The Last Days of Night(64)

“Good morning,” said Paul, fastidiously laying out his papers on the table.

“And you are?”

Paul stopped. Edison smiled. The inventor was taunting him. Trying to rattle him before the questioning had even begun. Edison’s act was terribly good. He would feign a discombobulated indifference to these worldly affairs before lashing out at just the right moment.

“I am Paul Cravath, attorney for Mr. George Westinghouse.”

The court secretary dutifully typed as the men spoke.

“Grosvenor Lowrey, attorney for Mr. Thomas Edison.”

“And I am Thomas Alva Edison.”

“Please state your place of birth, for the record,” said the court secretary.

“Ohio. But I grew up in Port Huron, Michigan.”

“And the place where you currently reside?”

“I have an estate in West Orange, New Jersey. I have my offices at sixty-five Fifth Avenue, New York City.”

The secretary nodded. “It is March eleventh, 1889,” she informed the room. “Mr. Cravath, you may begin.”

Paul had been practicing his questions for days.

“What was the first thing you invented, Mr. Edison?”

Edison laughed. “It was a…well, it’s called an automatic repeater.”

“And when was this?”

“Is George Westinghouse planning on claiming that he invented that now too?”

“What year was it?”

“Eighteen sixty-five. I’d been a butcher boy before that, selling candy on the rails. Left home with a single bag to my name. Rode the line for a few years. I learned the trains well. Found odd jobs, here and there. Things that needed fixing, repairing. I’ve always had a way with machines.”

“So it would appear.”

“I became friendly with the Western Union men at the stations. Now, they had some fun devices, didn’t they? I started to do what it is that I’ve always done. I tinkered. I asked a lot of questions. Some the men could answer, some they could not. If not, then I was required to develop my own answers. There were things they would discuss—I would overhear their conversations. If only we could loop messages automatically. If only we had a device to relay the signals. But then they wouldn’t do a thing about it. They would just move along, drown their complaints in their beer. So I did what it is that I have done ever since: I recognized a problem, and then I set about solving it. There was use for a small machine that might automatically relay telegraph messages? Fantastic. I spent a few months fiddling until I’d built one that worked.”

“And then,” said Paul, “you sold the design to Gold and Stock. For two hundred dollars.”

“You know this story?”

“You’ve recited it many times to the press.”

“It’s a good story.”

“It’s a very simple one,” said Paul. “But your tales of invention always are, aren’t they?”

“This is what your kind—and let the record reflect that by ‘your’ I am referring to Mr. Cravath and by ‘kind’ I am referring to idiots—can never wrap your brains around. It genuinely is simple. I identify the gap in existing technology and then I plug it. With these hands right here. Oh. I just realized. You were trying to get a rise out of me, weren’t you?”

“If Mr. Cravath is being argumentative,” offered Lowrey, “I can instruct the court—”

“No, no, Grosvenor,” said Edison. “Mr. Cravath and I are just having a bit of fun with each other, aren’t we?”

Paul agreed, silently. He had expected some sparring. He would have been disappointed without it.

“This process you’ve described,” said Paul. “Your plugging. You’ve applied it ever since?”

“After the repeater, Western Union made me a deal. I invented a number of things for them. And then I came to New York, where I opened up my own shop. A place to tinker.”

“You were a teenage vagabond. Riding the rails. And by twenty-two, you’d made it to New York.”

“And by thirty I was a millionaire. People seem to find some value in my tinkerings, it would seem. From the telegraph to the telephone to the phonograph to the light bulb. They were all problems, out there for the solving. I did so, and have—no thanks to your efforts—been comfortably compensated for it.”

“You invented the telephone?” asked Paul.

“Yes.”

“Funny. I thought Alexander Graham Bell did that.”

“It’s a lie,” said Edison, “but so far the courts have failed to recognize the truth of what happened. I invented the telephone, not him. I had the idea; I crafted the device. He just got his application to the patent office before I did.”

“Whoever files first holds the patent.”

“Says the lawyer. To which the inventor at this table says, ‘Why?’ Why should it be so? It wasn’t always.”

“That’s true. The courts have not always held that the first to file gets the patent. But they do now.”

“Men like you have reduced my profession to a game of paperwork. It’s tedious, and it’s absurd.”

“You weren’t first to the telephone,” said Paul, “but here you are claiming the invention was yours. What about the light bulb?”