The Last Days of Night(13)

“He’s one of Edison’s top engineers. Worked directly beneath Charles Batchelor.”

“Which means that he’d most certainly have been engaged on this distance problem. And even better: The Times says he’s been with EGE for four years.”

“So?”

“So if I spent four years working for a man, giving him my very best every day, and then was unceremoniously fired one morning because I’d failed—and my entire team had failed—to solve a problem that no one else could solve either, I’d have a bit of an axe to grind.”





[In any] machine, the failure of one part to cooperate properly with the other part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperative for the purpose intended.

—THOMAS EDISON



REGINALD FESSENDEN WAS even younger than Paul. Neither his thick beard nor the long handlebar mustache that bridged it helped him to look any older. Yet when Fessenden spoke, he adopted a professorial air. His chin would rise high as he peered beneath his spherical bifocals, and his words would flow slowly. He lectured like an old man.

Paul reasoned that Fessenden had every reason to play the professor, since he’d recently found employment as one. After his sudden departure from EGE, he’d been offered a position teaching electrical engineering at Indiana’s Purdue University. In no time at all, he’d found himself going from designing vacuumed glass tubes on Fifth Avenue to teaching basic motors amid the Indiana cornfields. When Paul visited him in his undecorated office on the Purdue campus, two weeks after the conversation with Hughes, Fessenden didn’t seem pleased about this unexpected course his career had taken.

“Thomas Edison can burn in hell.”

The blue midwestern morning poured through the muntin-sashed windows. The air felt clean, though Paul did not. He had barely slept on the night train in. He hadn’t had time to change clothes. He hid the wrinkles in his white shirt under his black overcoat.

“So you didn’t leave Edison’s employ willingly?” Paul asked, playing dumb.

“I well should have. He’s a fool if he thinks he can get along without me. Us. Without all of us. It was a massacre in there. Something about the price of his stock—his war against your client is costing him quite a bit of capital. It’s not my damned job to care about his stock, I’ll tell you. It was my job to design his machines, and I was doing quite exceptionally fine at it.”

“What about the distance problem?”

Fessenden’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

Paul explained that he was in need of help. That to win Westinghouse’s case against the man who’d done them both wrong—who’d kneecapped Fessenden’s career just as he’d poisoned Westinghouse’s with libelous charges of intellectual theft—he would need to know as much as he could about the inner workings of Edison’s laboratory. He wanted to know about its operation today, as well as some years back when Edison had first patented the light bulb. Fessenden possessed information, Paul explained, that could do a lot more good in Paul’s hands than his own.

Fessenden took this in quietly. His face betrayed nothing. It was only when Paul had finished that he raised an eyebrow and asked a very telling question.

“And what exactly, Mr. Cravath, is it that you’re offering me?”

Paul wanted to smile. These scientists were all businessmen in their hearts.

“I get the impression,” said Paul, “that you might be in need of a new job.” He gestured out the window toward the open expanse of Indiana fields. In the distance, a pair of old workhorses carried pails of water across the arid dirt.

He’d prepared the offer days before: Pittsburgh. Westinghouse’s laboratory. Head of engineering. When Paul described the position, Fessenden’s lips quivered. Would George Westinghouse, Fessenden asked, really offer such a senior position to someone so young?

“Well,” Paul answered, “I might be able to think of another fairly senior position in his organization that he offered to someone a good deal younger than expected.”

When Fessenden leaned back, the rusty wheels of his chair squeaked. “You enjoy it there?”

Paul shrugged. “If you can find a better position somewhere else, do let me know.”

Fessenden grinned. “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

They signed the paperwork then and there. The terms were generous enough that Fessenden did not bother to consult his own attorney. He would be extremely well compensated.

“So what do you want to know?” Fessenden asked as Paul slipped his fountain pen back in his pocket. The answer was: quite a bit. How did Edison’s laboratory function? What was its organizational structure? Though Fessenden hadn’t been there when Edison filed for the light-bulb patent, what had he heard from the men who had?

“Edison dictated the problems,” Fessenden explained. “We solved them. Experimentation, that’s how he did it. Endless, tedious experimentation. Invention, you know, it isn’t like the way the press describes it. It’s not Edison in a dark room with a box full of wires. It’s a system. It’s industry. It’s the man at the top, Thomas, saying, We’re going to build a light bulb. Here are all the ways people have tried to build light bulbs before. They don’t work. Now, let’s you lot find a way that does. And then he’d set fifty of us on that task, for a year. And eventually…a light bulb.”