Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  While Tesla came of an educated clan, he had grown up among farmers and laborers and knew well the relentless, bone-wearying drudgery that always had been (and still was) the daily lot of most of humanity. If a field had to be plowed, or sown, or harvested, people would do each backbreaking step, helped perhaps by their animals. If a well had to be dug, men with shovels would dig it, meter by meter. If a stout tree had to be felled, men would saw arduously back and forth until finally it toppled. If water had to be fetched and carried, women or children would haul it in heavy, sloshing bucketfuls. If clothes had to be washed, that dirty laundry would all be scrubbed by hand.

  The steam engine had already wrought a great revolution in transportation and manufacturing. Steam engines were powering new factories, allowing textile mills to spin out cloth in great undulating waves, and railroads spanned whole continents, reducing perilous journeys of many months to mere days. Now, Tesla saw his AC induction motor similarly obliterating life’s tiresome daily chores and burdens in a thousand ways.

  Szigety was also an electrical engineer, and he gradually grasped that Tesla had—astonishingly—figured out the motor he had been obsessing over for almost five years. Tesla had at long last extricated his tormenting electrical visions and given them substance. He had dispensed with the awkward commutators and brushes to produce power from an almost magical rotating magnetic field. There in the Budapest park, Nikola Tesla had finally figured out how to design a motor that operated on the undulating electrical rhythms of alter-nating current. The swift back-and-forth reversals of AC as they advanced along their conductors (versus the steady, forward-only advance of DC electrons) would prove to be completely pivotal in the ultimate development of Tesla’s polyphase vision, but in Budapest, Tesla knew only that he’d figured out his AC motor. Tesla and Szigety stayed up all night rejoicing in Tesla’s brilliant and completely original new motor design. Tesla’s first biographer, the science editor of the New York Herald Tribune, explained Tesla’s advance thus: “Up to this time everyone who tried to make an alternating current motor used a single circuit…. What Tesla did was to use two circuits, each one carrying the same frequency of alternating current, but in which the current waves were out of step with each other. This was the equivalent of adding to an engine a second cylinder…. [These currents created] a rotating magnetic field … [that] possessed the property of transferring wirelessly through space, by means of its lines of force, energy.”

  In short, Tesla planned to so position his currents that as the first waned, the next would kick in, creating an invisible whirling magnetic field, a beautifully simple AC induction motor, what some would later call a “wheel of electricity,” with almost no wearing parts. However, all this was still firmly in Tesla’s head—down to the most minute details, for he never worked from blueprints, only his own prodigious, three-dimensional memory. Of course, no one but Szigety and Tesla knew of his great breakthrough. Nor, as Tesla would soon find out, would many people—even fellow electricians—in the early 1880s be able to appreciate the brilliance and originality of his motor. Why, they would wonder, should anyone care much about an AC induction motor that ran off an AC generator—just as arc lights did—when geniuses like Edison were conquering the world with central stations generating DC? And Edison had motors aplenty to offer customers who wanted them to power their factories. Tesla was about to discover the perils and frustrations of being ahead of his time.

  For the next few weeks, the always dreamy Tesla drifted into an ec-static reverie. “For a while I gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and devising new forms…. The pieces of apparatus I conceived were to me absolutely real and tangible in every detail…. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system.”13 About this time, Ferenc Puskas, the family friend and patron, sold the telephone business where Tesla had been working and returned to Paris. Tesla, his brain afire with whirling electric motors, soon followed. For the other Puskas brother, Tivadar or Theodore, Thomas Edison’s European promoter and business partner, had agreed to introduce Nikola Tesla to Charles Batchelor, Edison’s right-hand man and the main force behind European Edison. Theodore Puskas had ably represented Edison’s telephone and phonograph patents in Europe, and Edison had kept him informed from the start about the glorious prospects of the incandescent light and the central station system.

  So it was that in 1884 Nikola Tesla arose each morning in Paris, swam his twenty-seven laps in the pool, and then strode down (presumably counting every step) to Ivry-sur-Seine, where Batchelor had established a large factory to produce dynamos and the other elements needed to install isolated stand-alone plants or central stations. Young engineers like Tesla learned all the intricacies of the various Edison machines and distribution systems, preparatory to fanning out across Europe to bring incandescence and electrical power to the Old World. The ever reliable Batchelor had been entrusted with a formidable first task upon reaching Paris: to work with Puskas to install and promote the Edison lighting exhibit in all its technical glory at the Paris Electrical Exposition of 1881. To the amazement of the cosmopolitan crowds of visitors attending the vast exhibit hall dominated by a working lighthouse, Edison’s gigantic and powerful new jumbo generators lit up an astonishing five hundred incandescent lamps of 16 candlepower each.

  Even the most cosmopolitan were puzzled by electricity. Unlike a steam engine, its power was obscure, invisible. Wrote one Frenchman, “We are not yet in the habit of observing machines that function without apparent cause. Their occult workings baffle us. The secret of their existence escapes us.”14 Edison’s electrical triumph was such that he swept all the top honors for his dazzling luminous display, leaving his competitors like the Englishmen Joseph Swan and Lane Fox, and fellow American Hiram Maxim, sharing a paltry second place. To Edison, struggling back in New York to get his central station working, this had been a soothing balm.

  Perhaps sweeter yet was the complete and public capitulation of English scientist William Preece. The longtime Edison critic had scoffed time and again at Edison’s assertion that he had subdivided the light. After visiting the Paris exhibit, Preece wrote, “Mr. Edison’s system has been worked out in detail, with a thoroughness and mastery of the subject that can extract nothing but eulogy from his bitterest opponents. Many unkind things have been said of Mr. Edison and his promises; perhaps no one has been severer in this direction than myself. It is some gratification for me to be able to announce my belief that he has at last solved the problem he set himself to solve.”15 As if that were not triumph enough, the French conferred the Légion d’Honneur on Edison—which, along with all the other accolades, imbued his new Paris company with great prestige and credibility.

  At the Edison factory in Ivry, Tesla had met his first Americans, who “fairly fell in love with me because of my proficiency in Billiards!” Of course, the naive and enthusiastic Tesla was soon explaining his wonderful alternating current induction motor and full system to these new colleagues and bosses, assuming that they, of all people, would appreciate it. At a time when the understanding of electricity was still quite primitive, polyphase alternating current was a quantum leap and difficult to grasp. Tesla’s exuberant and idealistic plan to liberate the world from drudgery was not at all obvious even to those working at Ivry. What they knew and understood was direct current electricity, where the electrons flowed only in one direction and created little magnetic field. There was no way to increase the voltage (or driving pressure) of that electricity. Really, the only way to increase the amount of direct current flowing out into an Edison power grid was to provide heavier (and highly expensive) copper wires to carry those greater numbers of electrons to their ultimate destination. The greater the current, the greater the heat on the wires. Hence the need for sturdy, low-resistance copper. Moreover, as those heavy currents traveled over the wires, they lost some of their energy to expended heat. Since the amount of delivered electric power is a func
tion of voltage (or pressure) times current (flowing electrons), direct current electricity systems—with their low voltages—needed to be high-current systems. It was this immutable Ohm’s law of electricity and the high cost of copper that kept the Edison systems confined to small, high-density locales. It also meant that no matter where you might come in accidental contact with an Edison DC system, you could not get badly shocked. The overall power was just too low.

  One of the Paris Edison men, D. Cunningham, foreman of the mechanical department, proposed to the young and hardworking Serbian that they form a company and finance it by selling stock to develop Tesla’s fabulous invention. “The proposal,” Tesla would later write, “seemed to me comical in the extreme. I did not have the faintest conception of what he meant, except that it was an American way of doing things. Nothing came of it, however, and during the next few months I had to travel from one place to another in France and Germany to cure the ills of the power plants.”16 That fall, as the Edison Electric Light Company in New York was officially launching its Pearl Street Station power network, Tesla again returned to Paris. After spending some months working closely with the Edison machines, he now proposed to his Paris bosses some improvements in the standard dynamos. “My success was complete and the delighted directors accorded me the privilege of developing automatic regulators which were much desired.”17

  Although Tesla freely shared his vision of a new and wondrous AC induction motor, none of the harried Edison managers seemed interested. Theirs was a DC system. They had good motors to offer their customers. What possible need did they have for an AC system or an AC motor? They had many other matters on their minds. Establishing the European Edison companies was fraught with the predictable difficulties of creating any new enterprise, but it was exacerbated by the scope and ambition of the company, the sheer newness of the product, and the technical and managerial inexperience of virtually all involved. As another electrical manager of the time explained, “People generally did not at all appreciate the need or value of electricity. They had to be educated to its use…. Suitable manufacturing methods as well as adequate ways of distributing the manufactured product had to be devised…. Customers did not exist, they had to be created.”18 Despite the great triumph of the Paris Expo, Parisians showed little serious interest in a central station. Batchelor’s almost daily letters and cables back to New York are a litany of insufficient capital, shipments that needed to be speeded up, fickle clients of isolated plants, problematic and erratic machines, and poor-quality supplies. Many of these difficulties were resolved fairly easily, but others were major embarrassments that threatened grave financial consequences. Into the latter category fell the disastrous case of the Edison lighting plant at the new railroad station in the important commercial city of Strasbourg, in Alsace-Lorraine, a region held by Germany since the war of 1870.

  In early 1883, the Strasbourg city fathers held a dedication ceremony to showcase the new railroad station’s light, an important event graced by the august presence of the aged but powerful Emperor William I of Germany. When the switch was turned on to light the station’s 1,200 Edison bulbs and flood the grand space with incandescent radiance, there was instead a terrifying explosion that blew out a wall. The German government, which had placed the order, was outraged at this violent fiasco and refused to accept the plant, much less pay for it. “On account of my knowledge of the German language and past experience,” wrote Tesla, “I was entrusted with the difficult task of straightening out matters and early in 1883, I went to Strasbourg on that mission…. The practical work, correspondence, and conferences with officials kept me preoccupied day and night.”19 By summer, the railroad station plant was largely repaired and negotiations launched with the German bureaucracy for payment. Tesla now had the time to do what he had been chafing to do—create a prototype of his AC induction motor. Having grasped the fundamental advantage of AC over DC, Tesla had long since designed in his head a system that would put it to work. “As soon as I was able to manage, I undertook construction of a simple motor in a mechanical shop opposite the railroad station, having brought with me from Paris some material for that purpose…. [That summer] I finally had the satisfaction of seeing the rotation affected by alternating currents of different phase, and without sliding contacts or commutator, as I had conceived a year before. It was an exquisite pleasure but not to compare with the delirium of joy following the first revelation.”20

  Having been further exposed to the American notions of stock companies and working capital, Tesla tried through some of his new and influential friends in Strasbourg, including the former mayor, to persuade a number of local wealthy men to invest in his revolutionary electric generator. To his mortification, no one evinced the smallest iota of interest, despite his being able to demonstrate his working prototype. Certainly there was a place for electricity in train stations, factories, and the homes of the adventurous rich, but if the world-famous, much honored American Edison was already installing electricity all over the Continent, why would anyone need the untested ideas of an obscure poetry-reciting junior engineer from Croatia? Who would risk their money on such an unknown? Having failed to sway any Strasbourg capitalists, Tesla was anxious to return to the cosmopolitan wealth of Paris and try his prospects there, now that he had his working model. But the Germans’ punctilious observation of every rule of rank and protocol held him hostage many months more in Strasbourg, as the completion of the railroad job stretched on and on through the fall and winter of 1883 and into the New Year. It was not until the spring of 1884 that the Germans finally accepted and paid for the Strasbourg Hoffbahn plant.

  Nikola Tesla then returned to Paris (after a year away), just as the Paris Salon was opening at the Palais de l’Industrie. For several years, the great hall full of paintings had been lighted with arc lights at night, a decision that had outraged some artists but had quadrupled the number of strolling art lovers (or the merely inquisitive) to seven hundred thousand, for many more had evenings free for such diversions than had days. In such small ways were the social fruits of electricity already apparent. So Tesla reveled in the beauties and energy of Paris as he strode down to Ivry-sur-Seine, happily anticipating “liberal compensation” for his dynamo improvements and his successful resolution of the Strasbourg assignment. With a thick wad of bonus francs, he could finally finance a full working model of his AC system, including his beloved motor and the necessary polyphase AC generator to run it properly. Then he would attract some venturesome French capitalists. Instead, the slightly older and wiser Tesla found his Edison bosses all passing the buck as he sought his bonus. “It dawned on me that my reward was a castle in Spain,” a mirage.21

  Considering the Edison companies’ constant scrounging for more capital and the rather perilous and very nascent state of their American and European operations, it is little wonder that no manager felt inclined to dole out cash rewards. In its 1883 annual report, the Edison Electric Light Company had reported only losses. Moreover, there is no indication in the vast Edison archive of business correspondence that Tesla’s Paris bosses valued Tesla’s contributions as highly as did the young man himself. Seeing that Tesla was restless and ambitious, Edison officials urged him instead to go to New York and work with the master himself. Charles Batchelor had already sailed home, having overseen the installation of more than a hundred isolated plants all over Europe, in textile mills, factories, hotels, theaters, stores, steamships, shipyards, and railroad stations. But only three central stations had been sold and installed, in the cities of Milan, Rotterdam, and St. Petersburg.

  Tesla’s young life thus far was marked by a series of dramatic events—several youthful near misses with death, his passionate embrace of electricity as a life’s work, and the revelation of the induction motor and the AC polyphase system. He was especially prone in these Paris years to certain intense hallucinations, notably encompassing flashes of light. “They were my strangest and [most] inexplicable experience,” Tesla woul
d later say. “They usually occurred when I found myself in a dangerous or a distressing situation or when I was greatly exhilarated. In some instances I have seen the air around me filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with time and seemingly attained a maximum when I was about twenty-five years old.”22 (Tesla also liked to describe his birth as occurring at the stroke of midnight during a severe electrical storm, obvious portents of his electrical future.) Nikola Tesla’s departure from Europe and arrival in the New World (what he termed the “Land of the Golden Promise”) featured further dramas. When he arrived at the Paris railroad station, “I discovered my money and tickets were gone,” not to mention his valise. With the train pulling out in great billows of steam, the frantic Tesla decided to go anyway and ran down the platform and scrambled on. The steamship company allowed him to board at the last minute only when no one else arrived to claim his berth. “I managed to embark for New York with the remnants of my belongings, some poems and articles I had written, and a package of calculations relating to solutions of an unsolvable integral and my flying machine. During the voyage I sat most of the time at the stern of the ship watching for an opportunity to save somebody from a watery grave.”23