by Marc Seifer
It was little wonder that Tesla was completely unsuccessful in describing his new AC invention to Edison and had to settle for Batchelor’s suggestion that he redesign the prevailing DC machinery instead. According to Tesla, “the Manager had promised me $50,000 on completion of this task,”54 and so Tesla set himself to work, “experiment[ing] day and night, holidays not excepted,” as was the custom of the factory.55
Thomas Alva Edison was an extremely complex fellow. Ornery, ingenious, determined, and unyielding, he was a fierce competitor and the single most important inventive force on the planet. He had descended from a grandfather, John Edison, a Tory who had been tried for treason during the American Revolution and banished to Canada, and a father, Samuel Edison, who had tied his son to a whipping post and beaten him publicly after young Al, as he was called then, had started a fire in a barn which threatened the rest of the buildings in the community.56 He had scrapped with and outwitted others on his way to Wall Street and had outdistanced competing inventors numerous times. Notches on Edison’s belt of “better mousetraps” included the telephone transmitter (microphone), an electrical pen, a musical telephone, and the duplex, an ingenious device which enabled a telegraph to send four messages in two directions simultaneously.
Edison was known to curse and swap jokes with his men at his research and development center, the world’s first invention factory. He kept his business free of cockroaches with a protective electric grid lining the edges of the floor and “electrifried larger varmints” with his “rat paralyzer”; he even occasionally wired the washbasin to keep his men on their toes. Edison was a trickster, a storyteller, and a con artist. The use to the consumer and the cost of production or “the market test [was] the sole test of achievement…Everything he did was directed by [that] realization.”57
In an entirely different realm of invention, besides being a better technician than anyone else, Edison was a creator; his most original work was a machine that talked: the phonograph. With this device, Edison had entered the realm of the immortal; he was the “Wizard of Menlo Park.”
Inviting the public to his laboratory on a number of occasions, Edison amazed people at all levels of society with machines that sang and reproduced the sound of birds, artificial lamps that changed the darkness into a light cherry red, and various other mechanical contrivances to make one’s workload easier.
The invention of the electric light was to Edison not only a new, clever technology; it contained the seeds of a new industry. His mere presence in the field drove the stocks of the gas-burning companies into the grave. Yet Edison planned to utilize their pipes by channeling copper wire through them instead of dangerous gas and to replace flame by electricity. He moved the center of his operation from New Jersey to New York City. There Edison rented a town house for his wife and family in celebrated Gramercy Park, the abode of such luminaries as authors Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, architect Stanford White, Century editor Richard Watson Gilder, and publisher James Harper.58 Edison later described his plans for orchestrating a revolution in home illumination: “I had the central station in mind all the time…I got an insurance map of New York City, laid out a district [bounded by] Wall Street, Canal, Broadway [and the] East River, [and purchased] two old bum buildings down in Pearl Street. They charged us $75,000 a piece. I tell you it made my hair stand on end.”59
Edison’s financial problems were numerous. Not only were there expensive start-up costs, there were also problems with the extreme inefficiency of the DC system and court battles on invention priorities and marketing battles against such competitors as Brush Electric, Consolidated Electric, Sawyer-Man, Swan Incandescent, Thomson-Houston, United States Electric, and the Westinghouse Corporation.
“Tell Westinghouse to stick to air brakes. He knows all about them,” Edison complained;60 but Westinghouse would not listen.
Edison’s other major competitor was Elihu Thomson. With Edison embroiled in a legal contest with Sawyer, Thomson used the ambiguity of the moment to appropriate the incandescent lamp Edison had given him and make it the template for ones produced and sold by the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. On October 8, 1883, the patent office ruled that William Sawyer had priority over Edison “for an incandescent lamp with carbon burner.”61 This decision, though later overturned in Edison’s favor, enabled Thomson to continue his piracy. Due to Sawyer’s priority, Thomson now saw himself as “ethically in the clear”62 as no clear-cut inventor had supposedly been established.
Edison thus came to vigorously dislike Thomson, a man who had betrayed his trust, and Westinghouse, who was now siding with Sawyer. For safety, aesthetic, and practical reasons, Edison was a proponent of underground cables and DC. “Nobody hoisted water and gas mains into the air on stilts,” he said.63 He publicized the fact that electricians were dying on the dangerous overhead wires of his competitors, but this battle eventually became transformed into DC versus AC; Edison stayed with DC, while Thomson and Westinghouse began to experiment with AC. As AC utilized much higher voltages, Edison warned the public against it. A long legal battle with Westinghouse ensued and ran into the millions of dollars. Thomson again managed quietly to avoid the courts while he expanded his business.
Francis Upton, Edison’s mathematician, graduate of Helmholtz’s laboratory, and contemporary of Tesla’s in terms of European education, had calculated in 1879 that to light 8,640 lamps for only nine city blocks, the cost would be $200,812 for the 803,250 pounds of copper required. Through clever wiring, improvements in lamp design, and “an invention corollary to the parallel circuitry,” Edison had cut copper costs almost 90 percent, but no matter what he did, a power station could never reach beyond a radius of one or two miles.64
Upton, whom Edison affectionately referred to as “Culture,” suggested that they look into the new advances in AC, and so he was sent, in 1884, to Europe to negotiate with Karl Zipernowski, Otto Blathy, and Max Deri, three Hungarians who had greatly improved the Gaulard-Gibbs AC transformer. Edison even paid $5,000 for an option on this “ZBD” system, but it was mostly to placate Culture. The wizard did not trust AC, and if his “damn fool competitors” were in it, he certainly didn’t want any part of it. Twenty years of experience, ingenuity, and doing the impossible with DC had to be worth something. The “bugs” could be worked out.
Yet at the same time that Edison constructed DC generators to make the earth tremble65 and competitors stole his ideas or fashioned other primitive electric-lighting devices, a Serbian genius in his very midst had designed a system which made this prevailing technology obsolete.
According to W. L. Dickson, one of Edison’s earliest biographers and longtime employee at Menlo Park and Goerck Street, “Nikola Tesla, that effulgent star of the scientific heavens, even then gave strong evidence of the genius that has made him one of the standard authorities of the day.” Tesla’s “brilliant intellect” had held Dickson and the other workers “spellbound” as he “alternately fired [us] with the rapid sketching of his manifold projects or melted [us] into keenest sympathy by pictures of his Herzogovinian home…But like most holders of God’s intrinsic gifts, he was unostentatious in the extreme, and ready to assist with counsel or manual help any perplexed member of the craft.”66
Although unable to interest Edison in his AC motor, Tesla was able “within a few weeks [to win]…Edison’s confidence.” Tesla’s greatest success came when he fixed a badly broken set of dynamos on Henry Villard’s ocean liner, the Oregon, the first boat ever to have electric lighting. “At five o’clock in the morning, when passing along 5th Avenue on my way to the shop,” Tesla recalled, “I met Edison with Batchelor and a few others who were returning to retire.
“‘Here is our Parisian running around at night,’ he said. When I told him I was coming from the Oregon and had repaired both machines he looked at me in silence…But when he walked some distance I heard him remark: ‘Batchelor, this is a damn good man,’ and from that time on I had full freedom i
n directing the work.”67
Alternately spending time at the Pearl Street Station or the Goerck ironworks, Tesla installed and fixed indoor incandescent lamps and outdoor arc lamps, reassembled many of Edison’s DC generators, and designed twenty-four different types of machines that became standards which replaced those being used by Edison.68 At the same time, he worked on patents on arc lamps, regulators, dynamos, and commutators for DC apparatus, trying to devise a way to approach his boss with his new invention, obtain a raise, and gain compensation for the lump sum he had allegedly been promised.
The atmosphere was informal, Tesla occasionally dining with Edison, Batchelor, and other higher-ups, such as Edward Johnson, president of the Edison Illuminating Company, or Harry Livor, another engineer and small-time entrepreneur in machine-works manufacturing. Their favorite spot was a small restaurant opposite the Edison showroom at 65 Fifth Avenue. There they would swap stories and tell jokes.69 Afterward, some would retire to a billiard house where Tesla would impress the fellows with his bank shots and vision of the future.70
Livor boasted of an agreement with Edison and Batchelor resulting in a company capitalized at $10,000, formed for the manufacture of shafting. Edison and Batchelor provided the machinery and money, Livor, the tools and services.71 Impressed, Tesla asked for advice, particularly how to obtain a raise from his present modest salary of eighteen dollars per week to a more lucrative twenty-five dollars. “Livor gladly undertook this service…to intercede with Batchelor…but greatly to his surprise was met with an abrupt refusal.”
“No,” replied Batchelor, “the woods are full of men like [Tesla]. I can get any number of them I want for $18 a week.” Tate, who began employment as Edison’s secretary shortly after this episode, which Livor related to him, noted that Batchelor “must have been referring to the woods I failed to find in the vicinity of Harlem.”72 Tesla’s version of the story is somewhat different: “For nine months my hours [at the Edison Machine Works] were 10:30 A.M. till 5 A.M. the next day. All this time I was getting more and more anxious about the invention [AC induction motor] and was making up my mind to place it before Edison. I still remember an odd incident in this connection. One day in the latter part of 1884 Mr. Batchelor, the manager of the works, took me to Coney Island, where we met Edison in the company of his former wife. The moment that I was waiting for was propitious, and I was just about to speak, when a horriblelooking tramp took hold of Edison and drew him away, preventing me from carrying out my intentions.”73
In analyzing this story, a discrepancy as to the timing was discovered, for Edison’s wife caught typhoid fever in July 1884 and died on August 9. Since Tesla had arrived in May or June, and if Edison’s wife was present, then the event took place in late June or early July, only a few weeks after he began his employment. In a close working environment, with the hours as described, even a few weeks could seem like a very long time. One way or another, with the death of Edison’s wife and Edison’s extreme dislike of such AC men as Elihu Thomson and George Westinghouse, no time for discussing an AC invention may have been “propitious.” The “horriblelooking tramp” who grabbed Edison away was probably Edison himself, who was known to dress like a “Bowery bum,” Tesla using a euphemism to soften the story. “The manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars [for redesigning equipment], but when I demanded payment, he merely laughed. ‘You are still a Parisian,’ remarked Edison. ‘When you become a full-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke.’”74
If a “completion agreement”75 had truly been made with Edison, Tesla should have had it put in writing. It seems unlikely that this amount of money for a somewhat ambiguous bargain would be offered, but it was well within Edison’s nature to make “expensive if indefinite promises of rewards as a way of getting the men to work for low wages.” Edison, who could be more deaf than he actually was, at times, was known to “put on” his college-educated ‘sperts, as when he convinced the chemist Martin Rosanoff that his first lightbulb filament was made out of Limburger cheese! Deeply hurt, Tesla left the company and set out on his own.76
5
LIBERTY STREET (1886-88)
There were many days when [I] did not know where my next meal was coming from. But I was never afraid to work, I went to where some men were digging a ditch…[and] said I wanted to work. The boss looked at my good clothes and white hands and he laughed to the others…but he said, “All right. Spit on your hands. Get in the ditch.” And I worked harder than anybody. At the end of the day I had $2.
NIKOLA TESLA1
Although Tesla felt cheated when he departed from the Edison Machine Works in the early months of 1885, his time spent there had enabled him to study the master at work. Simultaneously, it allowed Tesla to begin to organize his own company and write up first drafts in a notebook on advances in arc-lighting design and on the construction of DC commutators. It also enabled him to see that Edison was mortal and fallible and that he, Tesla, had a scheme significantly more advanced. A new confidence began to emerge.
In March 1885, Tesla met with the well-established patent attorney Lemuel Serrell, a former agent of Edison’s, and Serrell’s patent artist, Raphael Netter.2 Serrell taught Tesla how to break down complex inventions into individualized improvements, and on the thirtieth of the month they applied for Tesla’s first patent (no. 335,786), an improved design of the arc lamp which created a uniform light and prevented flickering. In May and June they applied for other patents on improvements on the commutator for the prevention of sparking and for regulating the current by means of a novel independent circuit coupled with auxiliary brushes. In July yet another arc-lighting patent was filed. This one enabled exhausted lamps to automatically separate themselves from the circuit until such time as the carbon filaments could be replaced. Unfortunately, the design had been anticipated by Elihu Thomson. Although “embarrassed” by having been unaware of the state of the art in America at this time, Tesla was able to create novel refinements, and they were patentable.3
During his trips to Serrell’s office, the inventor met with B. A. Vail and Robert Lane, two businessmen from New Jersey.4 With ambiguous assurances that they were also interested in the AC motor, Tesla agreed to form a lighting and manufacturing company with them in Tesla’s name in Vail’s town of Rahway, New Jersey. There, after nearly a year of toil working with Paul Noyes, from Gordon Press Works, he completed the installation; this, his first and only municipal arc-lighting system, was used to illuminate the streets of a town and some factories.5 The efficiency and original approach of the system attracted the attention of George Worthington, editor of Electrical Review, who “took pleasure” in featuring the company on the front page of the August 14, 1886, issue.
For the next few months, the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Company reciprocated by advertising in the journal. Vail hired the mechanical artist Mr. Wright of New York City to draw the lamp and dynamo and at the same time, along with Tesla’s help, created bold copy which claimed: “the most perfect…and entirely new [arc lighting] system of…automatic self-regulat[ion]” In a display ad four times the size of most other electrical concerns, the Tesla system guaranteed “absolute safety and great saving of power…with no flickering or hissing.”6
Having obtained stock in the company and with a little money in his pocket, Tesla moved into a garden apartment in Manhattan. Decorating the grounds “in the continental fashion with colored glass balls on sticks,” the cosmopolitan’s delight was short-lived. “Children broke in and stole the balls, so Tesla replaced them with metal ones. The stealing continued, however, so Tesla ordered his gardener to bring them into the house every night.”7
Unfortunately, neither Vail, who was president of the company, nor Lane, who was vice president and treasurer, cared about Tesla’s other creation. To them, an AC motor was a seemingly useless invention. The sensitive inventor became incensed, for he had postponed exploiting the AC system until the Rahway project was completed under the assumption that
his backers would support that quest as well. To his shock, Tesla was forced out of his own concern and handed “the hardest blow I ever received.”8 “With no other possession than a beautifully engraved certificate of stock of hypothetical value,”9 the inventor was bankrupt. Betrayed by men he trusted, the inventor came to consider the winter of 1886-87 a time of “terrible headaches and bitter tears, my suffering being intensified by my material want.”10 He was forced to work as a ditchdigger. The occupation was particularly demeaning for the self-perceived aristocrat. “My high education in various branches of science, mechanics and literature seemed to me like a mockery.”11
Tesla’s crisis abated in the spring. Having interested the foreman in his engineering prowess, he was introduced to Alfred S. Brown, a prominent engineer who worked for Western Union Telegraph Company. Brown, who himself held a number of patents on arc lamps,12 had probably seen the article and advertisements on Tesla in Electrical Review. Well aware of the limitations of the prevailing DC apparatus, he became immediately impressed with the “merits” of Tesla’s AC inventions and thereupon contacted Charles F. Peck, “a distinguished lawyer” from Englewood, New Jersey.13 Peck “knew of the failures in the industrial exploitation of alternating currents and was distinctly prejudiced to a point of not caring even to witness some tests.”
