Wizard
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Formerly a resident of Manchester, England, Batchelor, a “master mechanic,” had been sent to America a decade earlier to present innovative threadmaking machinery recently created by his employers, the Coates Thread Company.3 There he met Edison and shortly became his most trusted associate. Batchelor worked on the first phonographs and on perfecting the filament for the lightbulb. He also ran operations in New Jersey and then in Europe, owning a 10 percent share of Edison’s many worldwide companies.4 An open-minded individual, Batchelor was approachable, although also rather busy.
Anthony Szigeti probably emigrated from Budapest at the same time as Tesla, since both were hired by Puskas and “were together almost constantly in Paris.” Szigeti wrote, “Tesla [was very]…much excited over the ideas which he then had of operating motors. He talked with me many times about them and told me his plan…[of] constructing and operating motors…[and] dispensing with the commutator.”5
Having just purchased a large factory at Ivry-sur-Seine, for the construction of generators and manufacture of lightbulbs, Batchelor, as Edison’s closest partner, was planning on erecting central lighting stations throughout Europe. He also had plans in England, where the Crystal Palace Exposition was then displaying Edison’s new incandescent lamp.6 Batchelor would need good men to run the concerns and wrote Edison frequently as to the expertise of the various workers. He was particularly impressed with Puskas, who had successfully run the Edison lighting exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1881. “Puskas…[is the only worker] having any idea of ‘push,’” he wrote, “and I think that you should insist on him [becoming a partner].”7
Within six months Edison Continental would be producing lamps superior to those from America;8 the company would erect central stations in most of the major cities of Europe for indoor lighting and also administer the large outdoor arc lamps which were being used to illuminate the urban streets. Tesla, who was working at Ivry-sur-Seine, would be trained with the other workers to travel out and help run these facilities. “I never can forget the deep impression that magic city produced on my mind. For several days after my arrival I roamed thru [sic] the streets in utter bewilderment of the new spectacle. The attractions were many and irresistible, but, alas, the income was spent as soon as received. When Mr. Puskas asked me how I was getting along…I [replied] ‘the last twenty-nine days of the month are the toughest!’”9
In the mornings, before work, Tesla would arise at 5:00 A.M. to swim twenty-seven laps at a bathhouse on the Seine, and in the evenings he would play billiards with the workers and discuss his new AC invention. “One of them, Mr. D. Cunningham, foreman of the Mechanical Department, offered to form a stock company. The proposal seemed to me comical in the extreme. I did not have the faintest conception of what that meant except that it was the American way of doing things.”10
T. C. Martin writes: “In fact, but for the solicitations of a few friends in commercial circles who urged him to form a company to exploit the invention, Mr. Tesla, then a youth of little worldly experience, would have sought an immediate opportunity to publish his ideas, believing them to be [a]…radical advance in electrical theory as well as destined to have a profound influence on all dynamo electric machinery.”11
In his spare time, and as was his custom, Tesla wrote out the specifications and mathematics of his AC invention in a notebook12 and worked on alternative designs for his flying machine. He probably sought out financial backers, for he received an invitation to go on a shooting expedition from a “prominent French manufacturer.”13 Perhaps the inventor had not totally recovered from the strange illness he had almost succumbed to in Budapest, for after this outing he suffered the “sensation that my brain had caught fire. I saw a light as [though] a small sun was located in it and I [passed] the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head.” Writing this passage almost forty years later, Tesla claimed that “these luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when a new idea opening up possibilities strikes me.”14
In the summer he worked on the lighting at the opera house in Paris or went to Bavaria to help in the wiring of a theater; and in the autumn he may have helped in the laying of underground cables for the new central station going up in Paris or traveled to Berlin to install incandescent lighting at the cafes.15
At the end of the year Tesla “submitted to one of the administrators of the Company, Mr. Rau, a plan for improving their dynamos, and was given an opportunity.” Louis Rau, who was director of the Compagnie Continental Edison in rue Montchanien and had “his beautiful home lit with the Edison system,”16 allowed Tesla to implement his modernization plan. Shortly thereafter the young inventor’s automatic regulators were completed and accepted gratefully.17 Tesla was probably hoping to be compensated for his new contributions, but he was sent to work in Strasbourg before financial compensation was awarded.
In January 1883, Batchelor shipped twelve hundred lamps to the Strasbourg plant, located at the railroad station.18 And within three months Tesla arrived to oversee the operations. There he would stay for the next twelve months.
Batchelor had been urging Edison to test the generators coming from America for at least “two or three days with a [full] load,” as fires from faulty armatures and poor insulation were becoming too common. The powerhouse at Strasbourg, in particular, had been subject to this type of problem.19 Since “all our plants are differently constructed,”20 it would take well-trained and creative engineers to run things smoothly. Batchelor demonstrated confidence in Tesla’s abilities by sending him to Strasbourg; however, he seems not to have mentioned Tesla in his correspondence with Edison. In any event, Tesla’s account of the situation in Strasbourg corroborates Batchelor’s: “The wiring was defective and on the occasion of the opening ceremonies a large part of a wall was blown out thru [sic] a short-circuit right in the presence of old Emperor William I. The German Government refused to take the plant and the French Company was facing a serious loss. On account of my knowledge of the German language and past experience, I was entrusted with the difficult task of straightening out matters.”21
Having anticipated a long stay in the region, Tesla had brought with him from Paris materials for his first AC motor. As soon as he was able, Tesla constructed the motor in secret in a closet “in a mechanical shop opposite the railroad station”;22 however, summer would arrive before this first machine was in operation. Anthony Szigeti, his assistant, forged an iron disk, which Tesla “mounted on a needle,” having surrounded it, in part, with a coil.23 “Finally,” Tesla wrote, “[I] had the satisfaction of seeing rotation effected by alternating currents of different phase, and without sliding contacts or commutator, as I had conceived a year before. It was an exquisite pleasure, but not to compare with the delirium of joy following the first revelation.”24
Tesla presented his new creation to his friend, Mr. Bauzin, the mayor of the town, who tried his best to interest wealthy investors; “but to my mortification…[there was] no response.” Upon his return to Paris, he sought promised compensation for achieving a difficult success in Strasbourg. Approaching his employers, “after several days of…circulus vicious, it dawned on me that my reward was a castle in Spain…Mr. Batchelor [pressed] me to go to America with a view of redesigning the Edison machines; I determined to try my fortunes in the land of Golden Promise.”25
John O’Neill, Tesla’s first major biographer, has suggested that Batchelor wrote a note of introduction to Edison which read, “I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.”26 Evidence for the veracity of this oft-repeated tale is lacking. Batchelor, for instance, had been back in America for at least three months prior to Tesla’s arrival;27 thus, he would not have had to write a letter. Furthermore, there is evidence that Edison had already met Tesla in Paris during a littleknown sojourn he took to look over his European operations at that time.28 O’Neill also refers to Batchelor incorrectly as Edison’s “former assistant”29 when Batchelor was probably Ed
ison’s closest lifelong colleague. Edison does, however, substantiate that “Tesla worked for me in New York. He was brought over from Paris by Batchelor, my assistant,”30 but there is no reference to Batchelor’s appreciation of Tesla’s genius. On October 28, 1883, fully a year after Tesla began working for Edison Continental, while he was stationed in Strasbourg, Batchelor singled out “the names of…two [or three] I can mention as capable as far as their work shows: Mr. Stout—an inspector; Mr. Vissiere—my assistant; Mr. Geoffrey—whose plants are always spoken well of…There are others capable, but I think these are the best.”31 Certainly, had Tesla impressed Batchelor as O’Neill contends, he should have been listed in this letter or in numerous other letters to Edison that I have reviewed.
Before Tesla left for America, he spent time with a scientist who was studying microscopic organisms found in common drinking water. Combined with the scare he had with his bout with cholera a few years earlier, Tesla acquired a phobia which led him to shun unpurified water, scour his plates and utensils before eating, and refrain from frequenting unsavory restaurants. He would later write, “If you would watch only for a few minutes the horrible creatures, hairy and ugly beyond anything you can conceive, tearing each other up with the juices diffusing throughout the water—you would never again drink a drop of unboiled or unsterilized water.”32
In the spring of 1884, with funds for the journey supplied by Uncles Petar and Pajo,33 Tesla packed his gear and caught the next boat for America. Although his ticket and money and some of his luggage were stolen, the young man was not deterred. “Resolve, helped by dexterity, won out in the nick of time…[and] I managed to embark for New York with the remnants of my belongings, some poems and articles I had written, and a package of calculations relating to solutions of an unsolvable integral and to my flying machine.”34 The voyage appears not to have been a happy one; a “mutiny” of sorts occurred on board, and Tesla was nearly knocked overboard.35
In 1808, Sir Humphry Davy created artificial illuminescence by running an electric current across a small gap between two carbon rods. This simple device evolved into the arc lamp, used in English lighthouses in the 1860s and displayed at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 by Moses Farmer. By 1877 numerous investigators were exploring the possibility of placing the incandescent effect within glassed enclosures because they would be much safer this way for marketing to households, and a race developed between such inventors as Charles Brush, Thomas Edison, Moses Farmer, St. George Lane-Fox, Hiram Maxim, William Sawyer, and Joseph Swan.
“I saw the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance,” Edison said.36 And so he challenged William Wallace, Farmer’s partner, to a race as to who would be the first man to create an efficient electric light. Boasting that he would soon light up New York City with 500,000 incandescent lamps, Edison and his business manager, Grosvenor Lowery, were able to secure large amounts of capital from such investors as Henry Villard, owner of the first trans-American railroad, and financier J. Pierpont Morgan.
In November 1878, after three years of research, a hard-drinking telegrapher by the name of William Sawyer and his lawyer-partner Albion Man, applied for a patent for an incandescent lamp with carbon rods (filaments) and filled with nitrogen. They proclaimed that they had beaten Edison. Joseph Swan, another competitor, removed the nitrogen and kept the carbon filament but created a low-resistance lamp. Realizing that the amount of power required to send electricity a few hundred feet was prodigious using the low-resistance design, Edison created, in September 1878, a high-resistance vacuum lamp that utilized considerably less power. Together with a revolutionary wiring called a feeder line,37 his success was further augmented by a new Sprengel pump, which William Crookes had been recommending for the creation of vacuums in glass-enclosed tubes. It would be another six months—April 22, 1879—before he would file for a patent, but his new design would lower power requirements and thereby cut copper costs one hundredfold.38
The competition was fierce, and Edison’s financial backers were running scared. They suggested to Edison that they purchase the Sawyer patents and combine the two companies. Edison had not yet settled on carbon as a filament and was exhausting his working capital in experiments with boron, iridium, magnesium, platinum, silicon, and zirconia. At the same time, he had also sent explorers to the Amazon, Bolivia, Japan, and Sumatra in search of rare forms of bamboo, which he was also considering. It would not be until 1881 that he finally settled upon a form of carbonized paper.
During this time, however, and without Edison’s knowledge, Sawyer and Man approached Lowery. Their lamp was superior to Edison’s; it was patented, and it worked. Lowery tried to bring Edison in for a four-way discussion; however, Edison sent an emissary who “dared not relay to Edison all Lowery had said. But Edison heard enough to be jolted from his indecision…Cursing and spraying tobacco juice, he exclaimed it was the old story—lack of confidence!”39
Edison was adamant about not joining with Sawyer or Swan or anyone else. He continued rash publicity campaigns which announced “a veritable Aladdin’s lamp…[It is] Edison’s light, the great inventor’s triumph.”40
With the backing of Wall Street moguls, Edison began to illuminate Menlo Park and the private homes of the wealthy in New York City. The first was that of J. Pierpont Morgan, at Thirty-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue. The year was 1881.
To run the generator Edison designed a steam engine and boiler and placed the power plant under the stable in a newly dug cellar at the back edge of the property. Wires were connected to the new incandescent lights placed in the gas fixtures of the home via a brick-lined tunnel which ran the length of the yard just beneath the surface. “Of course, there were the frequent short circuits and many breakdowns on the part of the generating plant. Even at the best, it was a source of a good deal of trouble for the family and neighbors. who complained of the noise of the dynamo. Mrs. James M. Brown next door said that its vibrations made her house shake.” Morgan had to pile sandbags around the inside of the cellar and place the machinery on heavy rubber pads “to deaden the noise and the vibrations. This final experiment restored quiet and brought peace to the neighborhood until the winter, when all the stray cats in the neighborhood gathered on this warm strip in great numbers and their yowlings gave grounds [from the neighbors] for more complaints.”41
The following year, on September 4, 1882, the new Central Station at Pearl Street opened. It provided electric lighting to many Wall Street buildings, including Morgan’s office.
Tesla’s ship dropped anchor in New York in late spring of 1884, just as the monumental decade-long project the Brooklyn Bridge was being completed and the last components of the Statue of Liberty were being hoisted into position. Twenty-eight years old, “tall and spare, [with] thin, refined face”42 and sporting a mustache, Tesla still had the look of an adolescent.
His first impression of the New World was that it was uncivilized, a hundred years behind the lifestyle of the great European cities. Deferring his planned meeting with Edison one day to look up an old friend, Tesla had the good fortune to pass by “a small machine shop in which the foreman was trying to repair an electric machine…He had just given up the task as hopeless.”43 One rendition of the story has Tesla agreeing to fix the machine “without a thought for compensation.”44 On a separate occasion, Tesla revealed that “it was a machine I had helped design, but I did not tell them that. I asked…‘what would you give me if I fix it?’ ‘Twenty dollars’ was the reply. I took off my coat and went to work, [and]…had it running perfectly in an hour.”45 The story is important because, depending on the rendition, two different Teslas emerge, one motivated by money and one not.
In either case, Tesla was shocked by the rough character of the New World.46 He proceeded cautiously to Edison’s new laboratory, a former ironworks at Goerck Street, situated only a few blocks from the central lighting station Edison was constructing at Pearl Street.47 Batchelor probably met Tesla and introduced him to the inventor. �
��I was thrilled to the marrow by meeting Edison,” Tesla said.48
Possibly aware of the proximity of Transylvania to Tesla’s birthplace and a resurgence of interest in the tales of Vlad Dracula, the fifteenthcentury alleged vampire who lived in the region, Edison inquired whether or not the “neophyte…had ever tasted human flesh?”49
Aghast at the question and Edison’s “utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene,”50 Tesla replied in the negative and asked what Edison’s diet consisted of.
“You mean to make me so all-fired smart?”
Tesla nodded.
“Why, I eat a daily regimen of Welsh rabbit,” Edison replied. “It’s the only breakfast guaranteed to renew one’s mental faculties after the long vigils of toil.”
Wanting to emulate the grand wizard, the neophyte took on the peculiar diet, “accepting as true, in spite of a protesting stomach, the jocular suggestion.”51
Tesla’s various accounts of this meeting differ markedly, depending on his mood at the time of the telling and his awareness of the size and shape of the audience. For in his autobiography, published in six installments of Hugo Gernsback’s futuristic magazine Electrical Experimenter, Tesla wrote that ‘the meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life. I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries…and felt that most of my life had been squandered.”52
It wasn’t long before Tesla realized that his academic training and mathematical skills had given him a great engineering advantage over Edison’s plodding strategy of trial and error. In a bitter moment of reminiscence, at the time of Edison’s death in 1931, Tesla said: “If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search…I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor…Trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense…the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle.”53