The Last Days of Night(5)

Edison ran his fingers across the mahogany desk, past the mysterious boxes and sealed glass tubes and thin copper strips to a black button at the far edge.

“Do you like the view?” Edison turned to the windows. Beyond the glass, lower Manhattan rose from the ocean. The city shimmered in a glow of burning oil and gas, punctuated by the occasional flicker of an electrical bulb. “You can see the statue from here.”

There it was: Lady Liberty, just visible all the way from Bedloe’s Island. Paul thought back to his first visits to the city, when the arm was still on display in Madison Square Park, before the city had raised enough funds to build the rest. Paul and his friends would picnic under the shade of her elbow.

The light from the statue was dim this far away. But its source was unmistakable: electricity. The statue’s torch was powered by an electrical generator on Pearl Street, on the southern tip of the island. It was Edison’s generator. It was Edison’s light.

“We’ve been having trouble with the Pearl Street station recently,” said Edison. “Some instabilities.” He tapped his black button.

And suddenly the light went out. One tap of Thomas Edison’s finger, and the torch on the Statue of Liberty five miles away went dark.

“Power can be such an uncertain thing. Gas was so predictable. You take a heap of coal. You heat it, filter it, pressurize it, strike a match, and voilà—a flame that will light a room. Electricity is trickier. So many different kinds of bulbs—different filaments, casings, generators, vacuums. One malfunction and we’re all thrown back into darkness. And yet the old system of power is becoming obsolete. A new one rises to take its place. Once it becomes stable—once it is perfected and ubiquitous—there won’t be a going back. Do you know, the police tell me that all manner of horrid violence decreases in public places when my lights go up? Blessed with my brightness, men’s working days are no longer bound by the setting sun. Factories double their production. Midnight and noon lose their distinction. The nighttime of our ancestors is ending. Electric light is our future. The man who controls it will not simply make an unimaginable fortune. He will not simply dictate politics. He will not merely control Wall Street, or Washington, or the newspapers, or the telegraph companies, or the million household electrical devices we can’t even dream of just yet. No, no, no. The man who controls electricity will control the very sun in the sky.” And with that, Thomas Edison pressed his black button again and the statue’s torch burst back to life.

“The question that should concern you,” he said as he reclined in his chair, “is not how far I’m willing to go to win. The question is how far you’ll go before you lose.”

A good attorney could not scare easily. A great attorney could not scare at all. But as he stared at the brilliance of the distant Statue of Liberty, at the dark devices on Edison’s desk, at the 312 lawsuits that he had to win, at the pale face of a man who could do with one finger what generations of Newtons and Hookes and Franklins could not even conceive, Paul was scared. Because in that moment Paul saw what real power was.

Need. Power was the need for something so great that absolutely nothing could stop the getting of it. With a need like that, victory was not a matter of will. It was a matter of time. And Thomas Edison needed to win more than any man he had ever met.

All stories are love stories. Paul remembered someone famous saying that. Thomas Edison’s would be no exception. All men get the things they love. The tragedy of some men is not that they are denied, but that they wish they’d loved something else.

“If you think you can stop me,” Edison said softly, “go ahead and try. But you’ll have to do it in the dark.”





It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

—JAMES WATSON, CO-DISCOVERER OF DNA



A YEAR EARLIER, PAUL had been an eager young prodigy with one of the most coveted positions in New York law and not a single client to his name.

In the spring of ’86, weeks before his graduation from Columbia Law School, Paul had been personally recruited by the venerable Walter Carter. Paul accepted a clerkship at Carter, Hornblower & Byrne, to apprentice with Mr. Carter himself. If there existed a law student in the city who was not after such a position, Paul hadn’t met him.

Which is why it felt like the whole world was collapsing when, only months later, the firm began to dissolve. Suddenly Carter and Byrne wouldn’t even speak to each other. Paul never learned the substance of their disagreement; at that point it didn’t matter. The two split off into different firms, and Paul needed to pick a side.

Byrne took Hornblower, as well as the majority of the clients and virtually all of the prestige. If Paul followed Byrne, he’d be a clerk at arguably the best-known firm in the city.

Carter’s new firm, by contrast, was to be a two-person operation. Three, if Paul joined. Carter had partnered with an untested attorney named Charles Hughes, actually even younger than Paul but also engaged to marry Carter’s daughter. Their family firm would have no clerks. It would boast no significant clients. It would trade only on Carter’s name, which had been recently sullied by the rift with Byrne.

And yet, because his new firm was so small, Carter was able to offer Paul something that Byrne could not: partnership. To be sure, the split Carter suggested was far from generous—60/24/16, with Paul in the minority share. And yet…at no other firm in the world would Paul have his name on the door.