The Invention of Everything Else

by Samantha Hunt

  "I am Nikola Tesla. I have a letter from Charles Batchelor," and with that I presented the letter to him, unfolding it and placing it in his free hand. He read or at least he pretended to.

  I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.

  Mr. Edison chuckled when he was through, adding its paper to one of the mounds threatening to topple down to the floor.

  I continued. "Sir, I have created an invention that I imagine you will have tremendous use for. You see," I said, "it is an engine for the generation of alternating-current power that—"

  "Ha!" was the first thing Edison said, though I was not sure if he was talking to me. "Hold one moment," he said to an assistant before turning his attention my way. "Alternating current, I'm afraid, young man, is of no use to anyone. It doesn't work. It is extremely dangerous, expensive, and impossible."

  "But sir," I began, reaching for the letter from Batchelor so as to sketch my ideas on the back of it. Again he interrupted.

  "Now I need an engineer who can repair the dynamos of a ship that was supposed to set sail last week. Can you do that?"

  I stood up straight and nodded my head. "Yes. Of course."

  "Excellent. Get up to Pier 57. Ship's known as the Oregon and I hope I don't see you again until it's crossing the Azores." He turned to the one screaming man, presumably the captain of the Oregon. "I've got my best man on it," he said, and taking a bite from an overwrought, exploding sandwich, dismissed me and the others with a flick of his corpulent hand.

  The music began. I took my leave, and a song, large and oompahish, a marching band, a musical revue, followed me up to the'S.S. Oregon so that my step was light. I arrived in no time at all, accompanied by the sounds of the street, vendors, politicians, upset mothers snapping at their charges—their voices were singing to my ears. Once I had repaired these dynamos the great Edison would have to listen to me. I imagined our exchange still with joyful music, this time an opera. I'd sing, "Dear Mr. Edison, you must consider I have built a device that will change the world. You see, whereas the DC technology you have been backing cannot transport energy farther than two miles, the AC engine I have built could send power out to California and back again with no energy loss. It works!"

  "You don't say!" he'd sing in a deep baritone.

  "Let me show you!" We would step over to a worktable on the opera stage, where I would withdraw my notes and sketches and spread them before him.

  He'd study my plans for a moment. "Geeeeeeen-iiii-us!" he'd sing with his arms open wide.

  "Perhaps I might be," I'd admit in harmony, and Act I would come to a close. Edison would take my hand and together we'd bend in deep bows as the audience would jump to their feet screaming with praise and applause. The curtain would fall, and instead of roses the audience would shower us with dollar bills, money I would wisely reinvest in building my own laboratory, one as productive as Edison's.

  The Oregon's two dynamos were a disaster. The coils were burned out and there were short circuits throughout the system. The entire ship had been plunged into darkness while the dynamos sparked and sputtered, a dangerous condition given the condensation leaking from above. I worked by the dim light of the sun that was sneaking in through a high portal, and when the sun finally set I called for the crew members assisting me to light the gas lamps. The original job had been thrown together in a slapdash style; in fact, I was sorely unimpressed with the original handiwork of the Edison Electrical Company. I worked with a team of sailors until the sun began to rise the following day. I'd labored over fifteen hours, having to rewire the coils entirely, but my exhaustion was replaced with joy when I heard the ship hum, her electricity restored.

  Walking away from the S.S. Oregon in the first hours of morning, I felt nimble and alert. I was pleased with the work I had done. I removed my jacket and walked through the empty streets in my shirt sleeves, returning to Edison's lab with the news that the job was finished. It was five o'clock; the sun was just touching New York City. I watched as a familiarly shaped man approached. I was no longer astonished at the coincidences that racked this city. I caught Edison and Charles Batchelor, who was just back from Europe, arriving for work.

  "Why, Charles, here is our young man running around all night," I heard Mr. Edison say.

  I defended myself against his chiding. "I am just leaving the Oregon, where both dynamos are operating brilliantly."

  Edison said not another word to me but inhaled sharply. My ears still functioning with phenomenal sensitivity, I heard, as he walked away, Edison whispering to Batchelor. The music began again. "Batchelor," he said, "this is a damn good man."

  Mr. Edison was well impressed with the work. The following day I caught up with him inside the chemistry room. Table after long table, each one covered with narrow beakers, pipettes, glass tubing, and fat brown glass jugs filled with intriguing concoctions, and though it seemed a small dream, I thought that if I could remain in Mr. Edison's employ my inventions would have a home. I made him an offer. "There is much I could do around here. Your workshop is nearly in shambles. There are horrible leaks in efficiency. I am certain I could, with some tuning up, save you a fortune in operating costs," I said, appealing to his love of money.

  He scratched the bulb of his chin and glanced skyward. "You don't say."

  "I guarantee it, sir."

  "Well, if you could there'd be fifty thousand dollars in it for you."

  "Fifty thousand dollars?" I asked. I had to be certain I'd heard correctly. I already had fifty thousand dollars' worth of ideas in desperate need of funding.

  "Yes," he said. "Fifty thousand dollars."

  And at that "Yes," each one of my ideas took flight, filling the sky with the possibility of their invention.

  A number of weeks passed and I carved out a place for myself in Edison's lab. He was intrigued by my accent and had searched for the town of Smiljan on a map. Unable to locate the tiny village, he asked me quite sincerely, "Have you ever eaten human flesh?"

  Outside of this question we'd had little chance to communicate directly, so I was surprised when one day I found him standing beside me. "Do you hear that sound?" The music had subsided weeks before.

  I turned. Mr. Edison was uncharacteristically working down with the people he called muckers, his ranks of assistants. "Which sound?" I asked him.

  And he paused, lifting his ear up toward the ceiling. "That. That. That" He pointed up, shooting his finger off in different directions at each "That."

  I heard many things. Beside me two muckers, one an older Hungarian who'd been in Edison's employ for a number of years, the other a young man just recently graduated from college—a fact that had placed him at the butt end of many a snide comment—were wrenched in a bitter disagreement: "If you had an ounce of sense you'd have known that aluminum plates are about as effective as peanut butter," screamed one man, while the other, wielding a hammer, dashed to bits a device that now resembled a junk heap, a device it had taken the two men four days to build. Though I'd been in the lab only a short while, I already recognized how Edison enjoyed pairing men who despised each other. Repulsion, frustration, disagreement, and anger were, Edison believed, the forge of good ideas.

  There was coughing, spitting, matches being lit to burn pipes, lunch pails being tossed aside at the sudden burst of a good idea. There was swearing and steam pipes clanging. There was the general din of machinery in motion, and there was the sound of Mr. Edison taking credit for all of it.

  One young mucker had been charged by Edison to turn a tinfoil phonograph into a machine that could record not only sound but sight. The task was proving impossible, on par with spinning straw into gold. The poor man's good sense was unraveling. He could be heard issuing shrieks of nonsense from one corner of the workshop.

  "That," Edison said, "is the sound of—" but his last word was obscured by a terrific crash.

  I was nervous, surprised to have been taken into his confidence. I prepared myself to learn the great
man's secrets. "What?" I yelled over the din.

  "The sound of capitalism!" he answered. "Ever heard of it?"

  "Yes. Indeed, I have," I said, recalling the sailors, the ship. The prison where they were sent. "Heard of it. Not certain I agree."

  "There's nothing wrong with capitalism," he told me.

  "Except that in order to sell something, a person must first own it, and how can a person own these things that we are inventing? How could I own alternating current? That's like owning thunder or lightning. I can't agree with that."

  "Men own thunder all the time. That's how America works. And please, I've heard enough about your alternating current. If that's the last time you mention this abomination, it will not be too soon. AC is dangerous, and, more importantly"—Edison drove his finger once directly into the center of my chest—"my light bulbs don't work on it. And my light bulbs," he reminded me, "are your bread and butter."

  I worked day and night and I can't say that the fifty-thousand-dollar reward was ever far from my thoughts. My own inventions grumbled daily in neglect, in need of the promised money. Arriving at 10:30 A.M. and not leaving until 5 A.M., I did not require sleep; indeed, sleep seemed only to subtract from my powers. I found the same to be true for food and companionship. They were all routes that sent my blood to strange lands, whereas I preferred to keep my blood marching through the same channels, in training. Fifty thousand dollars could take my inventions far. And so, though the hours I put in were excruciatingly long, it wasn't but a few months' time before I had finished the daunting task of updating his laboratory, creating a more efficient, the most efficient, environment. I whistled. I went to claim the pay Edison had promised.

  "I've finished" I told him.

  "Indeed. I've never seen such work. You take the cake."

  "I'd now like to receive the fifty thousand dollars you promised me."

  "You must be kidding me."

  "But sir, you promised that amount."

  "You've got a lot to learn about the American sense of humor," he said and started to laugh, as if to demonstrate what was so funny about America.

  I did not laugh. Silence prevailed until anger burned into distraction. My attention split. There were two choices waiting nearby. One was tucked up on a high, dusty shelf, peering out at me from behind a box of fuses. The other, like a fluttering of wings, stood by the open door, just about ready to leave. The two choices began to converse in patient, low whispers, as if telling secrets, as if they were both the voice of my father speaking to God.

  Edison continued talking to me. His lips moved, his chin hennishly pecked up and down, but I couldn't hear a word he was saying. I was deaf to all sounds but the whispering choices.

  "Psst," one said to the other. "I see you're getting ready to leave."

  I perked up my ears.

  "Yes," the other voice answered. "That's exactly what I was thinking."

  "Ah. I see. Striking out on your own? Set to change the world?"

  "Exactly."

  "Yes. I could tell. Well, then, goodbye. Good luck."

  "Same to you."

  "But, if I may, just one thing before you go."

  "Of course."

  "You'll never make it."

  "Oh, no?"

  "No. You need Edison. You see, for ideas to grow into something real, the one thing they most require is money, and out there, money is hard to come by."

  "Don't worry about me. I'll do fine. I've got lots of energy and lots of good ideas. Plus I can move far faster on my own. And anyway, if I stay here he'll just take credit for anything I might invent. He'll water it all down—taking something brilliant and turning it into something people want to buy."

  "Yes. That's true. But isn't that the point of invention? To make things that people want to buy?"

  "Hmm. I thought the point of invention was to improve people's lives."

  The laboratory was silent for a number of moments as if everyone there, all the other muckers and Edison himself, were poised in this disagreement. Both sides seemed correct. The silence lasted. The dust in the air stood still. The argument remained unsettled.

  I cleared my throat. "Mr. Edison," I said, "I resign."

  I've told almost no one what happened after that, Sam. I became a digger of ditches. I was destitute. When this work first began I was so angry that I felt an urgency to uncover what was below, as though I had been given a pickax and a shovel so I could dig a hole deep and dark enough to shield the heights of my shame. Fifty thousand dollars gone. A schooled engineer with an invention I knew would change the world, digging ditches for a living. I wasn't alone in my overqualifications. In our ditch-digging ranks there were three doctors, immigrants who had found it impossible to ply their trade here. There was one man who claimed he was very high in politics, "like a mayor," he said, "back in Romania," and from the look of his skin, clear and nearly see-through, I believed him. There was another man who owned a very large textile mill, but when the mill burned in an act of arson, he had nothing left. There were even some men who'd once been Union soldiers and had seen horrors. All of us somehow belonged in the ditch. Miserable or ashamed, we dug deeper and deeper. Each day the ditch reached new depths and nothing felt any different except for a cruel tightness in my shoulders and a pain across the palms of my hands.

  My breath made a fog before me, as did the exhalations of all the men working to my left and right. The chain of day laborers stretched to over eighty feet long. The dark dirt walls crept first above our hips and then above our shoulders until they reached a point approximately mid-forehead. When I stood up and stared straight ahead, my gaze would be met only by dirt and an occasional pebble or brown stone. To see ground level I had to look up.

  Down that low the soil was warmer than the air. I could feel it. I could feel the heat rising beneath my feet and knew the truth of my surroundings. Hell was nearby.

  I tried to imagine plans to build my alternating-current device, but each shovel strike knocked the idea from me. In the ditch my inventions were elusive, like trying to catch the last thread of a dream as you wake. The thread always snaps and thoughts of alternating currents were replaced by hunger in my stomach.

  We kept digging deeper. We weren't even sure why we dug. Days, weeks, months, and all I knew was the shovel strike and the grumbling of the others in the ditch. We rarely spoke. It was not long before I lost sight of these men entirely. I dug deeper and deeper without a thought for time because time does not exist at the bottom of a dark ditch, and the patch of blue-sky light that I could make out overhead became narrower and narrower each day. I fed myself on the black soil. I'd think of the promised fifty thousand dollars, Edison's American sense of humor, and I'd sharpen my shovel on a gray stone. I dug deeper still. My misery and my inventions both became notions vague and unimportant and far, far away. I dug.

  Until one day.

  "Hello, down there."

  The voice was rusty and distant by the time it reached my ears. I said nothing.

  "Hello, down there! I am looking for an engineer named Nikola Tesla."

  This name did sound vaguely familiar. I put down my shovel and listened.

  "Hello? Are you there, Mr. Tesla?"

  I tried to croak a response, but it had been weeks since I'd last spoken. I stammered and coughed, trying to clear some of the dirt from my throat. "Hello."

  "Yes! Hello. Mr. Tesla, is that you?"

  I rubbed my shoulders and arms, separating myself from the dirt and the ditch. "Yes. Yes. I am Nikola Tesla," I said, just remembering this fact myself.

  "Mr. Tesla, there is someone up here who would like to speak to you. Hold on one moment. We'll throw down a rope."

  I brushed my hands together, trying to loosen some of the dirt there. My efforts were useless. I was filthy. I waited, trying to focus on the pinprick of light above. I blinked my eyes. The day was blinding. "How long have I been down here?" I yelled up.

  "About a year," the answer came back, followed by the knotted
end of a thick rope. It hit me on the head. In the darkness I tested the rope, pulling it taut, and then began to climb from the hole I'd dug, up toward the sky, where Mr. A. K. Brown of the Western Union Telegraph Company, like a dream come true, was waiting for me to start the Tesla Electric Company, waiting for me to climb up and change the world.

  4

  You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.

  —H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

  LOUISA IS LATE getting home because of the blackout. It's been dark for a while by the time she unlocks the front door to her house. She turns the key. The door won't budge. She uses her shoulder to try to shove. Sometimes it sticks. But tonight even her shoulder fails to do the trick. She shoves and shoves and finds she can barely move the door an inch. Something is blocking it from the other side. She takes a running start and shoves one last time.

  "Aye! Hey, quit it!" she hears from inside.

  She stops to listen. "What are you doing?"

  Walter had, it seemed, buttressed himself inside the small foyer and was pressed up against the door. "I was waiting for you to get home," he says through the mail slot.

  "Well, I'm home now. But I can't get in."

  "I know," he says. "Give me a minute. I fell back asleep."

  "You're supposed to be at work."

  "I called in sick. Something important's come up."

  She hears him shuffling to his feet on the other side. "Why are you sleeping in the doorway?"

  "I didn't want to miss you," he says. "I didn't want you to take your boots off, even" He opens the door finally. "We can't be late." He is wearing yet another unclaimed winter coat from the hotel's lost and found. This one is dark gray with houndstooth flecks of tan and a moth hole the size of a cigar burn just over the heart. It's a bit too large for him. The shoulders ride up and his neck is hidden deep in the collar.