The Last Days of Night(9)

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The day after the burning of the workman above Broadway and the midnight meeting with Edison, Paul immediately left for Pittsburgh. He did not do his client the courtesy of requesting an audience; he simply telegraphed that he’d be there that evening.

Paul arrived to find Westinghouse in the laboratory. Sleeves rolled up, topcoat off. Contemplating a steel disc on the worktable before him.

As Paul recited the events that had transpired in Edison’s office, Westinghouse caressed the device in front of him, running his fingers over its rough contours. It was as if his touch might be enough to bring the unfinished mechanism to life.

“Edison was trying to scare me,” explained Paul. “Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It means he’s afraid of something himself.”

Westinghouse waved a hand in the air. “You say he had a switch on his desk that controlled the statue’s torch? That’s not possible.”

Paul was unsure how to respond.

“What’s the distance from Fifth Avenue to the Statue of Liberty?” wondered Westinghouse aloud. “Must be four miles. Five? There’s no way Edison’s electricity could cover that much land. His current can extend but a few hundred feet from its generator. What did it look like?”

“It looks like a gigantic statue of a lady holding a torch—”

“No, no, the switch. What did the switch look like?”

Paul stared at his client. He tightened the Windsor knot on his long black necktie as he gathered himself. “I’m afraid I don’t recall, sir.”

“It’s the problem of distance,” lectured Westinghouse. “My own men go sleepless trying to solve it. Electrical current, of the voltage required to power a light bulb, cannot travel more than a few hundred feet before withering. Edison must have been sending a telegraph signal—yes, that’s it. Morse code to a man at the Pearl Street station, who could then turn the torch on and off for him. It’s the only explanation. There is no way Edison’s team has solved the distance problem. I don’t believe it.”

Paul refrained from reacting visibly. Westinghouse, an engineer to the bone, had the tendency to maniacally fixate on minuscule technical details while ignoring larger, more-pressing concerns. There was a billion dollars on the line, and he cared only about the shape of Edison’s switches. What Paul needed to explain to his client was that it didn’t matter whose switches were more elegantly constructed; if Edison succeeded in suing him into oblivion, Westinghouse would be designing dynamos from a Bowery stockyard.

“Unless,” continued Westinghouse, “this was a display meant for me, not for you. He knew you would report back to me, and he wanted me to think he’d solved the distance problem. He wanted to scare me. Well. It has not worked, has it?”

“You don’t much like lawyers, do you, sir?” said Paul.

A curious expression overtook Westinghouse’s face. Paul had gotten his attention.

“I don’t blame you. Yet right now you are very much in need of one. And I need you to help me do my job.”

“Very well.”

“It is among my jobs to identify any course of action that might serve your interests. Especially if you might not previously have been aware of it.”

Westinghouse sat back in his chair. Paul couldn’t tell whether he’d impressed his client with his speech or simply his gall.

“I would like us to begin to ponder a compromise,” suggested Paul.

“A compromise?”

“That serves you, and that best serves your products. Fair or not, this is the world in which we live.”

“What precisely do you mean by a compromise?”

“That’s not for me to say,” said Paul diplomatically. “There are any number of different ways that some sort of compromise might be arranged. We can take some time to determine which might be most beneficial to you.”

“Such as?”

“A merger, for instance. The Westinghouse and Edison Electrical Company. Or call it the American Electrical Company, maybe; take both of your names off it for simplicity’s sake. Or—how about this? A licensing arrangement, such as we’ve made with Sawyer and Man. You sell Edison’s generators and pay him a royalty, while he sells your far-superior bulbs and pays you a royalty. Or you each sell each other’s bulbs and each other’s generators, under a similar royalty scheme, and the consumers decide which they prefer.”

“Mine are better.” Westinghouse’s simple, earnest statement tore a hole in their conversation.

“All right.” What else could Paul possibly say?

“Edison’s bulbs break constantly. His generators need repair even more often than his shoddy telegraphs. Do you know, the light bulbs he sells last half as long as mine? And produce three-quarters the brightness? A product inferior in all ways. And yet people buy them by the cartload. He outsells me four to one, despite the poverty of his constructions. Who knows why? Can’t people tell that Edison is without the patience, not to mention the skill, the craft, to build quality products? EGE makes so very many things, of such unprecedented breadth, and yet each one is, pardon, shit. They’re shit. Edison makes shit and he sells so much shit that no one notices that it’s all shit. Shit is what Thomas Edison invented. I invented the light bulb. I perfected it, built it. It is the best in the world and it is only getting better.”