The Last Days of Night(16)

“Is Tesla’s design manufacturable?”

Westinghouse took the letter back before answering. “I had some of the boys look into it—it’s interesting, I’ll give your ghost that. But it’s decidedly half formed. Would take months of work to hone it into something that might be built.”

“Does the letter come with Tesla’s address? With a way for me to find him?”

“No,” answered Westinghouse. “But it comes with a way for me to do so.”

He gestured again to the schematics. “Mr. Martin has agreed to publish the schematics. He’s also asked that Tesla prove the efficacy of his design with a public demonstration. Martin has gotten Tesla to agree to present his work before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. An organization of which I am, you may have reasoned, a member.”

The demonstration would be in New York in only a few weeks. If Paul wanted to interrogate Tesla about his work in Edison’s lab, he was welcome to be Westinghouse’s guest.

As they returned to the laboratory to discuss other matters, Paul was encouraged. He had no idea what he was to make of this mysterious Mr. Tesla. But any enemy of Edison’s was bound to be a friend of Westinghouse’s.





Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification—the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

—KARL POPPER



THREE WEEKS LATER Paul led George Westinghouse through the evening crowds along Forty-seventh Street. Westinghouse was clearly no admirer of New York. The commotion, the bustle, and most likely even the noise overwhelmed him. He told Paul with pride that he hadn’t been to Manhattan in over two years. This Mr. Tesla would need to put on quite a show to justify breaking such a successful streak.

The two men arrived at the corner of Madison Avenue, where before them rose the blocks-long campus of Columbia College. They entered onto the grassy lawns to the echoing St. Thomas Church. Paul had not been back to his alma mater in some time. The sensation, as he stepped between the gray slabs of Greek Revival buildings, was one of time travel. He walked past the former Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. The property had been bought by the savvy trustees of Columbia years earlier. New wings were being added to nearly every building as the college expanded. The law school lay closer to Forty-ninth Street, on the north end of the campus. As Paul gazed at the unkempt students on the lawn, he felt impossibly old. Was it only a few years before that he had been this young?

To be a stranger in the place of your coming-of-age, to be an old man to your peers but a young man to your partners—these were the signs of generational displacement endemic to the young and successful. Paul felt an instinctive desire to be back here, to be a student again with so much to prove. And yet he remembered how tense and unhappy those years had been. He had found himself the poor Tennessee boy among the moneyed children of New York royalty. He’d thought he’d met a well-to-do crowd—sons of merchants and railroad men—at Oberlin, but that was only because he’d never met the truly affluent. He had never felt poor before Columbia.

As Paul led Westinghouse into the engineering school, he noticed he was far from the only postgraduate walking under the new stone archway. Clearly the publication of Tesla’s designs had served as some advertisement that tonight’s lecture would be far from ordinary. Whatever “ordinary” might mean in an organization so young as the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and in a field so untested.

As he and Westinghouse settled into two empty seats near the back of the long hall, Paul saw a familiar face several rows closer to the podium. Charles Batchelor winked as their eyes met. And then Batchelor turned away, lost in the sea of engineers.

So Thomas Edison was tracking Tesla too. Of course he was.

The schematics that Thomas Martin had published in Electrical World a week before were incomplete. They suggested the beginnings of some new device, but gave little indication as to its function. Yet evidently whatever Tesla had sketched had the potential to be quite revolutionary.

No one knew precisely what Tesla was to unveil. Westinghouse had said that, based on the schematics, it could be one of a hundred different electrical devices. The mystery only served to increase the potential.

They waited for half an hour. The longer the delay, the greater the expectations became. The chattering of the tightly packed crowd grew louder and more insistent with every minute in which Tesla failed to appear. The seats creaked under the weight of their gossip.

Finally the main doors opened to reveal Thomas Martin—identified by Westinghouse—leading a man who could only be Nikola Tesla into the hall. Tesla was shockingly thin, easily six and a half feet tall, with a delicately curled mustache and a part dead in the center of his slick black hair. Paul’s first thought was that he must be on loan from P. T. Barnum’s circus. Tesla appeared immaculate in his stiffly pressed suit and thickly greased hair, and yet utterly uncomfortable as he was literally yanked to the stage by his host. Martin deposited Tesla awkwardly into a reserved seat in the front row before immediately stepping up to the podium.

Everyone settled in for the evening’s performance.

“I will begin by stating the obvious,” said Martin with a commanding voice. “Our guest of honor does not want to be here.”

The joke was greeted by a warm chuckle from the crowd. Martin was as close to an éminence grise as New York’s engineering community possessed. Science was becoming a young man’s game, if the composition of this audience was any indication, and the white of Martin’s beard made clear that he no longer was one.