by Jill Jonnes
Nikola Tesla debarked at the port of New York on June 6, 1884, a fair, pleasant Friday, as did thousands of Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, and Russian Jews, all, like the young electrician, full of American dreams—peasants yearning for farms; young men heading to mines, mills, factories; husbands and fathers hoping to amass quick savings to return home to buy land or a business; wives and mothers envisioning happier, more prosperous futures for themselves and their offspring. There in the echoing spaces of Manhattan’s Castle Garden immigration depot, a gloomy former fort and onetime theater on a pile of rocks down by the Battery, the multitude of nationalities mingled, their many languages a Tower of Babel as they shuffled through the immigration lines and into an America fast becoming the most prosperous place on earth. For it was in these years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century that the United States would become urban, industrial, and exceedingly rich, its gross national product soaring from $9.1 billion to $37.1 billion, its per capita income tripling. And the three compelling reasons for this rising prosperity were there on view at Castle Garden. The first element was swift population growth. More than seven million hopeful souls passed through Castle Garden alone between 1855 and 1890, when Ellis Island opened as the new federally run immigration depot for New York. These foreign immigrants surged by the thousands off steamships and quickly set out via America’s far-reaching railroads, seeking their destiny in the great booming cities, remote territories, and new states. And there lay the second reason for burgeoning American wealth—its excellent system of transportation and communication. The fast-expanding American railroad network knit together its vast and disparate spaces, making commerce easily possible, as did the indispensable telegraph and the new telephone.
The people and the transport in turn made possible efficient exploitation of the nation’s phenomenal natural blessings—its vast coal and ore deposits, its rich farmlands and forests. Great fortunes and great enterprises were coalescing as this new American world of industry and cities arose. Men like William H. Vanderbilt were now richer than the queen of England. Millions were similarly striving to become rich—in railroads, steel, oil, lumber, coal, gold, silver, sugar, department stores, or such new consumer products as cigarettes, ready-made clothes, soap, biscuits, and colas. But in all those daily arrivals in that early summer of 1884, it is hard to imagine any immigrant whose dreams and visions equaled those of the obscure and impecunious Serb Nikola Tesla, who stepped onto the pedestrian precincts of crowded, dirty lower Manhattan still swathed in reveries about bringing cheap and abundant power and light to the whole world.
So Tesla set forth confidently in the New World, with all of four cents in the pocket of his one suit, the address of a friend, and the prospect of a job with Edison. New York City of the mid-1880s was not Paris. The Battery offered a broad green turf, wide paths, and shady trees. But as soon as one walked north from there, one was hit by the city’s frenetic commercial pace and palpable atmosphere of moneymaking and money getting. There were no sweeping boulevards, grandiose palaces, or formal public gardens. The downtown districts were a hodgepodge of large warehouses, commercial establishments, and shabby tenements, bisected by the four north-south lines of the elevated trains, whose noisy steam engines rained down soot and ash on the unwary from on high. Once summer settled in, the streets were hot and dusty and stank of horses, for equine teams pulled vehicles of every sort, the huge colorful old-style city omnibuses, the new streetcars gliding more quickly on sunken rail tracks, all manner of big teamster carts, and, for those who could afford it, the personal carriages. The immediate crowded blocks around Wall Street were fine and very imposing, built up with noble and costly ten-story edifices. Newsboys everywhere hawked the city’s bestselling newspapers, the Sun and the Herald, and the new fast-rising favorite, the World. And jutting up high over the warm and smelly commercial streets towered a veritable forest of wooden poles and their tangle of electrical wires, drooping and draping from pole to rooftop to window and on to other poles. In some commercial blocks, the festoons of hundreds of crisscrossing wires almost obscured the early-summer sky.
Nikola Tesla was walking north and taking in all these jangling sights and sounds when he noticed a foreman in a shop standing over an electrical motor and looking most exasperated. When Tesla entered the doorway, the man explained the machine was broken. Tesla offered his services, eventually got the motor working, and was promptly offered a job. He declined, saying he already had prospects of one. The grateful shop owner paid him $20, a munificent sum when a worker’s daily wage was generally $1. A skilled, educated, and experienced engineer like Tesla made $18 a week. So Tesla had his first taste of the riches of the New World. He continued on, located his friend, and secured a night’s rest. The next day he headed toward Fifth Avenue, where, one guide said, were “concentrated the wealth and aristocracy of the city … all the [brownstone] blocks are massive and palatial … [consisting of] the huge club-houses, the expensive libraries, the fine picture galleries, and richly furnished drawing rooms of this region of merchant-princes.”24 There, each late afternoon, one could marvel further at the conspicuous display of wealth, in this instance the passing parade of some of the world’s finest horseflesh and most luxurious vehicles en route to and from Central Park. There, fashionable New Yorkers liked to show off their fine equipages (and themselves) as they made their way amid the park’s artfully placed carriage paths.
Nikola Tesla fit in well with the well-dressed, attractive throngs on Fifth Avenue. His education and his year in Paris had given him a certain polish, so he confidently entered Edison headquarters at 65 Fifth Avenue. The impressive brownstone was luxuriously fitted out with beautiful electrical chandeliers and lamps to entice the rich, while its topmost floor had been given over to housing for some of the unmarried employees. On yet another floor, Edward Johnson had started a night school for fledgling electricians, for the company desperately needed trained men. Edison, wearing his shabby Prince Albert coat, was often to be found squiring around the more exalted visitors or holding court in his comfortable back office, smoking ci-gars. “The meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life,” Tesla later wrote. “I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries reading all sorts of stuff that fell into my hands, from Newton’s ‘Principia’ to the novels of Paul de Kock, and felt that most of my life had been squandered. But it did not take long before I recognized that it was the best thing I could have done.”25
Edison was not quite as unkempt in appearance now that he was a New Yorker, but he remained utterly practical, plainspoken, world famous, a great kidder, and at age thirty-seven a seasoned veteran of the corporate rough-and-tumble on both sides of the Atlantic. Before him he saw Tesla, erudite, unknown, tall, slender, formal in dress and manner, a dreamy young man a decade his junior who expressed himself in a flowery, heavy-accented style and came across as an utter naïf. He quickly nicknamed him “our Parisian.” Tesla recalled, “I was thrilled to the marrow by meeting Edison, who began my American education right then and there. I wanted to have my shoes shined, something I considered below my dignity. Edison said, ‘You will shine the shoes yourself and like it.’ He impressed me tremendously. I shined my shoes and liked it.”26
Tesla soon proved his worth, for the passenger steamship SS Oregon was stuck in dock over on the East River, unable to depart on schedule because Edison’s on-board lighting system had broken down. “The predicament was a serious one,” Tesla recalled, “and Edison was much annoyed. In the evening I took the necessary instruments with me and went aboard the vessel, where I stayed for the night. The dynamos were in bad condition, having several short circuits and breaks, but with the assistance of the crew, I succeeded in putting them in good shape. At five o’clock in the morning, when passing along Fifth Avenue on my way to the shop, I
met Edison with Batchelor and a few others, as they were returning home to retire. ‘Here is our Parisian running around at night,’ he said. When I told him I was coming from the Oregon and had repaired both machines, he looked at me in silence and walked away without another word. But when he had gone some distance I heard him remark, ‘Batchelor, this is a good man.’”27
In the summer of 1884, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in New York was still expanding, adding new customers, and always looking to supply electricity reliably and more profitably. They were now lighting up such important institutions as the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Commercial Advertiser, the New Haven Steamboat Company’s offices and large pier, Brown Brothers & Company on Wall Street, and the North British & Mercantile Insurance Company on William Street. Both Pearl Street in Manhattan and Menlo Park in New Jersey served as demonstrations of central stations.
But Edison’s direct current central station system, with its half-mile limitation in any direction, was proving a tough sell in less compact cities and towns. After all, it was far harder to convince the hundreds of businesses necessary to make the network of a central station profitable that they needed electric light than it was a single wealthy homeowner like J. P. Morgan or a single factory owner, who could more easily see the advantages. By the end of 1884, only eighteen central stations were installed in the United States. In contrast, isolated stand-alone lighting plants, which required only the enthusiasm of a factory owner or a hotelier, were a popular product. By the fall of that year, there were 378 such plants all over the country. Once again, as in Paris, Tesla was working on improving dynamos and troubleshooting. But with each passing week, he was “more and more anxious about the [AC induction motor] invention and was making up my mind to place it before Edison.”
Edison, who was thoroughly fed up with the listless management of the main company controlled by his Wall Street directors, was very much preoccupied that fall and winter with winning back control and restructuring the Edison companies to better push his central stations and generally advance their products. On August 9, his much neglected wife, having been ill on and off for several years, died out at Menlo Park, leaving Edison with three children. Edison threw himself even harder into his work. But in some late night dinner or other encounter, apparently he and Tesla did discuss his young employee’s proposed system for alternating current. Tesla pointed out that a central station based on alternating current dynamos could liberate electricity from the one-mile shackle of Edison’s DC plants. And if his, Tesla’s, induction motor was developed, it could fill the big, looming gap of an AC system that aspired to go beyond lighting. Moreover, his AC induction motor would surely be superior to those operating on DC. Edison, said Tesla, responded “very bluntly that he was not interested in alternating current; there was no future to it and anyone who dabbled in that field was wasting his time; and besides, it was a deadly current whereas direct current was safe.”28
The arc light companies all operated their blazing lights with high-voltage alternating current, and certainly there had been unfortunate accidents where electrical workers had been severely shocked and even killed by inadvertent contact with the AC apparatus. Edison denounced AC as far too dangerous for domestic use, a stance seconded by such other leaders in the field as Glasgow’s Sir William Thomson, a scientist whose giant reputation gave his opinions great weight. Perhaps just as relevant, Edison or his company had not invented or developed the alternating current generators used for powering arc lights. Edison took enormous and justifiable pride in having invented—although often with the help of his subordinates—every aspect of his low-voltage electrical system. A person touching any part of Edison’s DC system—from the dynamo to the wires to the bulbs—would receive only a mild shock. He wanted nothing to do with AC.
Nikola Tesla had arrived in the United States just in time for the lively every-four-years blood sport of presidential politics, American style. Corruption, which had sullied many aspects of local and national life, was the central issue. Senator James G. Blaine, the Republican candidate, was seen as deeply in thrall to the unbeloved and bullying railroads, which blatantly bought whom and what they wanted. The Democratic candidate was reformist New York governor (and former mayor of Buffalo) Grover Cleveland, known as “Grover the Good” for his fight against Tammany corruption. Democrats portrayed their man as a rare paragon of honesty in an age when dirty dealing in business and politics was rife. Then on July 21 the Republican Buffalo Evening Telegraph broke the scandal that the unmarried Cleveland had fathered a bastard! Wired Cleveland to the party, “Whatever you say, tell the truth.” The truth was that it might have been his child, so he had provided support. The Republicans now taunted the Democrats with the gibe, “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?” while the Democrats taunted back, “Gone to the White House, ha! ha! ha!” Also running was New Jersey lawyer Belva Lockwood of the Equal Rights ticket, even though no American woman could vote.
The race between the tall, fat, bland-looking Cleveland and the gray-whiskered Blaine was neck and neck when Blaine, the candidate of the new industrial titans, descended upon Manhattan at the end of October. New York, with its legions of rich men and newspapers that were read nationwide, had become deeply influential. In the afternoon, candidate Blaine met with important Protestant ministers at the vast marbled elegance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. One minister denounced the Democrats as “the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” A tired Blaine did not demur. Perhaps he was thinking of that evening’s festivities at Gotham’s most famous and delectably high-toned restaurant, Delmonico’s, renowned for its luscious lobster Newburg and the ever showy and scrumptious house dessert, baked Alaska. Even Edison, that man of the people, preferred Delmonico’s above all other restaurants. And on the night of October 29, 180 of America’s richest and most prominent men were gathering there to fete their Republican candidate, whose main campaign plank was excluding imports through high tariffs, thus leaving the vast and lucrative American market completely to his hosts’ industrial and consumer blandishments.
Unfortunately for Blaine, the scrappy Joseph Pulitzer had the previous year bought the fading New York World and was consciously refashioning it into the must-read paper of the new upwardly mobile workingman and -woman, people who were becoming deeply concerned at the rise of a plutocracy that seemed determined to control everything through convoluted monopolies, money power, and virtual ownership of amenable politicians. After taking over, Pulitzer assembled the paper’s existing staff and announced, “Gentlemen, you realize that a change has taken place in the World. Heretofore you have all been living in the parlor and taking baths every day. Now I wish you to understand that, in future, you are all walking down the Bowery.”29 Pulitzer proceeded boldly, abandoning the prim, reserved one-column format that indicated a story’s importance only by multiple decks of subheads. Instead, he splashed big news across many columns with blaring headlines and huge illustrations.
So, to the great indignation of the rich Republicans, the October 30 New York World devoted the entire front page to the Delmonico’s dinner, declaring in a giant banner headline: A ROYAL FEAST OF BEL-SHAZZAR BLAINE AND THE MONEY KINGS. The well-fed rich—recognizable caricatures of William H. Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, and so forth—were sipping Monopoly Soup and ladling Lobby Pudding while ignoring a poor wraithlike couple begging for scraps. The World was also careful to report on the “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” remark, which outraged Irish Catholics, many of whom had previously been Blaine supporters. Blaine lost in New York State by only 1,149 votes and thereby forfeited the whole election. New York City was not only the nation’s financial center, it also wielded enormous political power as the nation grappled with its new industrial identity. Grover Cleveland became the first Democrat elected since the Civil War, and his ascension was a sign of a nation restive over rising plutocracy.
Through all this no-holds-barred political combat over the nation’s future, N
ikola Tesla labored diligently away at his electrical duties for Thomas Edison. “During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and uniform pattern, which replaced the old ones. The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task.” In the spring of 1885, Tesla sought this big bonus. He told his first biographer, John J. O’Neill, that Edison reneged, explaining that the offer had been a big joke. “Tesla,” said Edison, “you don’t understand our American humor.”30 It is exceedingly hard to imagine that the Edison companies, still being in dire need of cash and capital themselves, would promise that kind of huge money—as much as they had gotten in hard cash to launch the initial company—to a salaried employee. Moreover, Tesla’s most recent biographer, Marc Seifer, points out that Tesla could not even get a $7-a-week raise. When another employee approached Batchelor on Tesla’s behalf (Tesla believing he deserved to have his salary raised from $18 a week to $25), Batchelor curtly refused, saying, “The woods are full of men like [Tesla]. I can get any number of them I want for $18 a week.”31 Whether a joke or a betrayal of a promise, Tesla was sufficiently outraged to quit.
Tesla had lasted less than a year as Edison’s employee in New York. In truth, he and Edison were like oil and water, each amused and annoyed by the other. A great dandy by nature, Tesla prided himself on being dapper and fashionable and abhorred Edison’s slovenly indifference: “If he had not later married a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect.”32 Far worse, believed Tesla, was Edison’s approach to science: “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search…. His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of his labor.”33 Edison, in turn, dismissed Tesla as a “poet of science” whose ideas were “magnificent but utterly impractical.”