Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Standing behind his shiny AC induction motors, Tesla began his talk, making his point by starting and stopping the machines and showing through drawings and diagrams also how they worked. “The subject which I have the pleasure of bringing to your notice is a novel system of electrical distribution and transmission of power by means of alternate currents, affording peculiar advantages, particularly in the way of motors, which I am confident will at once establish the superior adaptability of these currents to the transmission of power and will show that many results heretofore unattainable can be reached by their use; results which are very much desired in the practical operation of such systems, and which cannot be accomplished by means of continuous currents.”28 Tesla went on to tell all present that what they took quite for granted—the presence of commutators and brushes on existing motors to redirect the naturally produced alternating current into direct current when it entered the machine—would from here on in be unnecessary. He had invented a motor that was like no other, one that operated in a system expressly designed for it by him. Consequently, from this time forward, “alternate currents would commend themselves as a more direct application of electrical energy.”29

  Scientist and Tesla biographer Robert Lomas notes that others who came before Tesla found that the magnetic fields produced by alternating current entered motors and “just churned about, not turning the motor. What Tesla did, was to use two alternating currents that were out of step with each other [polyphase]. Like the propelling waves of legs that move a millipede forward, the magnetic fields worked together to push the rotating shaft of the motor around. By using more than one set of currents, he could ensure that there was always a strong current available to power the motor. As one of the currents died away, the other would continue to move the motor round. The magnetic field rotated and carried the motor round with it, and it did so without using any electrical connections to the rotating shaft.”30

  After Tesla delivered his lecture, Martin stepped forward to propose that the distinguished Professor William Anthony say a few words. The professor, in turn, bestowed his prestigious blessing on this brilliant Serb’s astonishing new motor: “I confess that on first seeing the motors the action seemed to me an exceedingly remarkable one.” He briefly discussed the technical advantages—few wearing parts—and the motor’s efficiency. Then the well-known electrical inventor Elihu Thomson, whose fast-growing firm Thomson-Houston had also entered the AC central station business six months earlier in the fall of 1887, stood up. Thomson, a tall man with deep-set eyes and a thick brush mustache, was not—like Edison, Westinghouse, or Tesla—an inventor who had created original and pathbreaking technologies. But he was immensely skillful at improving and making commercially viable the work of the field’s pioneers. Thomson-Houston, seeing the demand for Westinghouse AC systems, had begun offering their own line of central stations, prompting an outraged George Westinghouse to swiftly sue them for infringing on his Gaulard-Gibbs patents. Within a couple of months, the two companies reached terms, with Thomson-Houston agreeing to pay a $2-per-horsepower royalty on each transformer it produced. (About the same time, Hiram Maxim’s old firm, United States Electric, also began selling AC central systems. The Westinghouse response to this infringement was so bellicose, U.S. Electric opted instead to let itself be bought by the flourishing Westinghouse electrical empire.)

  When Professor Thomson stood up after the Columbia College AC talk, he complimented Mr. Tesla on “his new and admirable little motor.” But what Thomson really wished to establish was that he, too, had been working on an AC motor. “I have, as probably you may be aware, worked in somewhat similar directions and towards the attainment of similar ends. The trials which I have made have been by the use of a single alternating current circuit—not a double alternating current—a single current supplying a motor constructed to utilize the alternation and produce rotation.”31 However, Thomson’s AC motor depended—as had all others attempted up to this time—upon that troublesome object the commutator. Tesla understood exactly what Thomson was trying to do—establish precedence. He gracefully parried the challenge, declaring himself flattered to be noticed by someone as eminent as Professor Thomson, “being foremost in his profession.” Tesla was highly deferential, acknowledging, “I had a motor identically the same as that of Professor Thomson, but I was anticipated by him.”

  But he also honestly suggested that Thomson would be hard put to claim any kind of equality or anticipation here. Tesla pointed out that Thomson’s “peculiar form of motor represents the disadvantage that a pair of brushes must be employed to short circuit the armature coil.”32 Tesla had thought briefly along Thomson’s lines but had soared forward, eliminating the commutators with his completely original solution—magnetic fields continuously pushing round the motor’s core. Martin deftly cut off discussion while Tesla held the advantage. But this bristly public exchange marked the start of a lifelong antipathy. As Nikola Tesla returned to his seat, the assembled electricians comprehended uneasily and somewhat resentfully that a new titan had risen unbidden among them, eclipsing much of what they had done, making irrelevant many of their dearest labors. His name was Nikola Tesla, and the ambitious and influential Thomas Commerford Martin was his prophet.

  Tesla’s first lecture, “A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers,” was all Martin could have hoped, catapulting Tesla to instant fame in the engineering world. This paper, printed in all the foremost engineering journals, quickly became a landmark for its lucid description of an entirely new kind of very simple “induction” motor. Engineers and the press were astonished at the originality, simplicity, and promise of his AC design. Edison viewed it as but a variant on a technology that was unsafe and unfit for use in human habitations.

  It is likely that George Westinghouse had learned about Tesla’s revolutionary rotating motors and AC system before the Serb inventor made his dazzling public debut in mid-May before the engineers. After all, Franklin Pope, editor of the Electrical Engineer and a Westinghouse employee, had visited the Liberty Street lab at Martin’s behest. But it was not until Westinghouse read Tesla’s landmark lecture that he took action. He quickly dispatched H. M. Byllesby, a onetime Edison engineer lured away to become a Westinghouse vice president, to visit Nikola Tesla in Manhattan and see if the now famous motors merited such huzzahs. On May 21, 1888, Byllesby wrote his boss that he had met up with Tesla’s backers, engineer Alfred S. Brown and lawyer Charles Peck, and then proceeded to the Liberty Street lab with them. There he had met Tesla and witnessed several demonstrations, all of which, he admitted, were somewhat over his head. “His [Tesla’s] 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 it, the underlying principle of this motor is the principle which Mr. Shallenberger is at work at this present moment. The motors, as far as I can judge from the examination which I was enabled to make, are a success. They start from rest and the reversion of the direction of rotation can be suddenly accomplished without any short-circuiting.”33

  After the demonstration, Byllesby and his escorts returned to Alfred Brown’s office to talk business. The Westinghouse executive inquired about the possibility of purchasing the patents. He learned they were held by the Tesla Electric Company and that already Peck and Brown had an offer from a San Francisco capitalist of $200,000 plus $2.50 per horsepower on all apparatus. Reportedly, Cornell professor William Anthony was joining this syndicate. If Westinghouse intended to match or better this offer, they needed to know by Friday at the latest. Byllesby was aghast. He wrote the home office, “The terms, of course, are monstrous; and I so told them…. I told them there was no possibility of our considering the matter seriously but that I would let them know before Friday…. In order to avoid giving the impression that the matter was one which excited my curiosity I made my visit short.”34

  It’s not clear if Peck and Brown really did have suc
h a lucrative offer, for a week later, they were willing to grant Byllesby a $5,000 option for six weeks. George Westinghouse began seriously consulting with his in-house engineers and patent experts. What Tesla and his partners did not know was that a Westinghouse representative—the peripatetic Guido Pantaleoni—was once again in Europe on an AC mission, this time seeking to buy an AC motor patent from his Italian engineering professor, Galileo Ferraris. A month before Tesla’s talk before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, even as Tesla’s patents were being considered at the U.S. Patent Office, Professor Ferraris of Turin had given a lecture laying out his own version of an alternating current motor. There was, however, a monumental difference between Tesla and Ferraris, and that was that the Italian electrician viewed his effort purely as a tantalizing and amusing toy, while Tesla had designed a machine and system intended for heavy-duty commercial work. Martin had been properly impatient that Tesla declare his great discovery in a high-profile way, for others were indeed working away on the dilemma. With AC systems spreading across Europe and America, the pressing need for a working motor had become more than well-known. Among engineers, AC motors were in the air. Mere weeks before Tesla’s talk, Westinghouse engineer Oliver Shallenberger had solved one of the outstanding gaps in the company’s AC lighting system, the lack of a meter to measure electrical use. That meter was also based on the rotating effects of out-of-phase currents, and Shallenberger had begun to experiment with a possible motor. While Westinghouse continued to survey the general status of AC motors, he instructed Pantaleoni to buy the Ferraris patent for the small sum of $1,000.

  The wiry William Stanley would complain later in life (when George Westinghouse was dead and gone) that Westinghouse never really appreciated the possibilities of alternating current in the pioneering days and never compensated him fairly. Now, in the wake of Tesla’s triumph, Stanley claimed to his boss that he, Stanley, had already invented an AC motor. “I have built an AC system on basically the same principle,” he said. However, like Elihu Thomson, Stanley was overlooking the inconvenient fact that his AC motor was still using commutators and brushes. Only Nikola Tesla had designed an AC induction motor free of those troublesome, sparking objects. On July 5, 1888, Westinghouse, his option running out, wrote to one of his lawyers and partners, “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.”35 Early hopes of using the Ferraris patents as leverage now evaporated, and the Westinghouse people simply had to go along with what Brown and Peck were asking, which was, in fact, far less than the original $200,000. They sought and received $20,000 in cash and $50,000 in notes (payable in three installments), plus the $2.50 royalty per horsepower on every AC Tesla motor, with $5,000 minimum paid in royalties the first year, $10,000 the second, and $15,000 the third. Westinghouse was his usual phlegmatic and pragmatic self: “With reference to the Tesla motor patents, the price to be paid seems rather high when coupled with all of the other terms and conditions, but if it is the only practicable 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.”36

  Even if the California offer was real, the Tesla Electric Company partners may have preferred to sell to George Westinghouse. In an era of robber barons, Westinghouse had developed a reputation as a fair but indomitable, no-nonsense businessman who defended his patents ferociously. He had already sued Thomson-Houston over his transformer and forced them to make a royalty deal. And he had simply bought up United States Electric when they dared to trespass. In the sharklike atmosphere of Gilded Age capitalism, Nikola Tesla and his partners well knew that they needed such a fearless fighter if they were ever to see more than three years of royalties. Tesla very much admired Westinghouse’s qualities as a businessman. He said once, “No fiercer adversary 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 insurmountable. When others would give up in despair he triumphed. Had he been transferred to another planet with everything against him he would have worked out his salvation.”37

  Nor could Tesla and his investors overlook, as they considered their options, the overt hostility of Thomas Edison toward AC. The War of the Electric Currents was only likely to escalate as the stakes rose, and Tesla’s much needed AC motor put him squarely in the enemy camp. That being so, Tesla would later say that George Westinghouse was “in my opinion, the only man on this globe who could take my alternating system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power. He was a pioneer of imposing stature, one of the world’s noblemen.”38 Tesla, who had little trouble envisioning that the whole world would soon be operating on millions of AC-generated horsepower, viewed the deal for his patents as quite fair, even if he had to give five-ninths to his partners. Like Edison, Tesla wanted great wealth not for itself, but so he would be completely free to think, invent, and develop his ideas. The ardent idealist, he saw himself as finally bestowing his great gift on the world. Years earlier, when he had first conceived of the whirling magnetic field, he declared to the doubting Szigety, “No more will men be slaves to hard tasks. My motor will set them free, it will do the work of the world.”

  Thus, in late July 1888, Nikola Tesla quit the heat of Manhattan, ferried across the breezy Hudson, and boarded the comfortable cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the ten-hour journey to Pittsburgh, where he had agreed to serve as a Westinghouse consultant. By bestowing his new all-important AC induction motor upon George Westinghouse’s rapidly expanding electrical empire, Tesla was eliminating the one great remaining advantage of Edison’s DC system. The War of the Electric Currents was about to be joined in earnest.

  Thomas Edison at his desk dictating into the Edison Business Phonograph

  CHAPTER 7

  “Constant Danger from Sudden Death”

  On the warm late afternoon of Tuesday, June 5, 1888, weary New York City commuters ascended to the downtown elevated station as newsboys bellowed out their best headlines of murder, mayhem, and politics. Yet only those riders who purchased the venerable New York Evening Post to read for their trek back home would have seen a long, fevered, and highly bellicose letter to the editor titled “Death in the Wires.” The letter began, “The death of the poor boy Streiffer, who touched a straggling telegraph wire on East Broadway on April 15, and was instantly killed, is closely followed by the death of Mr. Witte in front of 200 Bowery and of William Murray at 616 Broadway on May 11, and any day may add new victims to the list.”

  The letter writer, one Harold P. Brown, denounced the wretched deadly spiderwebs of thousands of electric wires strung haphazardly above the city’s busiest streets. But Brown wished not simply to castigate the officials for the well-known dangers of unsafe wires, but to thunder of new perils. “Several companies who have more regard for the almighty dollar than for the safety of the public, have adopted the ‘alternating’ current for incandescent service. If the pulsating [arc] current is ‘dangerous,’ then the ‘alternating’ current can be described by no adjective less forcible than damnable.” Declared Brown, “The only excuse for the use of the fatal ‘alternating’ current is that it saves the company operating it from spending a larger sum of money for the heavier copper wires, which are required by the safe incandescent systems. That is the public must submit to c
onstant danger from sudden death in order that a corporation may pay a little larger dividend.” He called for the outlawing of all AC above 300 volts to “prevent the wholesale risk of human life.” (It was perhaps not immaterial that the Evening Post was owned by longtime Edison investor Henry Villard, soon to be Edison president.) Suddenly, the War of the Electric Currents had been moved onto far more dangerous, high-stakes terrain. Brown was seeking not to dissuade potential customers, but to outlaw outright AC.

  Who was this Harold Brown? Until that Tuesday, he was a thoroughly obscure New York engineer and electrical consultant, a complete nobody. At the time he composed his denunciatory letter to the Post, Brown described himself on his professional stationery as an electrical engineer, designer of apparatus for special purposes, contractor for arc and incandescent electric lights and steam power, and creator of life-protecting apparatus for arc light dynamos. Now, on June 5, 1888, he had suddenly charged forth against AC. What prompted Brown’s wrathful attack remains something of a mystery, despite extensive probings by numerous historians. He had no apparent ties at this stage to the Edison camp. Nor did he bear any discernible personal or professional vendetta or grudge against members of the AC group, including Westinghouse. Perhaps it was simply that this little-known member of the New York electrical fraternity saw a golden opportunity for fame and glory as the aggrieved voice of the gathering anti-AC crusaders. Until now, the Edison forces had contented themselves with written vituperation and proxies arguing against patronizing AC in genteel forums like the Chicago Electric Club. Suddenly, with Harold Brown, they had a man of action, an enraged fighter who would lead the public charge in the anti-AC holy war.