The Last Days of Night(92)
“Edison has a spy in Westinghouse’s senior leadership. He’s been reporting back all of Westinghouse’s plans—corporate strategy, the laboratory reports, even the designs of those Pennsylvania factories—to Edison. He’s been doing it for more than a year. You idiots kept getting beat and you couldn’t figure out why. Well—this is why.”
Paul felt sick, but he could not show weakness.
“How can you be sure Edison has a spy?”
“Because,” replied Morgan, “I was the one who put him there.”
Paul looked Morgan dead in his calm, unblinking eyes. In confessing this secret, he seemed to feel neither pleasure nor relief.
“Your plan is going to be significantly more complicated than you realize, Mr. Cravath, because if Westinghouse tells his senior staff about it, then our spy will tell Edison.”
“Who is it?” asked Paul. “Who is the spy?”
“You bury a penny,” said J. P. Morgan, his words echoing among the ancient pottery, “and in a thousand years you’ll have a fortune. But if you want to get to the fortune a bit faster…you need to bury something a whole lot bigger than a penny.”
Is the sudden transformation of all the relevant scientific characters [in your book] from petty people to great and selfless men because they see together a beautiful corner of nature unveiled and forget themselves in the presence of the wonder? Or is it because our writer suddenly sees all his characters in a new and generous light because he has achieved success and confidence in his work, and himself?
—RICHARD FEYNMAN, FROM A LETTER TO JAMES WATSON, CONCERNING THE LATTER’S MANUSCRIPT OF HIS MEMOIR THE DOUBLE HELIX
“REGINALD FESSENDEN?”
Paul’s mind raced to make sense of what Morgan had told him. Paul had not only spent hours by Fessenden’s side over the past year, but had even recruited the man himself. It had been Paul’s sales pitch that won Fessenden to their side, after he’d been fired by Edison….“You’re lying,” said Paul.
“Frequently. But not, as it happens, today.”
“Prove it.”
Morgan sighed. “You hired Fessenden yourself, eighteen months ago. You did so at a meeting at his Indiana office, after coming to believe that Edison fired him. You read about the firing in the papers, and went to find a bitter ex-Edison employee who might be bought off. You contacted Fessenden for information about Edison’s patent filing, only…Well, tell me: Did he actually give you any information that would help you take down Edison’s patent?”
Paul replayed his first meeting with Fessenden in Indiana.
“Of course he didn’t,” said Morgan. “Your next question is going to be about why Fessenden sent you in the direction of what’s his name, Tesla. Because Edison thought it would be a waste of your time. Fessenden had to appear to be helpful, while telling you something that wouldn’t actually help at all. And so we figured we’d make use of that loony Serbian nut. Thomas got a copy of his engineering society lecture long before he delivered it; told me it was ridiculous. Which gave me the idea of sending you after him in the first place. That you managed to actually get some use out of that man—that was unexpected. It didn’t make Thomas happy, I can tell you.”
Paul felt suddenly naked, his thoughts and plans and seemingly clever moves over the past years now revealed to be but a pathetic sham. Edison had been outplaying them from the very start.
“You believed you were hiring an apostate. What you were actually hiring was a Trojan horse. Fessenden took the job with your client specifically so that he could gain access to the latest Westinghouse technology. Bit of an irony, really, since Westinghouse thought he was getting access to Edison’s.”
“But,” Paul countered, “Edison never made use of alternating current. If Fessenden has been leaking Westinghouse’s designs—and you already had Tesla’s lecture—Edison must have seen that it was superior to his own direct-current work. If what you’re telling me is true, then how is it that Edison never created an A/C device?”
“Ah,” said Morgan. “That’s just the thing: Edison disagreed with your supposition. He saw the full reports. I did too, for that matter, not that I paid much mind to the technical gibberish. Edison thought he knew better. His advocacy of direct current—perhaps a mistaken one, as it turns out—did not come from a place of subterfuge. He genuinely believed, after surveying all of his own research and all of yours as well, that his system was the better one.”
“He wasn’t dishonest, but instead merely incompetent?”
“I would more charitably suggest that he simply followed the available evidence to a different conclusion. Scientists. You ask one hundred of them a simple question, you get one hundred different answers. They’re a necessary annoyance in the industrial business, I suppose.”
“This was all your idea,” said Paul. “Fessenden. Tesla. The whole ruse.”
“Of course it was. Thomas isn’t nearly devious enough to come up with something like this on his own.”
“This past autumn, when you were blocking our attempts to find new investors—this is how you knew who we were going to before we got there. This is how you were able to contact them first.”
Morgan looked pleased. “I’d been wondering if you’d figured that out.”