Even before I found your photograph and began writing this, I’d spent my share of sleepless nights tormented by the thought of such a fate. How could I not? After all, I’d landed in Los Angeles (in the Land of Psycho: psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, psychobabble), the Mecca of madness and its experts. It wasn’t long after my arrival, when I was still living on park benches and under beachfront piers, that the experts found me: a progression of social workers, their faces lit with bland compassion, intent on human salvage. Later, when I’d started to “recover” (that is, when I’d found an apartment and a job—because there are some things from which we never really recover), I escaped from their clutches, but I continued reading about the subject. And although I never found any answers in those books, I long ago became acquainted with the territory of madness and its history.
31 Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. x.
32 After the first of these incidents, in 1895, President Grover Cleveland asked Morgan how he had managed this colossal feat. “I simply told [the financial interests of Europe] that this was necessary,” Morgan replied, “and they did it” (Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900-1915 [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952], p. 119). ‡ Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1963). § Diary of Margot Asquith, November 13, 1911.
33 New York Times, December 20, 1912.
34 The significance of the relationship between Morgan and his partners and the Edison project can hardly be overstated; for example, as one historian points out, “the meetings of the directors of the Edison Electric Light [Company] were regularly held in Morgan’s office.” (Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography [New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959], pp. 292-93.)
35 Of course, Edison’s early installations were hardly free from complications. The electrical system at Morgan’s office cost nearly four times the original estimate and, more embarrassing yet, the system in Morgan’s mansion was a disaster. The steam-powered generators installed by Edison’s engineers beneath the stables at 219 Madison Avenue belched noise and smoke in such great quantities that neighbors two blocks away complained. After numerous delays, the engineers solved these problems by installing rubber supports beneath the generators, lining the engine housings with felt, and digging a trench across Morgan’s yard to funnel the smoke through the chimney of the house, away from the neighbors.
And even after these difficulties were overcome, problems remained. To celebrate the completion of the system, Morgan held a reception at his home to show off the electric lights to four hundred of his closest friends. Just before dinner, a loose connection set papers on the financier’s desk on fire, filling the house with smoke. As the bejeweled ladies and tuxedoed men fled into the evening street, it began to snow: the crowd of New York’s elite watched in silence as Edison’s lamps exploded and went dark one by one, the delicate glass bulbs shattering in the heat of the flames.
36 In fact, the silent technical war that took place between 1888 and 1920 was fought mainly between J. P. Morgan and his partners, who backed Edison’s DC electrical system, and George Westinghouse, who backed Tesla’s AC system. Dur ing this time, a common tactic of these rival groups was to publish advertisements attacking the technology promoted by the other: the Tesla AC system was condemned as being dangerous and unreliable, while the Edison DC system was labeled as outdated and inefficient.
Still, over time, the two inventors themselves were increasingly drawn into the fray. For example, as one biographer of Edison notes, “In the presence of newspaper reporters and other invited guests, Edison and [his assistant] Batchelor would edge a little dog onto a sheet of tin to which were attached wires from an AC generator supplying current at 1,000 volts,” to demonstrate the perils of the AC system (Josephson, p. 347), and he helped to arrange for the world’s first electric chair to be powered by one of Tesla’s generators.
For his part, Tesla—who had once hoped to work with Edison—responded with contempt for the other inventor’s work, writing: “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of a bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. . . . I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor” (New York Times, October 19, 1931).
By 1920, Tesla’s system—which had a vastly greater range of transmission and higher efficiency than the Edison generators—had prevailed, and remains the basic technology still in use today. Unfortunately for the inventor, to secure a merger that would stabilize his ailing company, George Westinghouse was forced to ask Tesla to give up his royalty rights to the AC system. Tesla responded by telling him, “The benefits that will come to civilization from my polyphase system mean more to me than the money involved. Mr. Westinghouse, you will save your company so that you can develop my inventions. Here is your contract and here is my contract—I will tear both of them to pieces . . . .” In doing so, the inventor relinquished ownership of what was arguably the most valuable discovery in modern history. (James O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla [New York: I. Washburn, Inc., 1944], pp. 80-82.)
37 As for the historical truth of what happened to James Force—really, I still don’t have any clear evidence or answers. Still, I find myself haunted by a letter to the editors of the Journal of the American Society of Electrical Engineers, dated August 17, 1902, that I came across while researching Thomas Edison. In this letter, Edison (or more likely, one of his assistants) writes:In our exploration of God’s great workshop, it is sadly too often the case that the best of us may be lead [sp] astray from his responsibilities to society. . . . One example of this is Mr. Tesla’s experiments in wireless power transmission, conducted near Colorado Springs from 1899-1900. . . .
Residents of the town of Colorado Springs near Mr. Tesla’s workshop reported erratic electrical phenomena around the building in which the workshop was housed. These included balls of fire, explosions of lightning, and regions of static discharge. . . .
Indeed, while Mr. Tesla conducted his experimentation, explosions and spheres of lightning were reported throughout the region. Near Telluride, Colorado, a barn was leveled by a blast of lightning with not a cloud in the sky, according to the farmer who was witness. Near the town of Kellogg, Idaho, a man was killed by an explosion of lightning. Similar incidents abound.
(Journal of the American Society of Electrical Engineers 12, no. 5 [September 1902].)
38 New York Police Department 2nd Precinct Blotter, January 18, 1901, from an entry dated 7:20 p.m.—or at least, this is how the footnote ought to read. But in fact, the real story is more complicated (isn’t it always?), the details more elusive.
According to the NYPD, the files that would contain this entry were lost during a fire in 1902. By an odd coincidence, the corresponding duplicate police records in the city archive can’t seem to be located. In fact, the only remaining trace of these events is the entry reprinted in the “police log” section of the New York Sun, on January 20.
Only this one mention—and then silence.
No discussion of these occurrences can be found in Morgan’s personal writings, and likewise none in Edison’s. There are no newspaper articles on the subject (which, given the celebrities involved, should have caused a journalistic frenzy). Everywhere I’ve looked there is, simply, nothing.
What can a silence say? This is the question I find myself confronted with, reading this passage (and also, if I’m honest, with this whole history). Staring into these lacunae, I think of how Rossetti wrote about “God’s word, which speaks in silence.” But above the low burble of my television, or through the radio playing at the neighborhood café where I have my morning coffee, such subtle voices are beyond my hearing. So in the end, I suppose, this absence can only stand for what such pauses have always meant: nothing in particular, and everything still unsaid.
39 According to the histo
ry books, McGurk’s Suicide Hallwas nearly the lowest rung for prostitutes, having taken over that position from the waterfront dance houses of the previous generation; hence the suicide-craze that gave it its name and, incidentally, its grisly lure as a tourist attraction. Figures are unreliable or uncertain on the total number of self-killings that went on there, but in just one sample year, 1899, there were at least six as well as more than seven attempts.
(Luc Sante, Low Life [New York: Vintage Departures, 1992], pp. 119-20.)
40 Using a magnifying glass it is possible to read the time and day of month (registered in small rotating numerals) on the face of this instrument: it is the 19th, and the time appears to be just after eight o’clock.
41 Geoffrey Sonnabend, Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter (Paris: Éditions Jurassiques, 1939), p. 46.
42 To the best of my (limited) understanding, this theory—now widely accepted among theoretical physicists—was first proposed by Hugh Everett in his paper “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Reviews of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454-62.
43 In fact the “Ohio question” raised issues of nationalism both domestically (in the wake of the Civil War, ended less than a generation earlier) and abroad, which deeply divided the American political landscape at the time.
In Congress the week before this particular meeting, the Republican secretary of war, Elihu Root, had alluded clearly to the question of the Free Estate when he read a statement that began:Mr. President, self-government and internal development have been the dominant notes of our first century: administration and the development of other lands will be the dominant notes of our second. God has marked the American people as His chosen Nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. . . . Pray God the time may never come when mammon and the love of ease will so debase our blood that we will fear to shed it for the flag and its imperial destiny.
The next day, Senator William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate, had concluded his speech at his party’s nominating convention to thunderous applause by directly contradicting the secretary of war, proclaiming:Among all the threats which lie arrayed against the greatness of this nation and her peoples none looms so large as the possibility that in her haste to step upon the world’s stage, America may forget the very ideals with which she began. . . . No greater injustice can exist than the subjugation of one people by another in the name of freedom.
44 The only account of this event seems to be that recorded by the Amish historian Daniel Yoder, who collected various oral histories of the Ohio region. In his volume An Account of the Ohio Region Told by the Common People of That Area, he writes:The son of one land-owner, Jacob Marse, who claimed to have been among the city’s defenders, fondly recounts his father’s tale: “He got his gun and went with the other men to the city. Louis Toledo came out in front of his house and read the men a poem. Then my father went and hid behind a cart with another man in an alleyway. When the enemy came [my father] started shooting and the man beside him was shot dead. Suddenly there was a loud noise that knocked him down and broke all the windows nearby.
“My father dropped his gun and went out into the street. All the other men had gotten knocked down and no one was shooting anymore. He looked at the Toledo mansion and it had disappeared. There was a cloud of smoke that covered half the sky. For a week after that, the weather was strange and nobody’s compass would work. It took [my father] a year to hear right again.”
(Yoder, An Account of the Ohio Region [Milwaukee: Barlow & Sons, 1908].)
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