by Marc Seifer
Now Westinghouse had to move fast. He realized the value of the Tesla patent applications, having had nearly a month to look them over, along with the report from Professor Anthony.43 A week after the lecture, on May 21, he sent Col. Henry Byllesby to Tesla’s laboratory. Byllesby met with fellow engineer Alfred Brown on Cortland Street, where he was introduced to Charles Peck, the lawyer and major financial backer of the Tesla Electric Company. Together with a fourth man, Mr. Humbard, they went over to Liberty Street to meet the inventor and see the machines in operation.
“Mr. Tesla struck me as being a straight-forward, enthusiastic, sort of a party,” Byllesby wrote to Westinghouse, “but his description was not of a nature which I was enabled, entirely, to comprehend. However, I saw several points which I think are of interest. In the first place, as near as I can get at it, the underlying principle of this motor is the principle which Mr. Shallenberger is at work on at the present moment. The motors, as far as I could judge…are a success. They start from rest, and the reversion of the direction of rotation is suddenly accomplished without any shortcircuiting…In order to avoid giving the impression that the matter was one which excited my curiosity, I made my visit short.”44
Back at Cortland Street, Brown and Peck informed Byllesby that he had to make a decision “by ten o’clock, Friday of this week,” as the company was also negotiating with a Mr. Butterworth from San Francisco. They claimed that Professor Anthony had joined this California syndicate and was backing up Butterworth’s offer of $250,000 in short-term notes and a royalty of $2.50 per watt of horsepower. “I told them the terms were monstrous,” Byllesby said, “but they replied that they could not possibly hold the matter over longer than the date mentioned. I told them I thought there was no possibility of our considering the matter seriously, but that I would let them know before Friday.”
Byllesby suggested that Westinghouse come to New York himself or send Shallenberger and another representative, but Westinghouse, who was familiar with the San Francisco syndicate, told Byllesby instead to stall them and try to secure more favorable terms.45
During the six-week interim, Westinghouse conferred with his specialists, Oliver Shallenberger and William Stanley, and his lawyer E. M. Kerr. Just three weeks prior to Tesla’s lecture, Shallenberger had discovered “by chance” that a loose spring spun in “a shifting magnetic field. Directly he said to his assistant Stillwell who was also present…, ‘There’s a meter in that and perhaps a motor.’ Within two weeks he designed and built a most successful alternating current meter of the induction type” which became standard for the field; and, like Tesla’s creation, his apparatus utilized a rotating magnetic field.46 Shallenberger, however, did not yet really understand the principles involved, nor had he had time to apply for a patent.
Stanley, on the other hand, claimed that there was nothing new in Tesla’s creation. He pointed out that in September 1883 he had put the idea down in a notebook that an induction coil could be excited by AC. “I have built an AC system on basically the same principle which allows electromotive force to be transmitted from power stations to homes for the purpose of illuminating them,” he told Westinghouse.47 But the fact of the matter was, Stanley’s system still used a commutator. His ego had gotten in the way of his ability to reason objectively that his scheme was not analogous to Tesla’s.
Kerr reminded Westinghouse that unless he had a competing patent of sufficient strength, he would be powerless. Westinghouse was aware that Professor Ferraris of Turin, Italy, had published a paper on the rotating magnetic field one or two months prior to Tesla’s lecture. Ferraris had also constructed discs that rotated in AC fields in university presentations as early as 1885. Tesla willingly admitted that “Professor Ferraris not only came independently to the same theoretical results, but in a manner identical almost to the smallest detail,”48 but Ferraris wrongly concluded that “an apparatus founded upon this principle cannot be of any commercial importance as a motor.”49 Nevertheless, Kerr realized the legal importance of Ferraris’s work. He suggested to Westinghouse that they purchase the U.S. patent options, so Pantaleoni was sent to Italy. He paid 5,000 francs, or about $1,000, for the rights.50 But time was running out; the Tesla people would not wait forever. Westinghouse wrote Kerr:
I have been thinking over this motor question very considerably, and am of the opinion that if Tesla has a number of applications pending in the Patent Office, he will be able to cover broadly the apparatus that Shallenberger was experimenting with, and that Stanley thought he had invented. It is more than likely that he will be able to carry his date of invention back sufficient time to seriously interfere with Ferraris, and that our investment there will probably prove a bad one.
If the Tesla patents are broad enough to control the alternating motor business, then the Westinghouse Electric Company cannot afford to have others own the patents.51
Concerning the sticky point of royalties, which the Tesla syndicate placed at the audacious figure of $2.50 per watt, Westinghouse wrote, “The price seems rather high, but if it is the only method for operating a motor by the alternating current, and if it is applicable to street car work, we can unquestionably easily get from the users of the apparatus whatever tax is put upon it by the inventors.”52 Thus, in no uncertain terms, Westinghouse writes here the portentous statement that royalty payments could be passed on to customers, a concept he would be forced later to conveniently overlook.
6
INDUCTION AT PITTSBURGH (1889)
[My] first impression [was that of a man with] tremendous potential energy of [which]…only part had taken kinetic form. But even to a superficial observer, the latent force was manifest. A powerful frame, well proportioned, with every joint in working order, an eye as clear as crystal, a quick and 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.
NIKOLA TESLA ON GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE1
Although George Westinghouse had made his fortune with the invention of air brakes for trains, he was not just a railroad man. He was a descendant of the aristocratic Russian von Wistinghousen family; his father was also an inventor, with six fundamental patents of farming machinery. With his brother Henry (who later became his partner), George early on was introduced to such devices as the battery and the sparking leyden jar (a glass jar lined with foil and used for storing an electric charge). Having been a cavalry boy and, later, a navy engineer during the Civil War, George Westinghouse had experience and vision; he knew that the future was in electricity.
In late July 1888, Tesla took a train to Pittsburgh to meet with George Westinghouse and finalize the sale of his patents. It may have been the middle of summer, but oddly, the inventor welcomed the intense heat. He looked forward to the meeting.
Considerable in stature, with a walrus-sized mustache, Chester A. Arthur sideburns, and a remarkable wife of equal proportion who wore a bustle that jutted three feet to the rear, Westinghouse greeted the lanky inventor. A garrulous man, George Westinghouse subsumed those around him with his geniality and unbounded confidence. He took Tesla to his home and then on a tour of the plant. With nearly four hundred employees, Westinghouse’s electric company was mainly producing “alternators, transformers and accessories for equipping central stations for supplying incandescent lighting.”2 Barrel-chested and physically expansive, Westinghouse counterbalanced in appearance the spindle-legged foreigner, who walked as “straight as an arrow, [with his] head erect…but with a preoccupied air as if new combinations were crystallizing in his brain.”3
Tesla said:
Though past forty then, [Westinghouse] still had the enthusiasm of youth. Always smiling, affable and polite, he stood in marked contrast to the rough and ready men I met. Not one word which would have been objectionable, not a gesture which might have offended—one could imagine him as moving in the atmosphere of a court, so perfect was his bearing in manner and speech. And yet no fiercer advers
ary than Westinghouse could have been found when he was aroused. An athlete in ordinary life, he was transformed into a giant when confronted with difficulties which seemed unsurmountable. He enjoyed the struggle and never lost confidence. When others would give up in despair he triumphed.4
Known for his foresight and courage, Westinghouse had already quadrupled the sales of his electric company, from $800,000 in 1887 to over $3 million in 1888, even though he was in the midst of expensive legal and propaganda battles with Edison.5 Extraordinary in his ability to generate enthusiasm in his workers and a decisive man of action, he immediately gained the respect of those he met, particularly Nikola Tesla.
Westinghouse offered Tesla $5,000 in cash for a sixty-day option, $10,000 at the end of the option if they elected to purchase the patents, three notes of $20,000 at six-month intervals, $2.50 per watt in royalties, and two hundred shares of stock in the Westinghouse Company. Minimum payment on the royalties was calculated at “$5,000 for the first year, $10,000 for the second year, and $15,000 for each succeeding year thereafter during the life of the patents.”6 Westinghouse also agreed to pay for any legal expenses in litigation on priority issues, but a clause for lowering payments was added should any suits be lost. Calculated out, for fifteen years, this figure, minus the stock, came to $75,000 in initial outlays and $180,000 in royalty payments, or approximately $255,000.7
Tesla owned four-ninths of his company, the balance shared by Peck and Brown, presumably three-ninths to the former partner and two ninths to the latter.8 Concerning total amounts paid out by Westinghouse, Tesla also referred to European patents, especially in England and Germany.9 Thus, it is hard to determine exactly how much Tesla received for his forty patents. Westinghouse was not only getting a simple induction motor but also a variety of synchronous and load-dependent motors as well as armatures, turbines, regulators, and dynamos. Tesla may have sold additional inventions later on in separate agreements; the value of his stock holding is also unclear.
A decade later, Tesla wrote to another financier, John Jacob Astor, that “Mr. Westinghouse agreed to pay for my rotating field patents about $500,000, and, despite…hard times, he has lived up to every cent of his obligation.”10 Since Tesla was trying to raise money from Astor, he may have exaggerated the sum. Two years earlier, Electrical Review noted that the Westinghouse annual report listed the purchase of the patents at $216,000,11 which is a figure that corresponds roughly to the Byllesby memorandum above, minus a few years’ worth of royalty payments. If this was the case, then Tesla probably received for himself about half that figure, or $100,000, the entire amount paid in installments during the years 1888-97.12
During the negotiations, Tesla agreed to move to Pittsburgh to help develop his motor. It is quite possible that he received no salary for his stay there, for he had a peculiar “principle, ever since I devoted myself to scientific laboratory research, never to accept fees or compensations for professional services.”13 Tesla had been paid for his patents and was receiving royalties (or payments against royalties), so there was an income. Further evidence that no additional daily or weekly compensation was received is implied in a signed agreement by George Westinghouse, dated July 27, 1889, substantiating that Tesla worked in Pittsburgh for one year and that during that time he was paid with “one hundred and fifty (150) shares of Capital Stock.” In return, Tesla promised to assign any patents to the Westinghouse Company which were directly related to the development of his induction motor patents. Other compensation was received from Westinghouse, however, for other contributions. For instance, when Tesla discovered that Bessemer steel created a vastly superior transformer than ones made out of soft iron, Tesla was paid approximately $10,000 for the idea.14
Tesla gave up his garden apartment in New York and moved into one of several hotels in Pittsburgh, including the Metropolitan, the Duquesne, and the Anderson.15 Hotel living would become a lifestyle which he never departed from.
His talk, just two months old, had already catapulted him to fame. “About the middle of August 1888 in the Westinghouse testing room at Pittsburgh,” Charles Scott, his assistant to be, remembered: “I had just come with the company and was assistant to E. Spooner who was running the dynamos testing room at night. He called me and said, ‘There comes Tesla.’
“I had heard of Tesla,” Scott continued, having “read [Tesla’s] paper on the polyphase induction motor which my former college professor had pronounced as a complete solution of the motor problem. And now I was to see Tesla himself.”
Fair-haired, with round, rimless glasses, Scott had only learned “that there was such a thing as alternating current” the summer before, in 1887. “I had…graduated from college two years earlier, and I wondered why I had not heard of such things from my professors.” His only introduction was an Electrical World article by William Stanley, which was “a fascinating…key to many mysteries.”16 Now, a year later, he was to meet Nikola Tesla, the man who so elegantly solved all the puzzles proposed by Stanley. “There he came, marching down the aisle with head and shoulders erect and with a twinkle in his eye. It was a great moment for me.”17
Scott, who later became an engineering professor at Yale University, was “Tesla’s wireman…in preparing and making tests. It was a splendid opportunity for a beginner, this coming in contact with a man of such eminence, rich in ideas, kindly and friendly in disposition. Tesla’s fertile imagination often constructed air castles which seemed prodigious. But, I doubt whether ever his extravagant expectations for the toy motor of those days measured up to actual realization…for the polyphase system which it inaugurated…exceed[ed] the wildest dreams of the early day[s].”18
Scott was not only Tesla’s assistant, as time went on and against the opinion of many colleagues, he became a champion of Tesla’s cause, a bearer of the truth, that is, that Tesla was the inventor of the induction motor. Another staunch supporter was Swiss immigrant Albert Schmid, coauthor of two AC patents with Tesla. Even though Westinghouse himself was also an ally, there was a bevy of other workers who tried seriously to strip Tesla of the crown. Major adversaries of the early period included Oliver Shallenberger, inventor of the AC meter, and his helpmate Lewis B. Stillwell, inventor of the Stillwell booster, which operated somewhat like the Tesla coil. At a later period, the key antagonist was Andrew W. Robertson, Westinghouse’s chief executive officer.
Yet another opponent was William Stanley, the first American to have ever successfully instituted an AC system in the country. Stanley had split off from the Westinghouse Corporation (circa 1892-93) in order to sell his own polyphase motors, which were clear patent infringements on the Tesla system. This position was supported by the courts a few years later, and Stanley was forced to purchase the Tesla motors from Westinghouse.19
To fathom the depth of hostility that existed within the Westinghouse camp against Tesla, one need only read Lewis B. Stillwell’s chapter on the history of alternating current, written forty years after the fact in a text entitled George Westinghouse Commemoration. Edited by Charles Scott, the book was widely distributed by the corporation and reissued in 1985. In the introduction to Stillwell’s chapter it is recounted
how Westinghouse brought the Gaulard-Gibbs system to America, how it was modified, and then given practical demonstrations by Stanley…and what has happened since.
In 1888 came Shallenberger’s brilliant invention of the induction meter. In the same year Nikola Tesla was granted his United States patents covering the polyphase motor and system. Westinghouse promptly secured the American rights. Tesla came to Pittsburgh to develop his motor. He made vain attempts to adapt it to the existing single phase, 133-cycle circuits…The obvious advantages [emphasis added] of direct connection of engines and generators called for a lower frequency…Two were selected as standard, namely 60 cycles for general use and 30 cycles for conversion into direct current.20
If we analyze the structure of this Stillwell quote, we note that although the topic sentence refers to Sha
llenberger, the entire paragraph is about Tesla. The word brilliant is used to describe an accidental discovery that a spring reacted to alternating currents21 when no adjective is used to describe the inventor of an entire power system!
Tesla refers to the same situation in his autobiography: “My system was based on the use of low frequency currents and the Westinghouse experts had adopted 133 cycles with the object of securing advantages in transformation [because their Gaulard-Gibbs system operated at that frequency]. They did not want to depart from the standard form of apparatus and my efforts had to be concentrated upon adapting the motor to their conditions.”22
With 120 power plants set up at 133 cycles per second, one can understand the predicament Tesla was placed in. Since Shallenberger’s meter was compatible with the prevailing 133-cycle single circuit, it appeared logical that Tesla’s polyphase motor could be made compatible as well.
In December 1888, Edison’s propaganda battle against Westinghouse peaked when Edison began to allow H. P. Brown (who was not an Edison employee) to come to his Menlo Park laboratory in order to electrocute various animals with AC. A few months earlier, Brown had experimented in electrocuting animals at the School of Mines, a division of Columbia University, in New York City. Brown, an electrical engineer who lived on Fifty-fourth Street, had become upset over the many accidental deaths of his colleagues. He had collected a list of over eighty casualties, and although many of the men died because of DC, Brown decided that AC was the real culprit. Within two years, Brown began to manufacture electric chairs for various prisons which he sold for $1,600. He also planned to get paid to be the executioner. During the summer of 1888 the New York Times reported that he “tortured and electrocuted a dog…First try[ing] continuous currents at a force of 300 volts…when the shock came the dog yelped…At 700 volts he broke his muzzle and nearly freed himself. He was tied again. At 1,000 his body contorted in pain…‘We will have less trouble when we try alternating current,’ Mr. Brown said. It was proposed that he put the dog out of its misery at once. This was done on an alternating current of 300 volts killing the beast.”23