“To Niagara!” Westinghouse echoed. He inflated his bull-like chest, stroked his mustache, and added, “Although… there’s something more important to celebrate.”
“What’s that?”
Westinghouse assumed a comically serious expression. “Now you must speed things up, Nikola. Borrow a machine gun from Hiram and threaten your assistants. Put the screws to your glass blowers.”
Tesla looked at him with mute amazement.
“Leave the presentation to me,” Westinghouse addressed Tesla, but he looked at the investors. “Create a show that will shock scientists and enchant the public. President Cleveland has invited members of the Spanish and Portuguese royal families to the most spectacular event of the modern times.”
“What in the world…”
“Nikola, we got commissioned.”
“What for?” Tesla asked.
“We’ll light up the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.”
Only the angelically absentminded Vanderbilt, with his granite chin and white sideburns, could get away with inquiring, “What exposition?”
George Westinghouse looked each of them in the eye. His fierce smile broke out like a geyser. “You will see!”
CHAPTER 60
The World Expo
President Cleveland, sporting a double chin and a heavy mustache, turned the “key to the future.”
“Ah!” millions sighed in relief.
The lake mirrored the images of the palaces. Gondolas skated across the rippling water. The wind undulated the plumes of the fountains. At the exposition, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the continent was finally settled. At the conference of the world’s religions, Swami Vivekananda lectured about the illusion of personality within the eternity of time. The Duke of Veragua, one of Columbus’s descendants, took in the spectacle with dreamy satisfaction. The Maharaja of Kapurthala exhibited his spectacular mustache—the sight of which made twenty women faint. Princess Eulalia of Spain took Harun al-Rashid walks across Chicago and even smoked in public. The Ferris wheel, propelled by sighs, rotated on the largest axle in the world.
“What’s the meaning of this dream of beauty?” Henry Adams, the writer, whispered.
The masses rolled in through the gates on the Midway. Ladies sweated underneath their corsets. Those sweating ladies had traveled a long way from their boring farms where the howling wind and sputtering oil lamps kept them company. For the first time in their lives, in the World of Light they could see Eastman’s camera, Benz’s automobile, Krupp’s cannons, the zipper, chewing gum, and the electric kitchen. While they sighed wistfully, their children dragged them toward a Venus de Milo sculpted in chocolate. Shrill voices resounded everywhere.
“Let’s see the lion tamer!”
“Let’s go to the Lapland and the Algerian villages!”
“Let’s go to Buffalo Bill’s circus!”
“Let’s take a balloon ride!”
“Let’s do it all!”
Freckled kids with upturned noses saw the Statue of Liberty made of salt and other products of useless ingenuity, such as a locomotive made of silk and a drawbridge made of soap. At the Kansas Pavilion, a herd of buffalo made of wheat lolled about. At the Agricultural Pavilion, there was a map of America made out of pickles, and a monstrous cheese that weighed a ton.
“Would you like a piece of the monster cheese?” George Westinghouse asked Nikola Tesla.
“I can’t wait!” the inventor laughed. Our hero was in a champagne mood. “You know what this is?” He grew excited. “This is a rite of passage. In Europe, they still imagine that America is full of wild Indians and buffalo. America has come of age.”
“Our light casts a new light on America.” Westinghouse acknowledged his words with slow pride.
MacMonnies’s fountain and the exhibition palaces lined with lightbulbs were the work of Tesla and Westinghouse. Their lights used more electricity than the city of Chicago.
They raised their batons, and hundreds of thousands of bulbs responded with mute music.
In the midst of this glare—the glare they created—Tesla remembered the gold stripe that burned under the door and the candles he made as a child so that he could read in secret. And now? He was a ray that shimmered among other rays, trying to make his way through people who did not exist.
That season, purple, turquoise, and violet dresses were in fashion. Someone had to light them up! Someone had to light up Don Quixote made of plums! The Venus de Milo made of chocolate and Princess Eulalia—all of that had to be lit up.
An ideal city rose next to the “city of broad shoulders,” of slaughterhouses and sooty factories. The real city was grotesquely fierce and dingy. The other one was dazzlingly white. The first was dangerous; the second was safe. Untouched by the spectacle of triumphant modernity, twenty thousand unemployed were on strike in the first one. In the second one, visitors were moved to tears.
“Thank God my miserable life isn’t the measure of all things,” people from Kansas whispered. “Thank God something like this is possible!”
On the roof of the Electricity Pavilion, a spotlight rotated as if asking:
“What? What? What?”
In a blue watercolor, the painter Childe Hassam immortalized Westinghouse and Tesla’s small kingdom.
A fifty-foot-tall kiosk rose in the middle of the Electricity Pavilion: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. Tesla Polyphase Systems. Glass neon signs burned coldly and pointedly on it. With its blue glimmer, the name of the Serbian poet Zmaj stood out among them. The signs crackled, and the explosions of tiny thunderbolts could be heard all over the building. Only the members of the International Electrical Congress and their wives were admitted to Tesla’s lecture—if they had passes.
Tesla shook hands with the dignitaries Westinghouse introduced to him. His biographer, Martin, presented a man with full lips, a small nose, and almond-shaped eyes: “This is our guest who came from India for the conference of world’s religions. Swami Vivekananda!” Tesla dove into the stranger’s extraordinary eyes.
“It would be good for us to talk,” Vivekananda simply said.
Tesla’s smile was fierce. “I’d love to!”
Westinghouse coughed impatiently.
The kiosk buzzed with excitement. On a velvet-topped table, Columbus’s egg spun in an electric whirlpool. Smaller balls revolved around bigger ones like planets around suns. Not even other electrical engineers knew what exactly those apparatuses were. Our cartographer of the unknown was engaged in the magical act of naming things.
In that magnificent exhibition, he presented oscillators so small they could fit in one’s hat. He also presented a radio wave transmitter the purpose of which no one could figure out.
At his lecture, Tesla appeared in a white smoking jacket. He stood in front of his audience while that other one whose hair was slowly rising stood next to him. Tesla’s black hair was parted in the middle. His ears stood out. His tired eyes were the color of the sky before a storm.
The reader should become concerned about him because he looked so ill, he had to excuse himself. “Mr. Westinghouse invited many electrical engineers to give this lecture, but when the time came I was the only healthy one.”
His shoulders were hunched in the beginning but straightened up as he went on. Yet again, he described electricity as an all-permeating substance that connects rough matter. That substance—which Lord Kelvin nearly equated with God—had broad and safe practical uses. Tesla described the heating of iron bars and the melting of lead within the electromagnetic field. He touched upon the possibility that electricity rejuvenates and heals.
Tesla’s assistant, Gano Dunn, did not listen to the lecture. He was waiting for a sign.
Tesla waved his hand.
The kiosk drowned in darkness.
In the dark, the same thunderbolts cracked that Giambattista Vico believed had intimated the first notions of God to humans. Tesla’s coil turned into the burning bush, wrapped in flames that did
not consume. With soft pings, lightbulbs and glass tubes lit up by themselves. But the climax came when the man in the smoking jacket let two hundred thousand volts run through his body. Not only did he allow them to pass through him, he turned into a cyclone of electricity. People retreated in horror when his hair stood up on end.
“Oh my goodness…” a voice gasped.
Tesla’s face would have become disfigured with triumph had he not had control over himself. Exhaustion turned into exaltation. With his crooked smile and bluish horns of Moses, the scientist turned left and right in the widening circle. No one tried to touch him. His body and clothes continued to emit a succession of fine haloes.
“What’s the meaning of this dream of beauty?” a female voice asked.
CHAPTER 61
In a Fantasy World
Thomas Commerford Martin introduced Tesla to a woman with a wisp of gray hair and a man with a Roman nose. They rubbed their eyes as they had just emerged from the dark.
The curls and waves of the stranger’s mustache flowed into his beard. He raised his nose a bit and looked at Tesla through his pince-nez.
“Robert Underwood Johnson,” he repeated, stressing each word as if Martin had failed to introduce him.
One look from his lady companion turned many a man’s knees into jelly. The flash of her necklace was as stunning as her bosom. Her nose held a mysterious air of confidence. Her eyes were cruel and bright.
“Katharine Johnson,” she said.
Her sudden laughter made the entire Pavilion of Electricity spin. Still laughing, she addressed Martin: “Why don’t you ever bring Mr. Tesla over?”
“I will. I promise.” Martin bowed.
Three weeks later, Katharine accepted an astonishing bouquet of roses from Tesla, who gingerly encircled it with both hands. At first glance, her face appeared classically serene, calm, more angular than oval. Her untamable hair gave away her nervous temper. So did her eyes. Her smile turned the air around her body into sweet liquor.
A wicker basket in the corner of the dining room was filled with wine corks. The dinner, inspired by Tuscan recipes, pleasantly surprised both Tesla and Martin. Johnson, the Italophile, believed that Apennine cooking equaled the French despite its occasional inconsistencies. He suggested he should write a guide to Italian restaurants for connoisseurs only.
“You’re a man ahead of your time,” proclaimed his guests as their faces became ruddy.
A pleasant rosy current circulated through the rooms and hallways. At sixteen, Robert and Katharine’s daughter, Agnes, was already a beauty. Little Owen was “a knee-high bundle of energy.” They had a black Labrador on which little Owen rode. The dog pounded its head hard against the table but continued to wag its tail as if nothing happened.
“His name is Richard Higginson the First.” Robert pointed out the dog offhandedly.
They also had a white cat called Saint Ives. Saint Ives constantly stalked something invisible.
“Cats tend to live in a fantasy world,” Katharine observed, with a smile that hinted at something else.
During the lively conversation, Nikola and Robert started to interrupt each other. Martin smiled with satisfaction. Robert was amazed at how much poetry Nikola knew by heart.
“Art shouldn’t be separated from life”—he put his wineglass away and almost choked with approval—“as something too precious for everyday use.”
“That’s exactly the kind of poet Jovan Jovanović Zmaj is,” Nikola exclaimed. He regretted that Robert could not read Zmaj’s poems. “They haven’t been translated…”
Robert could not stop talking about poetry. “Facts themselves won’t do,” he shouted. “They become irresistible only when they are slapped with the flame of poetry.”
Robert Underwood Johnson was generally considered to be a poet and an editor. Tesla soon understood that he was a magician. He knew everyone in New York and resembled an adult Tom Sawyer. He was a close friend of Mark Twain.
“Why didn’t Mark Twain come to the exposition?” Tesla asked.
“Actually, he did,” Johnson answered. “But…”
As soon as he arrived in Chicago, the humorist fell sick and spent ten days in his hotel bed. Other than holding a thermometer in his mouth, he did nothing but cough, so he failed to make the exhibition. He did not go on the fifty-cent around-the-world tour. He did not view the drawbridge made of soap. He did not write about the Main Canal, over which the Statue of the Republic, “Big Mary” with gilded shoulders, raised her hands in blessing. He did not see two hundred feathers trembling on Standing Bear’s headdress as the chief rode on Ferris’s wheel. He did not take the measure of the frightening cannons in the Krupp Pavilion. He did not elbow his way through a throng of police officers who were soothing lost children and the farmers who were ordering bratwurst on Fishermen’s Island. He did not catch the sight of the fleet of fifty electric gondolas floating along the canals. He did not see the New America that, thrilled by change, denied the fear of change. He did not witness Tesla and Westinghouse conduct a galaxy of lightbulbs.
“And he did not see you as you transformed into a fountain of sparks on the stage,” Johnson concluded.
The warm-eyed Martin added that Twain also missed “Little Egypt,” the belly dancer who swayed her hips on the “streets of Cairo.” Then he angrily put down his glass of cognac: “I want to ask you something else. Why didn’t Westinghouse sue Edison for pirating your motor?”
Tesla stared at Martin with his bright, impish eyes. “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” he warned.
“Why?” the fearless Martin repeated.
“Because he himself pirated Edison’s lightbulb.”
When they stopped laughing, they remembered the Saint Paul of Hinduism, Swami Vivekananda.
“Do you know what Hiram Maxim said about him?” Tesla asked. “The man, he said, is a living example of an ‘unsaved soul’ who knows more about philosophy and religion than all American preachers and missionaries put together.”
“I hear that he’ll move to New York to lecture.”
“I’ll go and hear him,” Martin promised.
“That exhibition was a visual treatise, the largest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel,” Katharine said and then yawned. “The entire town was a… sequin. One felt like whistling and blinking one’s eyes in wonder while eating cotton candy.”
Martin smiled dutifully.
Robert, however, disagreed; the World Exposition was a truly marvelous event, yet it felt empty compared to Chicago’s real problems. “Did you know that crowds of homeless people moved into the abandoned palaces of the City of the Future after the closing of the fair?”
In a word—they got tangled up in conversation. Martin was already taking his leave, but the reason they came had not been mentioned at all.
“What about you?” he asked Tesla.
“I’m not in a hurry.” Tesla shrugged.
Robert and he stayed on. They discovered that—when they were both boys—their fathers used to travel through rural areas. One was a doctor, the other a priest. Robert still remembered the underdone meat he was served in Indiana farmhouses for breakfast.
“I had to break the ice in the washbasin so I could wash my face.”
Tesla related how the bushes in Lika were black with June bugs. The branches broke under their weight. Robert became interested. Tesla discovered that his new friend combined a good temper with a love of anecdotes. His did not divorce a serious take on life from laughter.
That laughing man successfully pushed through the international copyright law, suggested to his friend John Muir that Yosemite should be made a national park, supported suffragettes, and edited the magazine Century with both good taste and authority. Robert was General Grant’s acquaintance and publisher. He knew the former President Harrison and was on intimate terms with the rising political star Theodore Roosevelt.
“Come sit here!” Robert told Tesla and threw a pinecone into the fire
place. It soon turned into a burning rose. The house was lavishly decorated, with Arabic incrustations. Refinement taken to a sick degree determined the shade of the wallpaper. The Bordeaux color of the room was enlivened by the blotches of two Tiffany lamps, which resembled twin jellyfish. A gold and silver clock with suns and moons ticked in its walnut case. No one knows how many glasses of wine they emptied and how many pipes of tobacco ash Johnson knocked into the fireplace that evening. Katharine was as beautiful as Venice. She swirled her skirts above her knees and settled at the piano. Glasses tinkled in the cupboard. The Labrador stood on his hind legs, and Robert waltzed with him. “Ah!” he sighed, falling back into the armchair in a paroxysm of dramatic exhaustion. When he found himself alone, Richard Higginson I got in a fight with a hissing radiator.
“My dog constantly quarrels with something, like Luther with the devil,” Robert said. “He barks at the doorbell, the rain, the thunder.”
When a nearby clock tower sounded midnight, the Labrador barked at it. But when it laconically struck one o’clock, the dog looked sad and dumb.
“You look gorgeous when you yawn,” Johnson said to his wife.
“I’m going to bed,” Katharine said. “Bye-bye.”
Blue-eyed like a husky, she smiled, looking Tesla in the eye: “We’ll become friends.”
“You think so?”
All coquetry fell from her beautiful face. The woman responded, “I know so.”
CHAPTER 62
On Top of the World
Tesla’s European tour and the World Expo made him famous.
In Electrical Review, the warm-eyed Martin was the first to ever use the magic word: “Prometheus!”
At Delmonico’s, they served him flaming dishes and desserts with sparklers.
Suddenly, everyone remembered him. His old friends started to write to him—the widow Bauzain from Strasbourg, his ailing uncle Branković, and even Tannhäuser, who invited him to his wedding in Vienna.
From a starving lad with bangs—in the picture from his Varaždin days—Nikola turned into a man on top of the world. His autograph became ornate. The motion of his hand became nervous and commanding. If a fly landed on his tablecloth, he demanded that the table be set again.
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