by Jill Jonnes
Tesla was catching on to the American way of operating, and now he took an absolutely practical tack. He needed to make an independent name for himself with something very salable and useful if he was going to interest investors in his far more visionary AC induction motor. So he set himself a straightforward and mundane task—designing improved arc lights that did not flicker and a better kind of generator to run them. In mid-March of 1885, Tesla began meeting with patent attorney Lemuel Serrell and his patent artist, who instructed him on preparing and submitting his first arc light patents. Serrell also introduced Tesla to two Rahway, New Jersey, businessmen who eagerly backed the new Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Company. The company’s first project was municipal arc lighting for Rahway, the investors’ hometown. For the next year Tesla labored away producing and installing his system, which lighted certain major streets along with a few factories. Tesla did all this to establish his bona fides. The Electrical Review was sufficiently impressed with his advances to feature his new system on its front page of August 16, 1886. In subsequent advertisements in the same journal, the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Company an-nounced it was “now prepared to furnish the most perfect automatic, self-regulating system of electric arc lighting yet produced.” There was “no flickering or hissing of the lamps” under this “entirely new system of automatic regulation resulting in absolute safety and a great saving of power.”34
In Rahway, New Jersey, over the next few months, the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Company finished successfully installing the powerful moonlight white arc lights around the city. In the course of this inaugural business venture, Tesla had received his first American patents—a commutator for a dynamo electric machine on January 26, 1886, followed by an electric arc lamp on February 9, 1886, and a regulator for a dynamo electric machine on March 2. In fall of 1886, Tesla proposed once again to his partners that they widen their horizons, think pioneering thoughts (rather than prosaic practical arc light ones), and get to work developing his world-changing alternating current motor and electrical system. “The delay of my cherished plans was agonizing,” Tesla recalled years later.35 Not only were these shortsighted New Jersey gentlemen not interested, but they elected to cheat Tesla, ever the naïf when it came to business, out of his patents and oust him from the very company he had founded. So in that autumn, poor Nikola Tesla, the romantic and dreamer, was reeling from “the hardest blow I ever received. Through some local influences, I was forced out of the company, losing not only all my interest but also my reputation as engineer and inventor.”36 As he put it later, “I was free, but with no other possession than a beautifully engraved certificate of stock of hypothetical value.”37 This elegant, erudite electrician and immigrant suddenly found himself as penniless as he had been when he’d stepped off the boat more than two years earlier. Moreover, he had no immediate prospects and was far too proud to seek help or work from his former Edison colleagues.
It is unlikely that Nikola Tesla harbored any illusions about the bleak desperation of being down-and-out in Manhattan. The Edison Machine Works, where Tesla had worked, sat amid some of New York’s vilest slums, windowless warrens where summer heat baked in the stench of overflowing outdoor privies and where bone-chilling winters drove the cold deep into the stained walls. Was it any wonder that disease and death awaited so many there, or that other familiar fate, the oblivion of vice and crime? In 1886, an arctic winter and a sour economic spell had reduced more families than usual to beggary. Clashes between labor and capital escalated venomously. Fast-swelling union ranks challenged the harsh new industrial order. Employers yielded as little as possible. Nonetheless, opined the censorious editors of the New-York Daily Tribune, “organized labor has astonished the country with exhibitions of its political power,” starting with blockaded railroads, striking tanners, curriers, carpet weavers, coal miners, and the Chicago meat packers. In Manhattan, fifteen thousand striking streetcar drivers and conductors fought street battles with police and fill-ins until they extracted a twelve-hour day for a $2 wage. All through 1886, “business in every quarter of the country has been disordered in consequence of these and hundreds of similar uprisings.”38 On May 4, anarchist bomb throwers killed seven policemen and injured dozens of strikers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, sending shock waves of fear undulating through the whole nation. That violence curdled the better classes’ already lukewarm support for the American labor movement.
Into this harsh economic climate ventured an unemployed Nikola Tesla, who found little need for his specialized electrical talents. “My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery,” he would say later.39 The newspapers were filled with hundreds of ads placed by men seeking work—as coachmen, butlers, private waiters, valets, and that all-around position, “useful man,” one who could tend a furnace or assist in the stable. In contrast, the “Help Wanted” column might have a handful of prospects, a family at Park Row looking for someone to care for their horse, cow, and garden. Or there was the Madison Avenue household in need of a man to run the furnace, wash windows, and make himself generally useful. With his money gone and his family far away, Tesla wandered the streets of Manhattan, the plush restaurants and luxurious shops a mocking reminder of his gnawing penury. “There were many days when [I] did not know where my next meal was coming from. But I was never afraid to work, I went to where some men were digging a ditch … [and] said I wanted to work. The boss looked at my good clothes and white hands and he laughed to the others … but he said, ‘All right. Spit on your hands. Get in the ditch.’ And I worked harder than anybody. At the end of the day I had $2.”40
In this year of unrest and anarchism, the new electrical industry had its own share of woes, though working conditions were idyllic compared to the dark, fiery, and often fatal dangers of the coal mines and steel mills. Thomas Edison’s own businesses had so expanded that he no longer personally knew all his men. At the lamp factory out in New Jersey, eighty highly skilled filament sealers formed a union and “became very insolent,” said Edison, “knowing that it was very impossible to manufacture lamps without them.” When they objected to the proposed firing of one of their members, Edison quickly designed thirty machines to automate their work. Then he fired the man as planned. “The union went out,” said Edison, following up with the punch line: “It has been out ever since.”41
In March of 1886, a committee at the Edison Machine Works on Goerck Street parlayed with their immediate boss, Charles Batchelor, demanding the right to form a union and seek better pay and conditions. The Edison management, which paid average wages, was amenable to reducing the workday from ten hours to nine, but they wanted no truck with unions. The shop was “to be run just as the managers decided & no interference whatever to be tolerated.” Nor would they accept the end of piecework. Batchelor explained to reporters, “If [a worker] loafs or gets drunk he loses his own time, not ours.”42 On May 19, the Edison workers struck. Shortly thereafter, Thomas Edison moved the machine works upstate to the quiet town of Schenectady, an easy ride north and then west on the New York Central Railroad. He wanted, he said, “to get away from the embarrassment of the strikes and the communists to a place where our men are settled in their own homes.”43
As for Nikola Tesla, “I lived through a year of terrible heartaches and bitter tears, my sufferings being intensified by material want.”44 Scraping by in the cold winter, Tesla was reduced many a day to working in a New York labor gang. Presumably, he was painfully aware as he swung his pick or shoveled his dirt that others might be pressing ahead with AC systems. As the days began to warm, and the daylight became mellow and lingered longer, fate smiled again on this dreamer. In the early spring of 1887, one of Tesla’s foremen realized that this hardworking Serb really was no ordinary laborer. He arranged to introduce the down-on-his-luck electrician to a high-level engineer at the Western Union Telegraph Company. The engineer, Alfred S. Brown, was impressed by Tesla’s fervi
d description of his AC motor that would power the world, and he in turn introduced Tesla to Charles F. Peck, a distinguished lawyer and investor. Peck was informed enough to know that no one had yet managed to design a commercial industrial AC motor that actually worked. Why should he believe great deeds would come from this former junior Edison engineer and failed arc light entrepreneur whose English was elegant but thickly accented? He declined even to watch some tests.
Tesla racked his brain, wondering how to impress this bland attorney. “I had an inspiration,” he recalled many years later. He asked Peck, “Do you remember the ‘Egg of Columbus’?” Tesla was referring to a banquet where the explorer challenged all those skeptical of his quest to show how they would balance an egg on its end. After they tried in vain, Columbus took the egg and, cracking the shell slightly by a gentle tap, made it stand upright. This small feat led to an audience with Isabella, the queen of Spain, who pledged her support. Peck was now intrigued. Was Tesla, he inquired, planning to balance an egg on its end? And why? “Well, what if I could make an egg stand on the pointed end without cracking the shell?” Tesla saw he had his man’s interest. Peck said, “If you could do this, we would admit you had gone Columbus one better.” Tesla pressed him on whether this would make him a potential patron. “We have no crown jewels to pawn, but there are a few ducats in our buckskins,” Peck conceded. “And we might be able to help you to an extent.”45
With that Tesla hurried forth through the tumult of the downtown streets clogged with wagons hauling barrels and every kind of freight to find a hard-boiled egg and a blacksmith. The demonstration took place the very next day. “A rotating field magnet was fastened under the top board of a wooden table and Mr. Tesla provided a copper-plated egg and several brass balls and pivoted iron discs for convincing his prospective associates. He placed the egg on the table and to their astonishment it stood on end, but when they found it was rapidly spinning their stupefaction was complete. The brass balls and pivoted iron discs in turn were sent spinning rapidly by the rotating field, to the amazement of the spectators. No sooner had they regained their composure than they delighted Tesla with the question, ‘Do you need any money?’”46
Nikola Tesla’s life was taking another one of its dramatic turns. After the betrayal of his Rahway partners, his winter of pauperism and hard labor, Nikola Tesla was once again launched on his long deferred electrical dream. Very shortly, he, Peck, and the Western Union engineer Alfred S. Brown had formed the Tesla Electric Company, and Tesla was happily setting up his first laboratory at 89 Liberty Street, a busy thoroughfare a few blocks in from the jumbled wealth of the Hudson River wharves and ferry lines and north of the moneyed blocks of Wall Street. While the yells of the truckers driving huge teams to and from the docks drifted in through his windows all that summer and fall, Tesla labored to put to paper the designs he needed to patent. Finally he would be able to build the whole AC system he had dreamed of for so long, especially his many induction motors. Finally he would free the world from drudge labor.
A young George Westinghouse
CHAPTER 5
George Westinghouse: “He Is Ubiquitous”
The bold and dynamic Pittsburgh inventor and entrepreneur George Westinghouse had spent much of 1883 and 1884 living in New York, watching closely as Gotham gradually came alive electrically, a metropolis nightly more scintillating with artificial light. Now each wintry eve, when a lavender darkness enveloped the city, the dazzling arc lamps bathed the major avenues in their brilliant blue light. Broadway had become a new nighttime stage for stylish crowds of promenaders shopping and strolling, the new electric light gleaming off the curved blackness of men’s derbies and high hats, casting a soft sheen on the women’s fur-trimmed velveteen cloaks, the jet black of their beads and feathered bonnets. Farther south, music halls and theaters sparkled brilliantly with electric lights, while Edison’s incandescent light lit up newspaper offices on Park Row, the best hotels, and many of the financial edifices around Wall Street. All up Fifth Avenue and over on Madison the brownstone mansions of the merchant princes and the new industrialists were aglow each dusk with electric candlepower. For those who cared to notice, the electrical future was quietly taking shape.
And George Westinghouse, one of the era’s industrial titans, was the sort who cared to notice. A forceful, well-built man of six feet, Westinghouse was an imposing presence with his thick mane of chestnut hair, vigorous sideburns, and huge walrus handlebar mustache. By 1884, at just thirty-seven, he had already assembled a formidable empire and fortune in the free-wheeling world of railroads, the most important and ruthless corporate force in America. His first railroad-related inventions, a “car replacer” that got derailed trains quickly back on the tracks and a long-lasting steel “frog” that prevented derailing at junctions, met a sorry fate, licensed at first by railroads only to be quickly “improved” so the roads could claim their own patents. Then, in 1869, Westinghouse, all of twenty-two, introduced his most momentous invention to date, a revolutionary air brake that allowed the engineer of a passenger train for the first time to quickly and safely stop all the cars. Westinghouse had had a struggle finding anyone willing to back this novel and expensive venture. And so, far, far wiser, when he finally did introduce his air brake, he staunchly refused to give the railroads licenses, saying only he would manufacture them in his small Pittsburgh works.
As the young Westinghouse improved his brakes and shored up his patents, the railroads tried to circumvent and eliminate this upstart. Wrote one railroad manager to another, “Do you use Westinghouse and can you make any improvement upon his apparatus without his permission and cooperation?”1 When Westinghouse felt the railroads, however powerful, were treading on his turf, he intervened forcefully, threatening patent lawsuits, usually in person. “Westinghouse stopped by,” passed along the railroad manager, “and warned that if we try the vacuum [brake], even experimentally, he will bring suit.”2 Having seen his first patents expropriated by the railroads and his first company consequently dwindle away, Westinghouse assumed a lifelong ferocity when it came to his products and patents.
Just as Edison became familiar with electricity through telegraphy, Westinghouse learned about the “subtle agency” through its use in railroad signals. Having swiftly established the Westinghouse Air Brake Company as preeminent in the United States, Westinghouse, who combined hard-driving ambition with a famously winsome, persuasive charm, set out to conquer England. He took with him his new wife, the refined and cultured Marguerite Erskine, whom he had met on a train and soon married in her hometown of Brooklyn after a whirlwind courtship. In England, he eventually sold air brakes but also discovered railroad signaling. In 1881, he began buying up promising patents, most important one that controlled electric circuits set off by trains, thereby activating signals. By combining these with his own improvements and inventions, Westinghouse soon dominated this new field through yet another Westinghouse entity, the Union Switch and Signal Company, organized in 1882.
The oil lamps used in the signaling system were problematic, and existing electric companies were unhelpful with solutions. George’s brother Herman, another mechanically inclined businessman, “had become acquainted with a live wire, Mr. William Stanley, Jr. and through him the Electric Company began to develop.”3 The immediate problem was the signal lamps, but they were something of an excuse. For if George Westinghouse was going into electricity, he would do it as he did everything, in a very big way. This suited William Stanley. Tall, slender, his middle-parted thin hair plastered neatly, and his luxuriant mustache ending in long, strange wisps, Stanley was indeed a “live wire.” After a dutiful semester at Yale, he bailed out to work with things mechanical, writing his parents, “Have had enough of this, am going to New York.”4 In 1884, after quick tours with the Swan Incandescent Electric Light Company and Hiram Maxim and two successful sojourns in his own small-business ventures, Stanley agreed to come work for the formidable George Westinghouse, ready for bigger ventu
res.
The truth was, when Westinghouse surveyed the state of the electrical art as embodied by Edison and his competitors, it did not much excite him, except as a sure way to develop a large enterprise. The physical limitations of Edison’s direct current central station were more than evident: The future foretold an insatiable demand for small direct current central stations serving mile-square areas and individual isolated plants, such as had been installed at J. P. Morgan’s mansion and in many factories and offices. Why shouldn’t George Westinghouse make and install electrical plants as well as Edison or Brush or Swan or Weston or Thomson-Houston? The world was brimming with ambitious young electricians for hire. George Westinghouse had had no trouble luring away one of Edison’s promising young mechanical engineers, H. M. Byllesby, just by offering a bigger salary. Preparatory to entering the electrical field with his own DC plants, Westinghouse paid Swan Incandescent Electric Light Company $50,000 to retrieve two patents they held from his new employee William Stanley. These patents covered a self-regulating DC dynamo and a carbonized silk-filament light bulb. William Stanley’s initial March 1884 contract paid him a handsome $5,000-a-year salary, with the stipulation that the company would own any of his patented inventions it manufactured and sold. Stanley would receive 10 percent of profits. The young inventor and electrician concentrated on setting up a commercial light bulb facility in Pittsburgh and developing a DC system for Westinghouse. The new Westinghouse system had its marketing debut at the 1884 Philadelphia Electric Exhibit. Reported Electrical World that September, “The company are now prepared to do business. Their display comprises electric motors as well. An ingenious arrangement of the lamps is shown by which when one goes out another is switched into circuit, and by which also a bell announcing the occurrence can be rung at any chosen place.”5