by Marc Seifer
“I was discouraged,” Tesla recalled, “until I had an inspiration. Do you remember the ‘Egg of Columbus?’ I asked. The saying goes that at a certain dinner the great explorer asked some scoffers of his project to balance an egg on its end. They tried in vain. He then took it, and cracking the shell slightly by a gentle blow, made it stand upright. This may be a myth, but the fact is that he was granted an audience by Isabella, the Queen of Spain, and won her support.”
“And you plan to balance an egg on its end?” Peck inquired.
“Yes, but without cracking the shell. If I should do this, would you admit that I had gone Columbus one better?”
“All right,” he said.
Having finally gained the lawyer’s attention, Tesla cut to the quick. “And would you be willing to go out of your way as much as Isabella?”
“I have no crown jewels to pawn,” Peck retorted, “but there are a few ducats in my buckskins and I might be able to help you to an extent.”14
After the meeting, Tesla rushed to the local blacksmith with a hardboiled egg and had a mate cast in iron and brass. When he returned to the lab, he constructed a circular enclosure with polyphase circuits along the perimeter, and when he placed the egg in the center and turned on the current, the egg began to spin. As the egg’s speed of rotation increased, its wobbling ceased, and it stood on its end. Not only was Tesla able to “go Columbus one better,” he was also easily able to display the principles behind the idea of his rotating magnetic field. Peck was won over, and together the three men formed a new electric company in Tesla’s name.
Peck, who had connections with John C. Moore, a banker with connections to J. P. Morgan, provided the bulk of the capital, and Brown provided technical expertise and located the laboratory at 89 Liberty Street, adjacent to what today is the World Trade Center. In return, Tesla agreed to split his patents on a fifty-fifty basis. In actuality, the three equally shared one patent for an AC dynamo, Peck and Tesla split five more patents on commutators, motors, and power transmission, and the balance of inventions conceived during this period were placed in the name of the Tesla Electric Company. Their first patent was filed on April 30, 1887.15 Finally, Tesla had arrived. He would begin an unprecedented excursion into the field of invention, a flow of intense activity which would continue unabated for fifteen years.
Driven by his wish to maintain priority in a variety of areas and upon the realization that new technologies could influence the course of history, Tesla began a vigorous schedule that frightened those around him. On many occasions, he drove himself until he collapsed, working around the clock, with few breaks. “Tesla produced as rapidly as the machines could be constructed three complete systems of AC machinery—for single-phase, two-phase, and three-phase currents—and made experiments with fourand six-phase currents. In each of the three principal systems he produced the dynamos for generating the currents, the motors for producing power from them, and transformers for raising and reducing the voltages as well as a variety of devices for automatically controlling the machinery. He not only produced the three systems but provided methods by which they could be interconnected and modifications providing a variety of means of using each of the systems.”16 He also calculated, in fundamental fashion, the mathematics behind these inventions.
On May 10, Anthony Szigeti landed in New York, and by the end of the week he was working at Liberty Street. With Tesla as designer, Brown as technical expert, and Szigeti as assistant, they began manufacturing their first AC induction motors. Peck, who along with Brown would be associated with Tesla for the next decade as a quiet backer, helped implement the patent applications by seeing investors in California, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Within a few weeks, Electrical World editor T. C. Martin stopped by the shop and coaxed Tesla into writing his first article on the invention. Immediately taken by him, Martin described the long-limbed electrician as having “eyes that recall all the stories one has read of keenness of vision and phenomenal ability to see through things. He is an omnivorous reader, who never forgets; and he possesses the peculiar facility in languages that enables the educated native of eastern Europe to talk and write in at least half a dozen tongues. A more congenial companion cannot be desired…the conversation, dealing at first with things near at hand and next…reaches out and rises to the greater questions of life, and duty, and destiny.”17
T. C. Martin, with heavy emphasis in his signature on the C, was a complex person who would come to play a significant role in Tesla’s life. In 1893 he edited the most important compilation of Tesla’s writings assembled during his lifetime. Flamboyantly mustachioed and with large, round, soulful eyes and a shaved head, Martin, now married, had been a former seminary student who had emigrated from England when he was only twenty-one. Born in the same year as Tesla, Martin had worked for the Wizard of Menlo Park in the late 1870s before moving to the island of Jamaica. Returning to New York in 1883, he quickly became editor of Operator and Electrical World. Started in 1874 by the well manicured W. J. Johnston from a “little four-page telegraph sheet prepared and issued by Western Union operators in New York City, for circulation among their fellows,”18 the Operator began to gain prominence after Thomas Edison started contributing significant pieces. As soon as Martin was hired, the paper’s name was changed simply to Electrical World.
The following year, in 1884, T. C. Martin became vice president of the newly formed American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), and in 1886 his first book appeared, The Electrical Motor and Its Applications. A few months later, he was elected president of the AIEE.19
With his newfound prominence and very British attitude, T. C. Martin’s sense of self-worth rose to the occasion. In very deliberate fashion, he organized a rebellion at Electrical World, with his coeditor Joseph Wetzler and a few other workers, against the owner, the proper, pedantic, and overbearing W. J. Johnston.20 A capable editor in his own right, Johnston was forced to fire his editors and work on the journal himself, “as if Martin had never existed.”
Along with Wetzler, Martin gained employment with Electrical Engineer, a competing company which gained great prominence when the duo climbed aboard. As a friend of Edison, and with his new base of operations, Martin was prepared to seize the moment. “An industrious writer with graceful style,”21 T. C. Martin had the capability to cross over into higher social circles. He was a leader, an opportunist, egoist, and charmer. He was also one of the most influential personalities in the glamorous futuristic field of electrical engineering. Having discovered this new volcano of vision in Nikola Tesla, Martin approached him with the idea of helping choreograph Tesla’s entrée into the electrical-engineering community.
The Serb was mysterious. He could rebuff lesser mortals and enjoyed the habits of a recluse. But Thomas Commerford Martin had tact and tenacity of purpose. He helped arrange for the esteemed engineering professor William Anthony, of Cornell University, to come to Liberty Street and test the new AC motors for efficiency. And Tesla reciprocated by traveling to Cornell to display his motors to Anthony and three other professors, R. H. Thurston, Edward Nicholas, and William Ryan. Anthony, who was twenty years their senior and a graduate of both Brown and Yale universities, had just retired from Cornell after fifteen years in order to take a position designing electrical measuring instruments for Mather Electrical Company in Manchester, Connecticut. Soon to be president of the AIEE himself, Anthony was pleased with his tests. Along with Martin, he helped coax Tesla into presenting his motor before the newly formed electrical society.
Martin had great difficulty persuading Tesla “to give any paper at all.” Martin said that “Tesla stood very much alone, [as] the majority [of the electricians] were entirely unfamiliar with [the motor’s] value.” In haste, Tesla wrote out his lecture the night before in pencil. It had not been easy for him to construct an efficient machine, but having finally succeeded and having passed all of Professor Anthony’s stringent tests for efficiency, “nothing now stood in th
e way of [its] commercial development…except that they had to be constructed with a view to operating on the circuits then existing which in this country were all of high frequency.”22
On May 15, 1888, Tesla appeared before the AIEE to read his landmark paper “A New Alternating Current Motor.” He had already filed for fourteen of the forty fundamental patents on the AC system, but he was still reluctant to fully announce his work. Realizing that the invention was worth at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars, Tesla and company sought investors through the advice of their new patent attorneys, Parker W. Page, Leonard E. Curtis, and Gen. Samuel Duncan, the last a leader of the firm and respected member of the New York Bar Association.23 By the time of the lecture, Tesla, Peck, and Brown had already been negotiating with prospective buyers, such as Mr. Butterworth, a gas manufacturer from San Francisco, and, through General Duncan, George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh,24 but nothing as yet was settled.
Westinghouse was already utilizing an alternating current system developed by the “erratic” French inventor Lucien Gaulard and the “sporty” entrepreneur John Dixon Gibbs of England.25 In 1885 his manager of the electrical division, Guido Pantaleoni, had returned to Turin, Italy, to attend the funeral of his father. By coincidence, through his engineering professor Galileo Ferraris, whom Westinghouse himself had met while visiting Italy in 1882, Pantaleoni was introduced to Lucian Gaulard, who had installed his AC apparatus between Tivoli and Rome. Gaulard and Gibbs had already made headlines two years earlier when they first exhibited their invention at the Royal Aquarium in London; but in Turin the system won a gold medal and a prize of £400 awarded by the Italian government. Westinghouse purchased the American patent rights in late November after receiving a cable request from Pantaleoni.
The Gaulard-Gibbs system, although improved by the Hungarian ZBD system, still had serious problems. For Westinghouse, this was further complicated by the fact that Edison owned the option on the ZBD; and it was probably to block competitors that Edison purchased the system to begin with.26
In the same year, in America, after creating the Westinghouse Electric Company, Westinghouse placed William Stanley in charge of the Gaulard-Gibbs modifications. Simultaneously, he brought to America Reginald Belfield, the engineer who had helped install the Gaulard-Gibbs system at the Inventions Exhibition in London two years earlier. Stanley, a frail, thin-faced temperamental “little man”27 with piercing eyes, aquiline nose, wispy mustache, and Alfalfa hairdo, was a native of Brooklyn who had worked for Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun. Although it was Westinghouse’s idea to place Stanley in charge of the Gaulard-Gibbs apparatus, Stanley would later maintain that Westinghouse never fully understood the system until he got it in working order.28 This appears unlikely, for it was a private joke among the upper echelon of the Westinghouse Company that Stanley had a penchant for claiming new discoveries when they became such to him. In any case, Westinghouse hedged his bets by establishing numerous DC central stations as well while research on AC was in progress.29
“Nervous and agile,”30 Stanley was a hypersensitive individual who never really got along with Westinghouse. Due to ill health, and on the advice of the general manager, Col. Henry Byllesby, who proposed that success might be more forthcoming if Stanley separated himself from the pressures of the company, the inventor returned to his childhood summer retreat in the Berkshires in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to work on the Gaulard-Gibbs system in private, taking Reginald Belfield with him. Stanley converted the Gaulard-Gibbs arrangement to parallel circuitry and independent control of separate fixtures and at the same time created a transformer which stepped up the AC from 500 volts to 3,000 when delivered along a transmission line and stepped them back down to original levels when entering households. This invention, although very similar to the ZBD configuration, was nevertheless patentable. It enabled AC to be sent three-quarters of a mile, or approximately one-quarter of a mile farther than the lower voltages of the prevailing DC systems.31
On April 6, 1886, George Westinghouse, along with Col. Henry Byllesby, traveled up to New Hampshire to witness the landmark apparatus for themselves. Prior to coming to Westinghouse, Byllesby had been employed at the Edison Machine Works as a mechanical engineer and was one of the designers of the Pearl Street station.32 “From that time on,” Byllesby said, “we progressed with amazing speed.”33 By the time of Tesla’s lecture, Westinghouse noted that his company had “sold more central station[s]…on the alternating current system than all of the other electric companies in the country put together on the direct current system,”34 but few engineers understood the principles involved.
In fierce competition with Westinghouse and a third player, Elihu Thomson of Thomson-Houston Electric Company, Thomas Edison had received a report on his own alternating current ZBD system. His engineers in Berlin indicated that the use of such high voltages was exceedingly dangerous.35 Thomson, who himself had lectured at the AIEE a year before on the topic of AC, supported Edison’s contention that AC was too risky.36 Thus, at the time Tesla spoke, the battle of the currents had already begun, but the makeup of the contenders was complex. In 1886, fully two years before Tesla’s high-voltage AC system became manifest, Edison had written to his manager, “Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically. It will never be free from danger.”37
Tesla’s lecture began with a brief description of the “existing diversity of opinion regarding the relative merits of the alternate and continuous current systems. Great importance,” Tesla continued, “is attached to the question whether alternate currents can be successfully utilized in the operation of motors.” He followed this preamble with a lucid description of the problems of the prevailing technology and his elegant solution, explained in words, diagrams, and simple mathematical calculations. The lecture was so thorough that many engineers, after studying the work, felt that they had known it all along:
I have the pleasure of bringing to your notice a novel system of electric distribution and transmission of power by means of alternate currents…which I am confident will at once establish the superior adaptability…and will show that many results heretofore unattainable can be reached by their use…
In our dynamo machines, it is well known, we generate alternate currents which we direct by means of a commutator, a complicated device, and the source of most of the troubles experienced…Now, the currents so directed cannot be utilised in the motor, but they must be reconverted into their original state…In reality, therefore, all machines are alternate-current machines, the current appearing continuous only in the external circuit during their transit from generator to motor.38
Since Tesla’s lecture was dealing with fundamentals, it was easily understood, even though his invention was so revolutionary.
By demonstration in Tesla’s laboratory after the lecture, the inventor showed that his synchronous motors could almost instantaneously be reversed. He also described, in precise mathematical calculations, how to determine the number of poles and speed of each motor, how to construct single-phase, two-phase, and three-phase motors, and how his system could be interlinked with DC apparatus. The lecture made use of entirely new principles.39
Now electricity could be transported hundreds of miles from a single distribution point, and not just for lighting streets or dwellings but for running appliances in households and industrial machinery in factories.
At the end of the talk, T. C. Martin called upon Professor William Anthony to present his independent tests of the Tesla motors. He had designed dynamos himself, which he had displayed a decade earlier at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Tugging nervously at his scraggly beard, Anthony confirmed that the Tesla motors he had taken back to Cornell had an efficiency comparable to the best DC apparatus. “A little over 60%,” he said, for the larger models. Moreover, the reversal of directio
n that the machines could achieve took place “so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell when the change took place.”40
Boiling inside at having been anticipated by a newcomer, the persnickety professor Elihu Thomson stepped forward. Wanting to reestablish that his work in AC predated Tesla’s, Thomson pointed out how their inventions differed: “I have been very much interested in the description given by Mr. Tesla of his new and admirable little motor,” he managed with a pert smile. “I have, as probably you may be aware, worked in somewhat similar directions, and towards the attainment of similar ends. The trials which I have made have been by the use of a single alternating current circuit—not a double alternating circuit—a single circuit supplying a motor constructed to utilize the alternation and produce rotation.”41
Unbeknown to Thomson, his words at that moment would come back to haunt him, because he had identified precisely the difference between the two creations. Whereas Thomson’s single AC circuit had to still make use of a commutator and thus was highly inefficient, Tesla’s system utilized two or more circuits out of phase with each other and constructed in such a way as to make the commutator obsolete. Tesla, of course, recognized the importance of Thomson’s words and reiterated the point to establish clearly that his invention, just presented, was not analogous to Thomson’s prior work:
“Gentlemen,” Tesla began, “I wish to say that the testimony of such a man as Professor Thomson flatters me very much.” Pausing with a smile and a bow of recognition, Tesla timed his coup de grâce with understated finesse. “I had a motor identically the same as that of Professor Thomson, but I was anticipated by him…That peculiar motor represents the disadvantage that a pair of brushes [i.e., a commutator] must be employed.”42
In this brief riposte Tesla claimed the high ground, and created an enemy who would fight him on this and other priority issues (e.g., the Tesla coil) for the rest of their lives.