The Last Days of Night(53)
The body of materials that would need to be combed over in search of evidence was daunting. Paul brought mounds of paper into his firm’s offices and stared at them as an experienced climber might regard the distant cliffs of Everest. What man could accomplish the trek alone?
Carter and Hughes already had a legal strategy they favored—a defensive one, arguing that Edison’s patent was well and good but that Westinghouse’s lamps simply did not infringe on it. Their rivalry with him was such that he strongly doubted he’d be able to convince them to take a more offensive path. He could talk to Westinghouse about the difficulty. But how could Westinghouse help? His men were engineers. Paul was in need of attorneys.
Paul’s thoughts turned to the marvel that was Edison’s laboratory. He could not help but admire the achievements of Edison’s organization. Even Reginald Fessenden had described its ingenuity with reverence. Edison’s laboratory had in fact produced more wonders in the span of a decade than any other such place in the course of human history. From the duplex telegraph to the phonograph to the carbon microphone to a hundred other lesser marvels, Edison’s achievements were extraordinary.
And yet he had not done it alone, had he? Edison was no solitary inventor slaving endlessly through a thousand orange dawns. The image he had loved to present to the public was just another of his deceptions. Edison was the figurehead of a large organization, just as any industrial-age baron was. Andrew Carnegie ruled an organization that refined more pig iron than any other in the world. Jay Gould produced railroads and John Rockefeller drew oil from the depths of the earth. The genius of each of these men was not in the labors of his own hands, it was in the efficiency of the system he had built.
Edison’s kingdom was different from those of the industrial barons. They had built organizations that produced objects. Forests were harvested for trees; mines were dug for coal; factories were built to combine the raw elements of heavy industry. Even the Westinghouse Electric Company had been formed in order to mass-produce industrial machinery for the buying public. But what Edison’s headquarters, first in Menlo Park and now along Fifth Avenue, generated first and foremost was something else: ideas. Vanderbilt had built an empire of ships, James Duke one of tobacco, and Henry Clay Frick one of steel. Thomas Edison had built an empire of invention.
Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness. Eli Whitney and Alexander Graham Bell had each made his name by inventing one brilliant thing. Edison had formed a laboratory that had invented many. His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention. Dozens of researchers and engineers and developmental tinkerers labored beneath Edison in a carefully constructed hierarchical organization that he founded and oversaw.
At the top of the pyramid, Edison would identify problems to be solved. He would look for weaknesses in the marketplace and locate areas that might be ripe for a new invention. He would then set a team to determine what technological problems stood between the current state of the industry and a proper solution. Once this team had isolated the relevant issues, a phalanx of under-inventors would tinker and toil on possible solutions until some breakthrough had been made. Then this army would be loosed upon an endless variety of potential refinements, until, by sheer volume of trial and error, an “invention” was produced. And that invention would be patented, mass-produced, and marketed under one name. A name emblazoned on the side of every device that came from that lab. A name whose six letters were rendered in the same font, the same size, on each machine. A name now found on one device or another in the home of any American of means.
E-D-I-S-O-N.
This same name was written so many times on the pages before him. He was taken by a particular jealousy. If only he had an organization around him as Edison did. If only Paul could have a system for solving legal problems as Edison had developed one for solving technological ones.
Well, why couldn’t he?
No one is rich who cannot afford his own army.
—MARCUS CRASSUS, 54 B.C.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S HAMILTON Hall was a four-story Gothic Revival structure at the center of the school’s Madison Avenue campus. The hall’s sharply angled roof peaked just above the leafless oaks that lined the campus’s dirt paths. The campus was a fortress of stone in the middle of the city, its gray spires piercing into the blue winter sky.
Paul had long felt that the Columbia campus must have been designed from a place of deep anxiety. Its intricate Gothic facades had been built to give the impression of the Old World, curving stone conveying the European Enlightenment and the storied schools of England and France. Though Columbia was one of the oldest universities in the country, it still had its baby fat. The affliction of insecurity that plagued the Wall Street nouveaux riches was even worse among the midtown academy. Bankers all wanted to be princes. Professors all wanted to be Martin Luther.
Technology had for centuries been the province of London’s Royal Society and Paris’s Académie des sciences. Before the recent decade, no one would have imagined America to be any forward salient of scientific progress. The United States was of an anti-intellectual bent. And yet the two most technologically advanced laboratories in the world, as far as Paul could tell, were no longer in Paris’s Louvre or London’s Burlington House. They were now in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were operated by two self-made men with no formal training at all. And, thought Paul, the third such laboratory might very well be in the small back bedroom of an opera singer’s Gramercy house. And it existed entirely within the mind of Nikola Tesla.