Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Very quietly, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company began testing its system. No formal announcement was made, but Thomas A. Edison had begun running his generating and distribution system, hooking up various customers, and testing the lights. The truth was, Edison had momentarily exhausted his penchant for ballyhoo. For four years, he had worked as hard as ever he had at any one project, and he was understandably nervous that it would actually perform as promised. Edison was now thirty-five years old, and while his face still looked as youthful as ever, his thatch of brown hair had turned gray in the years since he had blithely and innocently promised to light up all of lower Manhattan with his platinum bulb and William Wallace’s dynamo. The New York press found out that the Edison network was being tested when horses passing along Nassau Street at Fulton “became suddenly electrified, gave a sudden jump, and with a snort, ran off as speedily as possible.” At first the Edison people could not believe their system was responsible, but a steam-heating company also digging had indeed broken their iron pipe and shorted the wires. Such minor electrical disasters were unnerving, for Edison knew that no one could truly say what might happen when electricity went coursing forth from Pearl Street. They certainly hoped it wouldn’t regularly escape to shock the unwary.

  On September 4, 1882, a pleasant, warm day, a slightly chastened Edison, attired for the occasion in a better frock coat and a white, high-crowned derby hat, spent the morning and early afternoon repeatedly checking all aspects of the Pearl Street operation, abandoning his collar early on. Just before departing for Wall Street, where he was going (at long last) to formally launch the Edison Electric Light Company’s service, the great inventor synchronized his watch with Pearl Street employee John Lieb. Now, as the long-awaited event neared, Edison walked into the Morgan offices with Edward Johnson, John Kruesi, and a few others. J. Pierpont Morgan and many of the directors of the board also gathered in the burnished Drexel, Morgan offices. Four years of hard work of the most original, difficult sort and almost $500,000 had brought them to this crucial moment. Edison had been operating under a pall of skepticism for some time. And he knew better than any man present just how many small things could go wrong over at Pearl Street or in his electrical subways to bollix up his company’s formal electrical debut. To break the palpable tension, Johnson joked to Edison, “One hundred dollars they don’t go on!”

  “Taken!” said Edison. He looked at his pocket watch. It was three o’clock. The moment of truth was upon them. Over on Pearl Street, John Lieb stood on his tiptoes and threw the main circuit breaker. Blocks away in Morgan’s office, Edison closed the switch next to him.

  “They’re on!” cried the directors. It was a wondrous vindication, for all around them some one hundred incandescent bulbs had glowed softly to life. Three hundred more glowed in nearby offices, delivering an energy visibly superior to flickering, odorous gaslight. It was not until darkness fell, wrote The New York Times, whose Edison lights also came on that day, that “the electric light really made itself known and showed how bright and steady it is…. There was a very slight amount of heat from each lamp, but not nearly as much as from a gas burner…. The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye … without a particle of flicker to make the head ache … the decision was unanimous in favor of the Edison electric lamp as against gas.” In the coming months, another two thousand lights in additional buildings were lighted up. It was not happenstance that the Edison Electric Light Company’s first customers included such influential entities as his financial backers, Drexel, Morgan & Co., the Park Bank, and The New York Times. (The New York Herald had an isolated stand-alone plant.)

  Understandably, Edison gloried in his amazing accomplishment of creating the first true incandescent electric light network. To a Sun reporter, he said that day, “I have accomplished all I promised.” And he had indeed brought the incandescent electric light to New York City. But from the start, Edison had seen New York City as just the beginning. Already he had his corporate generals readying for new conquests. Before him the great inventor saw only more glory and great fortune, which to Edison translated into utter freedom to exercise his prodigious gifts as an inventor. He explained, “My one ambition is to be able to work without regard to the expense…. I want none of the rich man’s usual toys. I want no horses or yachts—I have no time for them. What I want is a perfect workshop.” While only the most perspicacious yet understood the potential of electricity, far-seeing capitalists were already envisioning the day the clearly superior electric light would displace the vast and lucrative natural gas industry, worth $400 million just in the United States. Edison’s electric light would span the world, and he and his backers would be even more famous and very rich. Pearl Street was just the tiny beginning of a great and lucrative radiant empire.

  Nikola Tesla, “our Parisian”

  CHAPTER 4

  Nikola Tesla: “Our Parisian”

  In April of 1882, a tall, slender young Serbian engineer of twenty-six named Nikola Tesla descended from a train amid the vast, sooty clangor of the Gare de l’Est and emerged into the resplendence of belle epoque Paris. The dreamy and romantic Tesla was enchanted by the magnificent grandeur of late-nineteenth-century Paris. For days after he arrived, he just wandered. He strolled the broad, expansive boulevards created by Baron Haussmann, lined with fashionable cafés and shaded with fragrant flowering chestnut trees; he admired the formal city parks with their splashing fountains and geometric designs of clipped greenery, he peered into the ancient and lovely churches set back in the warrens of old neighborhoods, lively with street markets pungent with every fish and cheese imaginable. Tesla lingered by the silvery Seine, spanned by one sculptured bridge after another.

  Paris at night, he found, was perhaps more wondrous. Kilometer after kilometer of gaslit avenues glowed in the darkness, lined by luminous shop windows and department stores. After dark, animated crowds swirled about like moths in their commercial penumbrae. The Paris Opera in those soft spring evenings was a gilded chimera, its new electric lighting casting a moneyed sheen on the ladies’ diamonds and the gentlemen’s silk top hats and opera cloaks. The city’s traditional gaslight, now joined by the new arc lights and the fledgling incandescence, combined to produce a distinctly modern metropolis, one of haunting nocturnal moods. Mirrored Parisian cafés and theaters, lit up luxuriantly, came to scintillating life, wonderfully alluring and atmospheric. “I can never forget the deep impression that magic city produced on my mind,” Tesla said decades later.1 But Nikola Tesla had come to the legendary City of Light not to gawk like a country rube, but to work as a junior engineer in Ivry-sur-Seine at Thomas Edison’s Société Industrielle, headed by Charles Batchelor, veteran of Menlo Park and engineer to the newly established Compagnie Continentale Edison.

  Those first few days of bedazzlement over Parisian glamour soon gave way to a regimen and rhythm of hard work. For Nikola Tesla the junior engineer, however dreamy and eccentric he might be, was truly possessed by only one great passion—the mystery of all things electric. So he rented rooms on the edge of the ancient and picturesque Latin Quarter with its many students and professors and settled into a strenuous schedule that began at 5:00 A.M. “Every morning regardless of the weather,” Tesla explained, “I would go from the Boulevard St. Marcel, where I resided, to a bathing house on the Seine; plunge into the water, loop the circuit [swim laps] twenty-seven times and then walk an hour to reach Ivry, where the Company’s factory was located. There I would have a wood chopper’s breakfast at half past seven o’clock and then eagerly await the lunch hour, in the meantime cracking hard nuts for the Manager of the Works, Mr. Charles Batchelor, who was an intimate friend and assistant of Edison.”2

  It was a considerable coup for a young man whose whole soul resonated to the little-known mysteries of electricity: He was here in the expanding Edison empire, for Thomas Edison was the great practical man in the field, the one who had shown the highly skeptical scientists you could indeed subdivide the elect
ric light and take it indoors. And Tesla’s boss, Batchelor, had been present at the creation of the very incandescent light bulb that was launching a new luminous epoch. Charles Batchelor, after his years in Newark and then Menlo Park, knew very well what hard work was, and he had arrived in Paris determined to conquer and electrify all of Europe, starting from scratch. Yet this was a monumental ambition, and at times, even the usually genial Batchelor felt deeply burdened, as this irascible note to Edison shows: “My job here is no fool of a job, what with lamps, dynamos, chandeliers, and all the extras. I am just in up to my neck; then I have so much outside work of such a responsible nature and involving so much money that I wear a hat about three sizes larger than when I left New York.”3

  Young Tesla, in contrast, was but a novice, a very junior engineer at the Société Industrielle. But he was also one who quickly showed he was a reliable troubleshooter capable of solving most electrical tangles. Tesla spoke good, formal, heavily accented English and was also fluent in numerous other languages, notably French and German. But observant colleagues concluded that however talented Tesla was as an engineer, he was also a decidedly odd fellow. Always fastidious in appearance, his black hair waving back gently, his mustache neatly trimmed, the tall, slender Tesla was prey to strange habits and phobias. He (silently) counted each step he took as he made his early morning walk down to the Ivry factory. Every activity ideally had to be divisible by three (hence the twenty-seven laps each morning in the Seine). Before eating or drinking anything, he felt obliged to calculate its cubic contents. He deeply disliked shaking hands with anyone. He had a “violent aversion against the earrings of women,” pearls above all. “I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver.” The mere sight of a peach brought on a fever.4 Moreover, Tesla could (and happily did) recite long swaths of Serbian poetry from heart.

  Tesla’s very presence in the noisy, busy Ivry Edison factory showed the deep incursions already made by the new modern industrial order on long-held traditions and life patterns. All the men in his deeply conservative Serbian family had always been destined for the church or the army, honored professions in their strategic small world ill situated between the decaying Ottoman empire and the crumbling European monarchies. “I was,” Tesla conceded readily, “intended from my very birth for the clerical profession and this thought constantly oppressed me.”5 His eminent father was an Eastern Orthodox minister. His highly inventive mother had devised and fashioned many handy household items and tools. She was also a master weaver who spun much of her own thread. “When she was past sixty,” wrote Tesla, “her fingers were still nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash.”6 But Tesla seemed destined only for electricity. All his life he recalled this formative episode at age three with his beloved cat, Macak. “It was dusk of the evening and I felt impelled to stroke Macak’s back. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the place.” What was this? the young boy wondered to his father. “‘Well,’ [his father] finally remarked, ‘this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see on the trees in a storm.’ My mother seemed alarmed. ‘Stop playing with the cat,’ she said, ‘he might start a fire.’ I was thinking abstractedly. Is nature a giant cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded…. Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer.”7

  During high school, Tesla, a prodigy in math and physics, fell even more deeply and irrevocably in thrall to the still nascent science of electricity. He alarmed his professors with his voracious and exhausting appetite for work, especially if it had to do with electricity. “It is impossible for me to convey an adequate idea of the intensity of feeling I experienced in witnessing [my physics teacher’s] exhibitions of these mysterious phenomena. Every impression produced a thousand echoes in my mind. I wanted to know more of this wonderful force; I longed for experiment and investigation.”8 But hovering always was the impending burden of the family priesthood. When the adolescent Tesla was stricken with cholera and teetered on the brink of death, his anxious father agreed that he could study to become an electrical engineer. So Tesla, the only son, recovered and was free to begin his studies in Graz, Austria.

  In 1877, during his second year at Graz, Tesla walked into his favorite physics class and saw sitting upon the wooden table a fascinating-looking machine, an assemblage of magnet and metal. Just in from the fabled city of Paris, it featured a large, standing, horseshoe-shaped laminated field magnet that stood over and around a hollow cylinder encased in tightly wrapped wire—the armature. This was the new dynamo invented by Belgian Zénobe-Théophile Gramme. It was causing a great stir in Western Europe and the United States because here, at last, was a dynamo that could generate enough electricity—when powered by a steam engine—to run the new sun-bright arc lights in factories and on city streets. But equally thrilling, the Gramme machine, when run in reverse, could also serve as a motor. If machines, too, could be moved by electricity, the implications of this new motive power would be enormous.

  Raptly watching his teacher’s demonstration of this Gramme machine with its magical combination of two long known materials—magnet and metal—Tesla could little dream how this clever machine would change his whole life trajectory. When the Gramme machine was run as a motor, its commutator brushes (segments of copper that rotated with the armature and caused the current to flow in one direction only), noticed Tesla, were “sparking badly, and I observed that it might be possible to operate a motor without these appliances. But [my professor] declared it could not be done and did me the honour of delivering a lecture on the subject, at the conclusion he remarked, ‘Mr. Tesla may accomplish great things, but he certainly will never do this. It would be equivalent to converting a steadily pulling force, like that of gravity, into a rotary effort. It is a perpetual motion scheme, an impossible idea.’”9

  Initially deeply embarrassed by such a public rebuke, Tesla the dreamer could not resist, however, thinking about the pointlessness of the sparking commutators. And indeed, these were the glaring weak points of the first new experimental electric motors. The gauze brushes that rubbed against the commutators were essential for picking up the naturally alternating electric current and sending it back into the motor as a nice, tame direct current. At the same time, commutators were also expensive to maintain for obvious reasons—whenever the motor ran, the commutator brushes were wearing down and generating sparks. So young Tesla was soon immersed almost daily in an electrical reverie, his blue gray eyes ablaze, his mind cogitating various designs of motors that did not involve sparking brushes, reviewing again and again how he might combine motors and generators. “The images I saw were to me real and perfectly tangible.”

  In the fall of 1880, as Thomas Edison was laboring away at Menlo Park to get his central power network ready for his second New Year’s Eve demonstration, far across the Atlantic, Nikola Tesla, who had managed to get himself kicked out of high school for gambling and then done some youthful drifting, was entering the university in the ancient city of Prague, Bohemia, at age twenty-four. He stayed in Prague but a year, for his father died, forcing Tesla, now twenty-five, to get a job. He moved to Budapest, Hungary, the thriving commercial capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where he worked for a new telephone company run by a family friend, one Ferenc Puskas, brother of Thomas Edison’s European friend and representative Theodore Puskas. Through all these intervening years, troubles, and various relocations, Tesla had never stopped wrestling in his head with how to design a motor that did not awkwardly scoop up electric current with a commutator and brush.

  At the phone company, Tesla’s intense and voracious work pace brought on an excruciating breakdown. The glorious city of Budapest with its showplace parks along the Danube River, famous castle, and lively cafés was reduced to tiny, tormenting sounds. “I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the timepiece. A fly alighting on a table in the room
would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat, vibrate so strongly the pain was unbearable.”10 The doctor was mystified and offered no hope of recovery. Yet even as the world hurtled and smashed upon him, Tesla felt that all this hypersensitivity was slowly unleashing from his unconscious the motor design that he had been seeking for almost five years.

  One of Tesla’s closest college friends, Anthony Szigety, had also moved to Budapest to work at the new telephone company. He suggested to the debilitated Nikola that he begin to exercise to regain his health. With exercise and fresh air, Tesla began to recover. One chilly February late afternoon in 1882, the athletic Szigety persuaded Tesla to wander forth to a city park as the sun was setting lushly. Tesla, as was his dreamy wont, began reciting poetry, Goethe’s Faust, to celebrate the blazing sky before them:

  The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;

  It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;

  Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,

  Upon its track to follow, follow soaring . . .

  “As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed.” Tesla had been swaying and waving his arms gracefully as he declaimed, as if he were about to soar aloft. Now, tall, emaciated from his illness, he stood stock still. Szigety was worried that his friend had been stricken again and tried to steer him to a bench. Instead, Tesla swooped down and snatched a big twig. “I drew with a stick in the sand…. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much that I told him, ‘See my motor here; watch me reverse it.’ I cannot begin to describe my emotions.”11 Decades later, Tesla passionately relived this exultant electrical epiphany with his first biographer, science editor John J. O’Neill, recalling how he, Tesla, rapturously gestured to his simple designs in the dirt and declared to Szigety, “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it sublime? Isn’t it simple? I have solved the problem. Now I can die happy. But I must live, I must return to work and build the motor so I can give it to the world. No more will men be slaves to hard tasks. My motor will set them free, it will do the work of the world.”12