The Last Days of Night(111)
Chapter 7: Reginald Fessenden did work for Edison before he went to work for Westinghouse, with a stop at Purdue in between, though the timeline has been simplified here. Fessenden was not actually Edison’s mole within the Westinghouse operation. The real mole was of lower status—a humble draftsman, arrested in 1893.
Chapters 15–16: Tesla did go to work for Westinghouse outside Pittsburgh in 1888, in exchange for a license on his alternating-current patents. The fundamental shift in strategy on Westinghouse’s side in going from a “house by house” electrical system to a “network” electrical system is discussed in Thomas P. Hughes’s fascinating Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. However, in reality this shift was not as sudden as I’ve rendered it. Westinghouse had been interested in A/C technology for a few years before Tesla’s demonstration—which is real, though Westinghouse was not present for it. Westinghouse acquired a portfolio of A/C patents to develop as early as 1886; he just hadn’t gotten the technology to work yet.
Chapter 21: The crisis concerning royalty structures that confronted Westinghouse and his attorneys following Tesla’s sudden departure is real, though the timeline has been compressed and we don’t know whether the negotiating error was Paul’s.
Chapter 25: Both the mysterious fire in Tesla’s laboratory as well as Tesla’s ensuing mental breakdown and amnesia did occur. They just took place at different times, and in a different order, than the sequence presented here.
In 1892, Tesla’s long hours of work in his lab, on the concept of “wireless telephones,” sent him into a mental breakdown. He passed out and woke with no memories of his life at all, save scattered images of his infancy. He spent months in bed, struggling to regain his memories. It was some time before he was finally able to invent again.
This episode recalled other moments of mental illness in Tesla’s life. According to his autobiography, he experienced frequent hallucinations, both visual and auditory. He wrote: “[These hallucinations] usually occurred when I found myself in a dangerous or distressing situation, or when I was greatly exhilarated. In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame.” These visions, however, gave him insight into the machines he began to design. Thomas Hughes and others have explored whether Tesla might have been diagnosed with schizophrenia were he alive today; to my mind, it seems likely that he would have been. Tesla figuratively saw the world in ways that no one else did in part because Tesla literally saw the world in ways that no one else did.
Three years after this breakdown and recovery, on March 13, 1895, a fire engulfed Tesla’s lab. Tesla was not present when this fire broke out—he discovered it the next morning, at which point he became inconsolable as to the destruction of his machines.
Chapter 34: Paul’s big idea that he could construct an industrial system for the law—just as Westinghouse had for manufacturing and Edison had for inventions—is very much accurate. I think it’s fair to say that Paul Cravath invented the modern law firm, in exactly the same way that Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla invented the light bulb.
However, Paul is generally credited with inventing his “Cravath system” in the early 1900s. I’ve moved this idea to 1888–90, so that it might fit within this narrative. Whether Paul was in fact inspired by Edison and Westinghouse when he had this idea is impossible to say, but seeing as he did implement these ideas after his experience with those two inventors, it seemed to me likely that he was.
Chapter 36: Agnes’s interview with The New York Times is real, though I’ve combined two Times pieces—“Agnes Huntington’s Story,” December 14, 1886, and “Paul Jones in New-York,” September 21, 1890—into one.
Chapter 37: Harold Brown’s character and backstory are largely accurate and are discussed in Jill Jonnes’s Empires of Light as well as in Tom McNichol’s AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War, Mark Essig’s Edison and the Electric Chair, and Richard Moran’s Executioner’s Current.
The timeline of Brown’s campaign to promote the electric chair has been compressed—I depict the flurry of activity over the chair as happening in early 1889, but it actually happened at the end of 1887. The description of Brown’s horrifying animal electrocutions is accurate. Brown’s dialogue in these scenes is partially verbatim, though I’ve trimmed some parts and elaborated upon others for a more conversational tone. If anything, I have probably minimized the physical horrors he committed on these poor animals. In reality, he quickly progressed from dogs to horses to—seriously—an elephant.
Chapters 38–39: Someone really did break in to Harold Brown’s office in August 1889. After the burglary, stolen letters proving a connection between Edison and Brown were leaked to The New York Sun.
Did Paul do it? Most historians feel that someone on Westinghouse’s side did. If so, it stands to reason that Paul at least knew about it and kept the secret. So while this scene is invented, Paul’s moral culpability in the events thereof is certainly plausible.
Chapter 41: What Paul refers to as the “lie” on Edison’s patent application—that is, the discrepancy between the filament specified and the filament that his company would come to use—is accurate. However, I’ve simplified the progression of Edison’s filament experiments, and whether or not this constitutes deceit rather depends on one’s perspective about the nature of invention.