Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Instead, he strolled down for work at 10:00 A.M. as usual, only to be greeted by the horrifying sight. “It cannot be true,” he repeated again and again as he paced up and down before the charred, smoking ruin. His fifteen employees, who had arrived quite a bit earlier, stood there disconsolate. They had not had the heart to summon him from the Gerlach Hotel to such a tragedy. When The New York Times reporter approached him, Tesla waved him away, saying, “I am in too much grief to talk. What can I say? The work of half my lifetime, very nearly; all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus, that it has taken years to perfect, swept away in a fire that lasted only an hour or two. How can I estimate the loss in mere dollars and cents? Everything is gone. I must begin over again.”25 Tears filled his eyes. All his specially designed dynamos, oscillators, motors, and vacuum bulbs, not to mention all his records and papers and correspondence, his World’s Fair exhibit, all his newly developed radio transmitters and receivers, the many years of work and thought, all gone up in raging flames.

  While one might readily suspect the fire had arisen in his laboratory with all its electrical wonders, the nightwatchman reported it had begun on the ground floor. Another tenant, a steam-fitting manufacturer, had over time saturated the loft building with oil, and “it burned like a tinder-box.” The watchman’s buckets of water were futile. All the firemen could do, though they battled the fire for three hours, was prevent its spread to an adjacent box factory and the nearby elevated railroad. In a heartsick daze, Tesla slipped away and wandered the city streets. Robert and Katherine Johnson looked for him everywhere, wanting to help him at this moment of “irreparable loss.” Some of his apparatus existed in similar form elsewhere—his dynamos and oscillators and motors—but his radio work was unique and would all have to be completely rebuilt. Nothing in his laboratory was insured. The financial loss was complete and devastating. Tesla had made huge sums in recent years, but he had poured almost all of it into the now smoldering ruin.

  There was, of course, nothing to do but start again. Encouraged by Commerford, the Johnsons, and his many Manhattan friends and acquaintances, Tesla regathered his broken spirits and secured a new laboratory at 46 East Houston Street. Later he would tell a reporter, “I was so blue and discouraged in those days that I don’t believe I could have borne up but for regular electric treatment which I administered to myself. You see, electricity puts into the tired body just what it most needs—life force, nerve force. It’s a great doctor, I can tell you, perhaps the greatest of all doctors.”26 By March 22, Tesla was sufficiently recovered to write one of the top Westinghouse managers with orders for new equipment. “You have, no doubt,” Tesla wrote, “learned through the papers of the unfortunate accident which has deprived me of all my apparatus, and of some results of my recent work. I must now rebuild my laboratory.” Within the month, needed machines began to arrive. Tesla also wrote Westinghouse engineer Charles Scott, who had supervised AC at the Telluride Gold King Mine, asking him to help push through his many orders. “This kind of work is almost essential to my health,” he explained.27 In the interim, Tesla found refuge in the most unlikely of places—Thomas Edison’s gigantic laboratory in West Orange, where once Harold Brown had electrocuted dogs, calves, and horses. The press had taken to portraying Edison and Tesla as rivals for the title of America’s greatest wizard, but in such a time of loss, Edison could set aside his competitive instincts to offer temporary working shelter to the grieving Tesla.

  When first Edward Dean Adams considered the financial prospects of a hydropower plant at Niagara Falls, he (and all others) had assumed that transmission to thriving big-city Buffalo was the key to success. Now, as the first of the eighty-five-ton dynamos was fitted into place around the thick steel shaft of the giant turbine, the Cataract officers discovered that entire new industries were prepared to move to the firm’s industrial acres and contract for large amounts of cheap Niagara power. The first industrialist was Chester Martin Hall, who had announced in 1893 that he would be moving his Pittsburgh Reduction Company to the falls. Until the enterprising and energetic Hall, aluminum was a highly sought after strong, light metal whose high price—$15 a pound—prohibited its widespread use. While Hall was a student at Oberlin College in 1880, his professor had told his class that whoever could cheaply manufacture the wonderfully useful metal would make a fortune. Hall had whispered to a classmate, “I’m going for that metal.”28 And he’d kept at it doggedly from that time until 1884. Back in his woodshed laboratory, Hall finally, after much trial and error, discovered that double fluorides would extract aluminum from the clay where it was most abundant. When he energized that with electric current, he ended up with pure aluminum. Soon, Hall’s Pittsburgh company (later renamed Alcoa) had the price down to less than a dollar a pound. But to cut costs further, he needed plenty of cheap electricity. At Niagara he hoped to get it.

  Hall’s daring commitment to cheap power that did not yet exist was matched by that of Edward Goodrich Acheson, a chemical genius who had acquired his electrical training with Edison in Menlo Park and then Europe. He was a sufficiently talented inventor that George Westinghouse had bought some of his patents. Acheson decided that what the emerging industrial world needed was a cheap abrasive, something to replace the $1,000 plus it cost for a pound of diamond dust. Eventually he devised an electrochemical process that created what he called Carborundum, a substance hard enough to cut glass. At his factory in Monongahela, just outside Pittsburgh, he was already selling twenty pounds a day at $576 a pound, but he could have sold twice that, were the price not so prohibitive. Like Hall, Acheson needed massive amounts of cheap electricity. In his case, electricity would fire new arc furnaces capable of reaching unheard-of temperatures. He, too, sought electricity at Niagara. When Acheson informed his board that he had signed a contract for 1,000 horsepower a day (with an option for 10,000 more) from the Niagara Falls Power Company, which had yet to transmit so much as a single horsepower, they resigned en masse. Hall with his aluminum and Acheson with Carborundum would soon be followed by many other entrepreneurs starting or expanding electrochemical or electrometallurgical firms producing “acetylene, alkalis, sodium, bleaches, caustic soda, chlorine.”29 So it was that Edward Dean Adams and William Rankine discovered, as their fixed costs mounted and the dynamos were not yet running, they could probably sell all their first 15,000 horsepower of electricity locally.

  Finally, on August 26, 1895, almost a year later than predicted by the engineering journals, Niagara power was harnessed for full-time commercial use. For nine months, the engineers had been testing and calibrating and retesting all aspects of the system, especially the behemoth Westinghouse dynamos. Lead engineer B. J. Lamme described what happened during one early test in Pittsburgh of a giant dynamo when numerous little temporary steel bolts had “loosened up under vibration, and finally shook into contact with each other, thus forming a short circuit…. In a moment there was one tremendous [electric] arc around the end of the windings of the entire machine…. It looked, at first glance, as though the whole infernal regions had broken loose. Everybody jumped for cover.” One man managed to shut down the machine, and gradually the huge flaming electrical arc that had engulfed the dynamo subsided. Peering forth from their shelters, the engineers then rushed back and “someone climbed underneath to see what had become of our man inside … expecting him to be badly scorched…. He said the fire came in all around him but did not touch him.”30 No one present had ever seen such a sight.

  But now, at long last, the first Niagara dynamo was ready. At 7:30 A.M. that late-summer morning, the inlet gates at the canal opened, the river water flooded into one of the penstocks, the turbine whirled, and so did Dynamo No. 2, flashing alternating current off to the Pittsburgh Reduction Plant. The specific electrical needs of this voracious first customer made for delicious irony. For, as The New York Times noted in its small story buried back on the ninth page, “The power from the power house is sent over copper cables laid in a conduit to the
aluminum works. The current sent is an alternating one, and before it can be used in the making of aluminum it must be transformed to a direct current. This is done by passing through four of the largest rotary transformers ever built. These are 2,100 horse-power each, and three of them are running. Everything was found to work perfectly and great satisfaction was expressed by the officers.”31 The Niagara Falls Power Company had spent several arduous and expensive years determining the best means of sending large amounts of power the long distance to Buffalo. Adams and Sellers had audaciously chosen AC, and now they had all the customers they needed within easy reach of DC and the power they needed was DC!

  The city of Buffalo, the original intended market, the booming metropolis that had proudly declared itself the City of Light, had been bogged down month after month about what sort of franchise they should grant. Its Common Council and then its Board of Public Works wrangled on and on about how to proceed. Should the city itself manage the electrical power? William Rankine, a man whose brutal schedule for six wearing years had brought on a serious case of heart disease, handled the negotiations. Rankine, Niagara Falls Power Company secretary, had first approached the Buffalo city fathers in October of 1894 to secure the necessary franchise, explaining that his company would like a commitment for 10,000 horsepower before Niagara began excavating new wheel pits, ordering more dynamos, and installing transmission lines twenty-six miles across the farms and forests. A full year later, Buffalo’s Common Council and Board of Public Works were still dithering and the Niagara Falls Power Company had no franchise. They were separated by such serious issues as the city’s wish to have the right to revoke the franchise on ten days’ notice or the right to order all wires underground at any time.

  But at Niagara Falls, Power House No. 1 was at last up and running, and it had been successfully flashing electricity to the Pittsburgh Reduction Plant for more than a month. Now both Westinghouse dynamos were humming quietly away, which meant the Niagara Falls Power Company was finally earning income. Edward Dean Adams, president of the Cataract Construction Company, felt the time propitious for a full-scale, formal tour of the $4 million investment, a small and private celebratory savoring of their mighty work. So on September 30, 1895, Adams assembled his board of directors at Power House No. 1. All the men (with the exception of William Rankine) were well-known Manhattan millionaires, long admired for their financial prowess but increasingly resented during hard times as plutocrats running Wall Street and government as their own private club.

  When the Cataract directors stood for their photograph inside the luminous powerhouse, all wore the standard uniform of Gilded Age gentlemen: somber vested suit, dark overcoat, respectable black bowler, and black umbrella in hand, powerful men dwarfed by the gargantuan dark dynamos brooding behind them. The tall, slender John Jacob Astor, not yet thirty, was a scion of the gigantic New York real estate fortune. An inventor with numerous patents, he interested himself in all manner of odd schemes and adventures. Darius Ogden Mills had made his first money in the craziest days of the California gold rush before settling in New York, where he became a famously shrewd investor. His purchase of Edison stock convinced J. P. Morgan to invest more also. His nine-story Mills Building on Broad Street was a prestige address for stockbrokers and lawyers and was the first office building in the city to have its own generator and electricity. It housed, not incidentally, the offices of the Cataract Construction Company. Edward Wickes represented the interests of the Vanderbilts, who, as the major stockholders in the almighty New York Central, remained one of America’s richest and most socially prominent families. Wickes was also a vice president, with Francis Lynde Stetson, of Cataract Construction. Charles Lanier was an old friend of J. P. Morgan’s whose family’s Wall Street investment firm (where Adams was a partner) specialized in railroad finance. George S. Bowdoin was a blue-blooded Morgan partner who often joined Morgan on the Corsair, Morgan’s luxurious yacht (with its six staterooms and working fireplaces), where he entertained lovely actresses and desirable widows. John Crosby Brown was a white-bearded partner of the Wall Street firm Brown Brothers.

  Last, but by no means least, was Francis Lynde Stetson, who had by now acquired the sobriquet of “attorney general” to J. P. Morgan. Earlier that year, in February, he and Morgan had rushed down to the White House in a private railcar to meet with President Cleveland, as the government, hemorrhaging gold from the U.S. Treasury, teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Stetson found some legal loophole that allowed August Belmont and Morgan to arrange a huge bond sale and thus replenish the U.S. coffers with gold, despite opposition from the Republican Congress. Republicans, Populists, and newspapers across the land howled in outrage, especially as the Wall Street bankers proceeded to make a profit on it all. But with no federal banking system in place, only men like Morgan had the financial clout to steady the markets. Later, Morgan, who viewed himself as a staunch patriot, wrote a friend, “The dangers were so great scarcely anyone dared whisper them.”32 So Francis Lynde Stetson’s aura of power shone ever brighter. A millionaire in his own right, Stetson was a hard-nosed legal adviser to many of his own ilk. Rumor had it Morgan paid him a $50,000 annual retainer just to be on call.

  We have no record of what this mighty assemblage of Cataract directors thought of their tour. They had arrived, as was the way with the rich, on private railroad cars, no doubt ignoring the ever-present mélange of hard-selling hackmen scouting late-season fares and touts promoting tourist hotels. Coming out that late September morning to the powerhouse, they would have passed Erie Avenue’s clapboard houses with their wandering chickens. Our eloquent witness to the wonders of the new Niagara power is, instead, Englishman H. G. Wells, science fiction writer turned social observer:

  These dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel pit into which one descends has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible forces in their sleep…. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket…. All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that…. I fell into a daydream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used by them.”33

  One suspects that the New York millionaire Cataract directors, observing these very same sights on this, their first formal inspection of their company’s electrical industrial tour de force, were also beset with reveries of what these first monster dynamos augured. Two months later, steelmaker extraordinaire Andrew Carnegie, his reputation for benevolence tattered by Pinkertons unleashed on strikers at his Homestead works, had come to see this latest industrial marvel. He wrote in the official guest book, “No visitor can have been more deeply impressed nor more certain of the triumphant success of this sublime undertaking.”34 J. P. Morgan made his pilgrimage that fall also, bringing along his wife, Frances, and several other women. As was his wont, he left no comment.

  The one person who had not yet set foot in Niagara Falls, the man who had never seen the world-famous cataract, much less Power House No. 1, was Nikola Tesla, the very electrical dreamer whose system of AC (above all his induction motor) had made it all possible. Again and again, the inventor had been invited to make the journey to Niagara and experience two astounding sights: the thundering Great Falls with their towering clouds of mist and rainbows, and the herculean power enterprise under construction, with its astonishing subterranean horseshoe-shaped tunnel or the gigantic turbines sunken in the bowels of Stanford White�
�s cathedral of power. But for four years Tesla had turned down all invitations. Not until the summer of 1896 did he finally agree to come. First, he would spend a day in Pittsburgh with George Westinghouse, where they would visit the firm’s splendid new twenty-acre electrical works out in Turtle Valley. That evening, Edward Dean Adams and several others would join them as they traveled overnight in the comforts of Glen Eyre, Westinghouse’s sumptuous private railcar.

  The next morning, at the height of the tourist season, Nikola Tesla came for the first time to Niagara Falls, debarking with the rest of his travel companions around 9:00 A.M. on July 19, 1896, at the small but always bustling Pennsylvania Railroad depot. Also present for this momentous and historic encounter that lovely Sunday were George Westinghouse, the electrical magnate whose steely determination, tremendous courage, and considerable charm had prevailed in the War of the Electric Currents. Accompanying Tesla and Westinghouse were Edward Dean Adams, who as president of Cataract had advanced resolutely toward the bold choice of AC; William Rankine, the upstate lawyer whose incessant dedication to this gigantic venture had wisely shepherded its physical construction; Westinghouse attorney Paul Cravath, who had steered his friend and client through so many legal and financial perils; and Westinghouse’s thirteen-year-old son, George junior. The group made their way through the holidaymakers, fathers in their straw boaters herding gaggles of excited children and wives in cool white lawn dresses with parasols ready against the sun. All the Westinghouse party boarded a trolley, which trundled them a mile southeast on Erie Avenue toward the edge of town, the lush green foliage of deep-summer trees spreading cooling shade along the dusty tracks. Ahead loomed Stanford White’s handsome limestone Power House No. 1, fronted by a broad lawn. This many-windowed cathedral of power was situated on one side of the broad inlet canal, where the diverted river water sparkled in the sunlight as it flowed steadily into the powerhouse.