The Last Days of Night(25)

Here, between the bent and soiled gear bits, lay the framework for the electrification of the United States.

“You’ll be able to sell to whole municipalities at once,” said Paul. “Entire towns will become Westinghouse towns.”

“Precisely. Alternating current isn’t just better technology. It’s better business.”

Paul thumbed through the maps. Red dots blotted what was clearly already Edison territory—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington. Only Pittsburgh among the large cities was unmarred by a crimson spot.

Yet Westinghouse had also placed tiny blue dots throughout the land, marking off receptive townships: Lincoln, Nebraska; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Duluth, Minnesota.

Westinghouse’s electrical revolution would not hail from the steel towers of America’s moneyed metropolises. Instead, his insurgence would come from a thousand sleepy villages. Together, these hamlets would form a network of power that would stretch from Ithaca, New York, to Portland, Oregon.

Edison had taken Broadway. So Westinghouse would take Broad Street, Ohio.

The lines were drawn. Everyone would have to choose a side. Everyone would join a network. Networks of light. Networks of people. Networks of power. Networks of money.

“We can begin selling immediately,” said Westinghouse. “And we should be able to install our first system by the autumn.” He took in the wonder on Paul’s face. “If you can keep the courts off our backs, then Nikola Tesla and I will stop Thomas Edison.”





What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.

—TIM BERNERS-LEE



ON THE NIGHT Tesla moved into his new laboratory on the Westinghouse estate, there was to be, at Paul’s suggestion, a welcome dinner in the inventor’s honor. A friendly meal at the central mansion, attended by Tesla, Westinghouse, and the more garrulous members of the senior staff, Fessenden and his lieutenants. Would Tesla do something strange at Westinghouse’s dinner table? Likely. But Marguerite would be there to soothe, and the engineers would be there if Tesla launched into one of his impenetrable monologues. The conversational bases were manned.

While the household staff helped Tesla move into his newly furnished apartment, Marguerite supervised the preparation of the rosemary-roasted chickens. George Westinghouse whipped up his traditional salad dressing. White ties were knotted across the gentlemen’s necks, and Paul’s lone dinner jacket was pressed yet again.

Everyone gathered at the door as the servants ushered Tesla into the mansion for the first time. The gentlemen bowed in a line, right to left. Tesla approached Marguerite, bending to take her hand, and then he emitted a high-pitched yelp.

Paul—and everyone else—was too startled to speak. Tesla retreated slowly to the door. Marguerite strained what looked to be every muscle upon her face to keep a smile in place. It was the butler, finally, who inquired of Tesla as to whether he was all right.

“It is the hair,” said Tesla gravely. He looked in horror to his sleeve. Paul peered. Sure enough, there on Tesla’s shirtsleeve was a long white hair. It could only have belonged to Marguerite.

“I cannot stand to its touch,” said Tesla. “My apologies, Mrs. Marguerite Westinghouse.”

With that, Tesla walked out the front door. The dinner that followed at the Westinghouse table was mercifully brief.

As it turned out, Tesla would never set foot in the main house again. His laboratory space was only a short walk down the dirt road, but the engineers tasked with assisting him reported that he almost never left.

His meals consisted solely of water and saltine crackers, brought to his apartment above the lab at odd hours of the night upon an urgent ringing of his bell. Any attempt to get a bit of meat into his belly met with disastrous results, as the cubic contents of the braised pork shoulder presented to him on a polished silver plate were deemed to be a multiple of seven, and hence toxic to his bloodstream.

Weekly meetings were set to inform Westinghouse of the inventor’s progress at designing a light bulb that would elude the reach of Edison’s patents. The meeting times came and went without an appearance from Tesla himself. In fairness to him, there was no progress to report, so his decision not to attend such meetings was in some sense perfectly rational.

For all these eccentricities Westinghouse had little patience. This was a place of business, in which men conducted themselves in a manner commensurate with the seriousness of their task. Westinghouse seemed to think of himself as the father to a large clan of eager children; he would famously grace them with presents at holidays, and had in fact been the first employer in America to reduce his employees’ workweek to six days. Every soul in his company, from the head of his accounting division to the lowest assembler in his factories, received at least a day of rest per week. For Westinghouse, such gifts were signs of respect. All hands in the Westinghouse Electric Company were in this mess together. There was a clear enemy not so far away in New York, a rival army dwarfing theirs in number and resources and power.

Westinghouse found himself impotent in the face of Tesla’s willful insubordination for the simple reason that he needed Tesla, while Tesla only found Westinghouse to be vaguely useful. Westinghouse could not dock Tesla’s pay, because Lemuel Serrell had ensured its inviolability. He could not forbid access to any tools of the lab, because he needed Tesla to make as much of their resources as possible. And any social pressures he might place on Tesla were equally pointless: Isolation was no punishment for a man who sought, above all else, to be left alone.