Tesla

by Vladimir Pistalo

  Glazed ham with Madeira wine

  Tournedos Laguipierre

  Strawberries with maraschino

  Pears in brandy

  Charlotte with ice cream

  As soon as the last guest was served, the plates were taken away. One had to eat quickly. Westinghouse’s engineers had no appetite. As is often the case with anything that is quite logical, when they learned of Tesla’s solutions they exclaimed, “We knew that!”

  They spoke little. They smacked their dry lips as they ate. They took their revenge on Westinghouse’s new favorite by casting quick and spiteful glances at him. They called him “colleague” with some hesitation. They believed that the praises they spared him would shower back on themselves. Personal spite is most often disguised as public concern. Westinghouse’s engineers were deeply concerned about the world.

  “What happened to the families of those people who were snowed in during that awful blizzard back in March?” the engineer Stillwell asked Margaret Westinghouse.

  Engineer Shallenberger’s gravelly throat produced some raspy sounds pertaining to the World Expo that was supposed to take place in Paris the following year. “That self-same Eiffel who constructed the base for the Statue of Liberty will build the tower there as well.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see the Eiffel Tower bathed in lights?” Tesla asked.

  “Somebody needs to work,” Stillwell retorted in the voice of a Salem trial judge.

  Still seeing some flashes beneath his eyelids, Tesla responded with a little ironic smile.

  A row of shapely glasses trembled next to each guest’s plate. They were first filled with white wine and then with red. When the glasses were empty, gloved hands took them away. Tesla had barely a chance to take a sip of some late-harvest muscatel when cognac the color of amber appeared in the glasses. The backs of the chairs in the salon groaned under the weight of the newly fattened gentlemen. A lit cigar served as an alibi for a deep sigh.

  With subdued mirth in his eyes, Westinghouse recollected how he started to pump the natural gas they had discovered right beneath the city.

  “His gas actually brought industry to Pittsburgh,” Shallenberger, ever the sycophant, amended.

  Westinghouse waved off the comment.

  “He’s not a ripple—the man’s a wave!” Stillwell praised his boss.

  “He’s a fighter who never quits!” Shallenberger exclaimed.

  Stillwell did not want to be upstaged at any cost. With theatrical flair, he pointed out his employer to Tesla: “This is the man who took the fun out of stopping trains.”

  Westinghouse’s chuckle turned into a merry guffaw.

  “Long ago, each car had its own brakeman,” he explained to Tesla. “At a whistle, each man would start to brake as the train entered the station. Sometimes they stopped the train too early, and sometimes they passed the station and would have to back up. In both cases, passengers chased after them.”

  “So when this gentleman patented his brakes,” Shallenberger put down his glass of cognac on the table, “those entertaining scenes came to an end.”

  “Ha, ha, ha!” All the guests in the jolly mansion Solitude laughed.

  Before he booked his trip to Pittsburgh, Tesla asked the frowning Peck about Westinghouse. He was told that the previous year his Pittsburgh-based company’s profit quadrupled and that his parents were Baltic-Russian aristocrats.

  “Nothing is created without an individual,” Westinghouse raised his finger before his guests. “And nothing remains without an institution.”

  The host did not utter an inappropriate word the whole evening. He signaled to the butler to place a bottle of cognac on a low table. He poured some and confided to Tesla, “My entire life was linked to the railroads. I met my wife on a train. The idea for my first invention came to me on a train.”

  The huge host invoked the time after the Civil War, when railroads crisscrossed the country. People shot bison from the train. They used their hides for wall coverings. The owners of railroads bought senators like sacks of potatoes. Senators who “stayed bought” were considered honest. Poets glorified the howl and the sharp whistle of the engine as it penetrated the most magnificent landscapes in the world.

  The silver on Westinghouse’s temples highlighted the deep red of his face. “A practical man is a man with a vision,” he explained. “Without a vision, he’s not practical—he’s pedestrian.”

  His enthusiasm was boyish. He loved a good fight. He moved his chair closer to Tesla’s: “They said I was a bully at school. I didn’t stay long in college. I’m not an academic type. I’m good at something else: I like to roll up my sleeves and convince people. That’s what I want to do with your motor.”

  With his broad chest and clear eyes, this gigantic aristocrat greatly appealed to Tesla. Whenever Westinghouse left the room, the light became dim, and when he returned everything seemed to expand.

  “I always knew it was possible,” he said at the end of the evening. “I suggest we prove it together.”

  Ever since he had met Westinghouse, the young inventor had a nauseating and thrilling premonition. In his large bed at Solitude, he wrestled with his oncoming success like Jacob with the angel. Success was a living creature, huge but invisible, which slept in his room at night and breathed close to him during the day. Success smelled of the February wind and enormous solitude.

  CHAPTER 45

  The Engineers

  The evil suppress virtue much more than the good admire it.

  Don Quixote

  The face of the newly arrived Hungarian electrical engineer lit the mirrors in Pittsburgh. He was always excited and jovial, so everyone liked him.

  “With your full cheeks and your light eyes, you remind me of a lynx,” Westinghouse laughed.

  Westinghouse called him Anthony and asked him to elaborate on the discovery he witnessed in the park in Budapest. Szigety preferred Mrs. Westinghouse to anyone else.

  “Did you see her cleavage?” he whispered into Tesla’s large ear. “I wouldn’t mind curling up in there like a hamster and hibernating for the winter.”

  Tesla rolled his eyes and introduced him to Westinghouse’s engineers.

  “These guys don’t like you, my friend,” Antal told him right after the meeting.

  “Why?” Tesla was taken aback.

  “They envy you because you don’t envy anybody,” Szigety responded. “They also believe that you have it in for them as much as they have it in for you.”

  Tesla recalled his father’s words that the truth is never adverse to an intelligent and honest man. Under the influence of his arrogant naïveté, Nikola believed people would appreciate that he was in the right and they were in the wrong, which would help them lift the burden of error from their minds. The brief pauses the engineers used when talking to Tesla put him “in his place.”

  Oliver Shallenberger, the inventor of the electric meter, and his assistant Lewis Stillwell, the inventor of the amplifier similar to Tesla’s reels, were the worst.

  “I’ll lock horns with them for you,” Szigety promised Tesla.

  Shallenberger’s smile oozed sugary revulsion.

  At home, his wife was careful not to give their child the best piece of chicken, which was reserved for her husband. Shallenberger finely cut and thoroughly chewed his white meat. After the meal, he gently hugged their little daughter, looked at the ceiling with his teary eyes, and wondered, Why, God?

  The ambitious engineer was under the impression that fate had dealt him a rotten hand. Volcanic bitterness, furious impotence, and aggressive fear alternated in his chest. He was the former prodigy. He had worked on the alternating current motor for years: Why don’t the journalists ask him about the events in China? Why doesn’t his little daughter—after she’s finished gnawing on her chicken wing—feel proud of her father?

  Lewis Stillwell rarely bothered to ponder such questions. His nose was shapely, his eyes were a mixture of steel and champagne. The handsome, cold man did
not care about recognition. At night, before his second shoe fell by the bed, he grimaced: The stranger doesn’t know what to do with his money. If Stillwell had that kind of money, he would build a house above the Hudson. And he would build another house for his mother, and then a church. And he would have a stable full of horses, the best in Saratoga Springs.

  People would know who Stillwell is!

  There was a rumor among the engineers that Westinghouse had offered the stranger some sort of partnership. Apparently, the stranger was stupid enough to turn him down.

  “But, if you don’t mind, I will still stay in Pittsburgh,” Tesla promised, “to work on adapting my motors to your system.”

  “This is how we will do it,” Westinghouse proposed at a closed meeting. “I’m offering you five thousand in cash for sixty days, ten thousand at the end of that period if I buy your patent, three times twenty thousand in two-month intervals, two and a half dollars per watt by way of income, and two hundred shares in my company.”

  “God damn it!” swore Shallenberger.

  “It’s not going to work that way,” growled Stillwell.

  The war started right after the contract was signed.

  The motor could not be adapted to the higher frequencies of Westinghouse’s equipment, so Tesla suggested lowering them. Stillwell and Shallenberger used long rationalizations to grease their spiteful reluctance. Terms such as “the integrity of the system,” “technological rationale,” and “economic factor” were repeated at regular intervals.

  In Pittsburgh, Tesla experienced frequent flashes behind his eyelids. Those bursts of light revealed to him things he could only helplessly ponder before. Formulas and forms floated in that liquid platinum. Tesla refused to work on what anyone else could do—he wanted to work on what only he could do. Every day, on his behalf, Szigety politely fought with the engineers.

  Whenever they relaxed during dinner, Tesla began to philosophize: “In order to notice something original, one has to ignore required things. Institutions tend to promote obligatory concepts. Desirable concepts are rewarded with money and a pat on the back. Institutions train people not to focus on what is not rewarded and to never understand concepts that bring no personal gain.”

  Dealing with the engineers, Szigety scratched himself out of boredom and almost fainted from formalities. Nevertheless, he persevered. His explanations to Stillwell and the man’s superior were miracles of inspired clarity. Shallenberger’s strength fed on repetition. He kept telling the same story using the same words. Every evening, this Hungarian Pan opened a bottle of wine at the Anderson Hotel. After he poured, Szigety slapped himself on the forehead and cried, “What idiots!”

  Tesla responded prophetically: “It seems that a man must forgo his cognitive abilities if he wants his social standing to be recognized. Oh, institutions!” he said, raising his voice. “Your purpose is to blind people and then to lead the blind. In you, they parade their knowledge as if knowledge is devoid of any elements of mystery. In you, they gymnastically exercise being brainwashed. In you, the work horses by the names of Stillwell and Shallenberger haul the cartloads of authority.”

  After the second glass, Antal felt inspired to declare, “Those two hate originality and consider it monstrous. They would want the morning paper to tell them what they already know.” After the third glass, he screamed, “I have no clue how people can live like that. These are the people with perpetually wounded pride. If Shallenberger were given a choice between catching a cold and letting someone else die, he would avoid getting ill.”

  “What about Stillwell?” Tesla was becoming amused.

  “He would envy a blind man his seeing-eye dog.”

  CHAPTER 46

  The Blind Say That the Eyes Stink

  Are not golden-winged myths in the long run much more lasting than dull rows of numbers? How can we not love legends that brush our feverish brows with their rosy wings and dress our wounds with the golden cotton of fluffy clouds?

  Humankind calls on myth all the time: Deliver us from dark reality, O legend! Have mercy on us, O legend!

  In the legend, Tesla turned his proud profile to the audience, raised his hands, and tore into pieces a check for a million dollars.

  “You trusted me,” the legend spoke through Tesla’s mouth.

  But in reality, George Westinghouse howled:

  “Never!”

  The chief of all undertakers, J. P. Morgan, bought out Edison’s company and offered to buy out Westinghouse’s as well.

  “Never!” Westinghouse bellowed, like a dying brontosaurus.

  After this outburst, he formed a partnership with a few small manufacturers. The sky above Pittsburgh grew dark. The investors became nervous. With their fingernails, they underscored the item of the contract that specified Tesla was entitled to receive two and a half dollars per watt. They repeated:

  “Get rid of this!”

  When Tesla opened the door, Westinghouse looked like a tuxedoed armoire rocked off balance. The frowning giant stared into the wind that swept the last snowflakes past the window. “The big gorilla sent his barking monkeys to buy my company,” he said, sighing.

  Two bluish little horns sprang from Tesla’s temples. He did not listen to what his visitor was telling him. He listened to the marrow of Westinghouse’s bones. Between his nose and his mouth, he caught a taste of the man’s soul.

  “I have no choice,” Westinghouse broke down. “Please, give up your dividends.”

  Tesla was still a fresh young man who wanted to be liked. His eyes radiated warmth and attention. His hair was divided into two wings down the middle of his head. The whiteness of his shirt could have made Westinghouse snow-blind.

  The inventor craved success with every fiber of his being and prepared himself for it. Yet he felt debilitating fear from the enormity of the approaching success he was preparing for. Everything worked against him: endless delays, ill-willed engineers, pirate competitors.

  “Fine,” Tesla sighed, and swapped money for fame.

  From that point on, Westinghouse turned into a surging wave again. He pressured the engineers who had been stalling the project for more than a year.

  All the available equipment had to be modified to fit the detested motor. Shallenberger and Stillwell closed their ears. Something had to be done. This was when the young engineer Benjamin Lamey came on the historical scene, squinting like a groundhog on Groundhog Day. He looked sleepy all the time, even when he was hunting. Westinghouse put him in charge of bringing the motor to the equipment, like Muhammad to the mountain. The good-natured Lamey simply embraced Tesla’s old suggestions about adapting the system to the motor that worked at sixty cycles.

  “It’s out of the question.” Shallenberger reddened and left the meeting.

  “Wait a minute.” Stillwell took hold of his shoulder in the echoing hallway. “There’s something to this.” The two of them whispered to each other like two scorpions kissing under a rock. Stillwell spoke with excitement; his superior’s face lit up. From Shallenberger’s hocuspocus grin glimmered something truly sweet, almost sincere. “You think so?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Stillwell responded.

  “You think so?” Shallenberger repeated, moved.

  Whispering, Stillwell explained that this time the idea was not coming from Tesla, which made it a new idea. They could accept it, give all the credit to Lamey, and thus shut out the intruder, who was packing his bags to return to New York anyway. They would be as persistent as crickets. In Tesla’s absence, their constant chirping would make the story true.

  While a maid was putting his starched shirts in his trunk, Tesla threw documents in his bag while humming incessantly. In Pittsburgh, he had been battling the engineers for a year, like Siegfried fighting the evil dwarves.

  “From flowers, a spider only gathers spite—while a bee gathers honey in her flight,” he mused.

  “The blind say that the eyes stink,” Szigety quipped.

  The maid pres
sed down on the lid of the stuffed trunk with her whole weight.

  “Are you positive you don’t want to stay at Westinghouse’s?” Szigety asked.

  “Don’t those bureaucratic dirtbags know that what they say isn’t true?” Tesla said as he closed his bag with a vengeance.

  Szigety shrugged. “Didn’t Goethe say that even slanderers should be taken seriously because it’s impossible for people not to believe what they desire with all their hearts?”

  CHAPTER 47

  For Everything That Lives

  The law of competition, which is sometimes hard on an individual,

  is the best for the human race,

  as it enables the survival of the fittest in every field.

  Andrew Carnegie

  He pushed his way through the crowd of porters with dust on their shoulders and took a seat on the train. Two sisters with large noses and their similarly endowed mother were sitting across from him. Laughter bubbled through Tesla’s nostrils like champagne as he remembered the words from a lecture he gave as a student: “My dear colleagues, spirited colleagues—follow your noses!” He hid his smile inside a newspaper. Then he pulled his nose out of the paper and anxiously looked at the sky: It was going to rain! He had Stevan Prostran’s letter in his pocket. Looking at the address written in a workman’s hand on brown paper moved him.

  He got off the train at nearby Homestead.

  So that was where Blake’s dark, satanic mills were—the workshops of the divine blacksmith, the crippled Vulcan!

  A whistle sounded from afar. The factory bellowed and breathed fire like a dragon. The fallahs hurried to build pyramids. The air was sour from the smoke.

  For twelve hours without a break, they fed the smelters with ore. Held captive inside the furnace, the sun flailed its fiery tentacles through the door. The heat singed smelters’ eyebrows.

  That was where people with crippled tongues lived and shared their broken memories. Tesla walked by sooty smiles. In the workers’ hovels, Slovakian women sang the most melancholy songs. In front of the huts, old Serbian and Croatian women talked of aches and pains.