The Last Days of Night(21)

“What happened? Between the two of you?”

The expression on Tesla’s face was one that he might make tasting rancid milk. That is, if Tesla even drank milk.

“I ventured Europe as a young man, after departing Serbia. By ’82, I’d journeyed to Paris, France, where I made the meeting of Mr. Charles Batchelor. He’d been delivered to oversee Edison’s manufacturing in Paris, France; the gentleman gave me a hiring there. He remained for a few of months, and as he looked over my still humble tinkerings, told me to look up to him if I ever made it to New York City, America.”

“So you did.”

“So I did. I moved to New York City, America, with a nickel inside my pocket. I marched right to Edison’s offices. My first meeting with the great Mr. Thomas Edison. It was…Have you ever met Mr. Thomas Edison?”

“I have. It’s not an experience I’d recommend to the faint of heart.”

“He laughed at me. ‘Who is this Parisian tramp and what is he saying?’ That’s what Mr. Thomas Edison said. My accent is wide. Perhaps you have been noticing. Mr. Charles Batchelor told him I was a clever one, but he did not believe. So I offered him a demonstration. They had a ship in the harbor of New York City, America—failure of its engines. It had been supposed to bring materials to London, England, but couldn’t leave port. Their fixing person was in Boston, America, but would not be down to repair it for two days. So I said I would take it in my care.”

Tesla gazed at his veal rounds. With his silver knife, he sliced the ris into halves. And then quarters. And then, with infinitesimal precision, further into eighths.

“Engines are not complicated things, Mr. Paul Cravath. People seem so fearful of them. A fear of digging one’s hands inside. ‘Too many moving parts!’ I am quite brilliant, you know, and yet while I would wish for this tale to illustrate my brilliance, it doesn’t. Because any one of persons can fix an engine. All you do, you see, is you take the first part. You study: What is this piece doing? To what is it connected? And then you follow along: What is this next piece? To what is it connected? An engine is a chain, and all chains are made of linkings. Mr. Charles Batchelor could have done the same himself if he’d possessed the patience.”

“But he didn’t,” replied Paul. “You did.”

“Edison was…impressed, perhaps. I went to work for him the next day, at his laboratory in New Jersey, America. It was filthy.”

“Filthy?”

“Not only would he have the laboratory cleaned unoften, but Edison’s men worked as pigs in a pool of slop. Commutators here, gears there, all the screws in one big pile in the center of the table so that to find two matched ones, God forbid, would be as if finding two needles simultaneously in the same haystack. Edison is a slob. He is a bull in a shop. What is it?”

“China.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s a china shop,” said Paul. “With the bull. Harder to explain than would be worth your time.”

“I appreciate your honesty. That laboratory is a place I will not return to, do you understand? It’s not only the filth. It’s the absence of vision. Let’s say you want to do something…say, all right, say you wanted to build a table. So you would set out the top, and then Edison would say, Let us try building it with two legs! And a reasonable man would respond, But a table clearly should have on it four legs. Let us build that. And Edison would say, But we must experiment. That was the word he loved—‘experiment.’ He was experimenting always. Every possibility, every variation, every useless, no-point, waste-of-time modification he could devise. So the two-legged table, it would not work. And I would say, Might we now build our four-legged table? And Edison would say, No, let us try a three-legged table! And he would build it. And then, at long length, six months later, you would finally be granted permission from Lord Sir Thomas Edison to build a table of four legs. You have wasted half a year on a task that should have cost you but a day. Edison General Electric’s lab is not designed to foster invention. It is designed to foster tedium.”

“So you left,” said Paul, as a waiter refilled his glass of Montrachet.

“At the end of that year, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-four, I requested of him for a raise. Another seven dollars a week. It would have brought my salary to a princely twenty-five dollars per week.”

“And Edison said no to such a reasonable request?” soothed Paul. To be sure, twenty-five dollars a week was a very decent salary—and yet it was nothing compared to what Edison had made from the patents created at that lab.

“He laughed at me. Again. I will never forget his laughter. ‘The woods are full of men like you, Tesla.’ That is what he said to me. Those were his very words. ‘The woods are full of men like you, Tesla. And I can have any number of them for eighteen dollars a week.’ I walked out of the door to his office on that day and I have not seen him since.”

“It sounds like the time is right for getting even.”

“So it is that you have suggested, Mr. Cravath. But how is that to become occurrence?”

“Why don’t I show you?” said Paul as he reached, with some flourish, for his billfold. He removed a check, drawn from Westinghouse’s bank.

It was, of course, not Paul’s own money that he slid across the table. And yet he felt a thrill at the ability to command such a fortune with his fingertips.