or obligation, with no one waiting for her at home. Most freeing of all, there was no petulant husband to have to appease for the sin of staying late at work.

  Nelle’s job made her feel deeply and quietly proud, partly because she loved this magical field of electro-magnetism, and partly because of Mr. Nikola Tesla himself. He was not yet thirty-two years old and wore his thick black hair swept straight back from the eyes. The effect magnified the intensity of his gaze.

  She looked up from her arduous task of winding layers and layers of fine copper wire around a solid iron bar three feet in length and two inches in diameter. The bar sat braced against her wooden work table, held in place by a rubber-coated iron vise. Every single turn of wire had been laid perfectly against the turn next to it, in order to ensure a precise level of electrical energy over the entire copper mass.

  She could still hear Mr. Tesla’s enthusiastic voice when he first explained to her the importance of perfection in this new task. “It is as if we are painting layers of metal over the magnetic core, building up coat after coat with such precision that we can weigh out the entire mass of copper wire down to fractions of a milligram and predict exactly how it will shape the magnetic field!” While that sounded terribly important, it was t
he passionate gleam in Mr. Tesla’s eyes that was magnetic to Nelle Whitaker. It shined in her memory.

  During the six months since Nelle was hired, the magical force of magnetism seemed to become something he generated along with his fantastic devices. The force was so powerful it held her at the lab, day after day, during the unending work sessions that always followed Mr. Tesla’s bursts of creative invention.

  The strange magnetic force increased its power over Nelle every time Mr. Tesla came out of his isolated work room to interact with others—he always spoke to Nelle as a colleague, not an underling, always addressed her as “Miss,” never by her first name. “Meese,” he pronounced it. It sounded so exotic, a recurring reminder of his European background.

  To Nelle, Mr. Tesla often appeared brusque with the other workers in a distracted sort of way, but his manner with her seemed special. Her only disappointment about it was that the warm moments were few and brief, but Mr. Tesla was so unfailingly polite that the bubble of formality around him made it unthinkable to attempt a personal conversation.

  On this night, she passed the midnight hour with all but three of the dozen lab assistants having already gone home. She was proud of that; the inventor’s magnetism again bound her to the place. It even seemed to hold her upright and on her feet while she waited for Mr. Tesla to notice that there was not another soul in his employ who understood and supported him with more commitment than she displayed, every single day.

  Nelle blinked her eyes hard several times to push the floating dots out of her vision, then carefully began to turn the next wind of copper wire. By now, all of the other technicians—the one other female and the eight men with families—had been gone for almost an hour. The two remaining men were bachelors, free to give a solid effort at overtime. It didn’t matter to Nelle; not only was her willpower fixed in place, but for the past several minutes, every time she glanced up, the increasing slump in each man’s posture indicated that both of them were close to calling it quits.