by Jill Jonnes
By early March of 1888, a month later, the Journal of Engineering and Mining was reporting, “All the electrolitic copper in this country is now firmly in the grasp of the syndicate. There appears, in fact, nothing to prevent prices from being advanced to any figure the syndicate may wish.”13 This unfortunate and ominous turn of events was a real blow to the Edison Electric Light Company. For instance, in the spring of 1887, the company had been putting together a bid for a Minneapolis central station powering 21,700 lights. They estimated the feeders at 254,000 pounds of copper and the main at 51,680 pounds. At seventeen cents a pound, copper costs would total $51,965. Each one-cent rise in copper pushed costs up $3,056. A three-cent rise—for copper prices were escalating steadily—would add $9,000 to the almost $52,000 price tag for copper. In painful contrast, the new Westinghouse AC central plants required a third as much copper.
Just as he was being squeezed by Westinghouse on one side and the rising price of copper on the other, Edison was presented with an irresistible opportunity for wreaking some sub-rosa vengeance on his new enemy. In early November of 1887, Edison, America’s most revered electrician, had received a beautifully penned letter from Dr. Alfred Southwick, a dour Buffalo dentist and one of three members of the New York State Death Commission. The commission’s task was to find a civilized alternative to hanging for state prisoners condemned to execution. The committee chairman was the rich New York attorney and philanthropist Elbridge T. Gerry, best known for activism in the prevention of cruelty to animals. The third member was Matthew Hale, an Albany politician. After a series of repellently botched state hangings, New York governor David Hill had wondered if this “Dark Age” system might yield to something of a “less barbarous manner.”14 All the newspapers had described in revolting detail the state hangman’s scandalous and repeated incompetence, whereby benighted criminals dangled in agony on too loose ropes, gasping until slow-motion strangulation finally silenced their death rattle. Or there was the equally gruesome but opposite problem: a noose so overtaut that it bloodily severed head from body before horrified official witnesses. In his letter to Edison, Dr. Southwick sought the inventor’s opinion on using electricity for electrocuting condemned criminals and also wondered if he could suggest “the necessary strength of current to produce death with certainty in all cases and under all circumstances.”15 Edison wrote back to Dr. Southwick declining to get involved, saying he opposed capital punishment. That was in November.
But Dr. Southwick was as hard pushing as his hometown of Buffalo. He was quite adamant that clean and modern electrocution should prevail (having once seen a man keel over neatly dead in an electrical accident), and he wrote the nation’s foremost electrician again in early December. Appealing to Edison’s sense of civic duty, he pleaded, “Science and civilization demand some more humane method than the rope. The rope is a relic of barbarism and should be relegated to the past.” These three commissioners of death—Dr. Southwick, politician Hale, and philanthropist Gerry—had made a thorough study of the history of lethality, conducting a survey of the state’s judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, and physicians on the issue, and Dr. Southwick was pleased to report that eighty-seven of the two hundred responding favored electrocution. What the Buffalo dentist needed now was Edison and his enormous prestige “as an electrician” to persuade the legislature.
Tellingly, on December 9, 1887, Thomas Edison changed his mind and wrote Dr. Southwick again. But this time, the world’s most famous electrical wizard was full of very definite and very damaging opinions. The quickest, most painless death, he asserted, “can be accomplished by the use of electricity, and the most suitable apparatus for the purpose is that class of dynamo-electric machine which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of those are known as ‘alternating machines,’ manufactured principally in this country by Geo. Westinghouse…. The passage of the current from these machines through the human body even by the slightest contacts, produces instantaneous death.”16 Was it the steadily rising price of copper? Had Westinghouse just won yet another central station contract from the Edison camp? Was it that the gas companies were proving harder to dislodge than anticipated, with their dropping prices and the much brighter gas mantle for their lights? We can only speculate. Whatever the reason for this hostile act, Edison’s endorsement did the trick, and in mid-1888 the New York State Legislature would establish electrocution—much to the outrage of (the rest of) the electrical fraternity—as the new means of capital punishment starting January 1, 1889. Edison had just quietly (and secretly) planted something of a legislative land mine intended to damage his AC rivals.
By February of 1888, Thomas Edison was no longer content to vent his rancor with secret attacks. Using the vehicle of the Edison Electric Light Company, he lashed out publicly, issuing what surely stands as America’s longest and most splenetic howl of corporate outrage. The eighty-four-page Edison diatribe, jacketed in angry scarlet and emblazoned with the title WARNING!, served as the official public salvo in one of the most unusual and caustic battles in American corporate history. Edison, with his DC system, was making his first open attack against Westinghouse and AC in the War of the Electric Currents. Thomas Edison, who had long (and reasonably) assumed that the electrical future was securely his—with all its glory and potential for riches—suddenly saw the famously tough, reckless, and industrially wealthy Westinghouse boldly swooping in from Pittsburgh to steal away his hard-earned prize. Edison would not sit back quietly and let what he saw as a dangerous system imperil not just his company, but the whole marvelous field of electricity.
What had triggered this furious verbal assault from the Wizard of Menlo Park? Why did he launch the War of the Electric Currents then? Edison, not the introspective sort, never did say. But we know that until 1885 Thomas Edison had been too busy (and fully confident of market dominance) to even bother suing the many lesser companies infringing on his 1879 light bulb patent. He had dismissed and largely ignored his competitors as shameless imitators, “patent pirates” who stole his ideas and inventions but who posed little genuine threat. But by 1885, as other companies began hurting his business, Edison had finally unmuzzled his top-dollar lawyers. Certainly part of his rising bitterness toward the Pittsburgh magnate was fueled by his anger at all infringers, for Westinghouse was among those making free use of an Edison-style bulb. Yet historian Harold Passer explains that Edison competitors “seriously questioned the validity of the Edison lamp patents. The United States company [controlled by Westinghouse], for example, considered its patent position much stronger than Edison’s because it owned the incandescent-lamp patents of Farmer, Maxim, and Weston. Both Farmer and Maxim had worked in the incandescent lighting long before Edison.”17 Westinghouse, ever a fighter, had further goaded Edison by filing a counter light bulb patent suit. Thus, however much the Edison attorneys might huff and puff in the courts, there was still at this point, says Passer, “reasonable doubt that the basic Edison [light bulb] patent would be sustained. It is probable that few manufacturers and users of incandescent lamps considered it a serious business risk to make and use these lamps without permission from the Edison company.”18
But angry as Edison was about light bulb infringers, George Westinghouse’s biggest fault was daring to trespass at all on Edison’s electrical terrain. When Thomas Edison first heard that the Pittsburgh industrialist was eyeing electricity, he famously snapped, “Tell him to stick to air brakes.”19 Not only had Westinghouse defied Edison, he was selling something original, a power system that was new, not just a second-rate copy of the Edison system. While the first half of WARNING! was dedicated to excoriating the light bulb infringers, much of the second half assailed Westinghouse. The whole AC system was “the most uneconomical yet offered to the public,” insisted the Edison people, once you factored in the greater efficiency of DC generators, the reliable track record of the more tested DC systems, the lack of a meter to measure AC use, and the absence of any AC motor.20 The DC motor remained Edison�
��s great trump card. Those who preferred AC were dismissed as “Cheap Johns” and “the Apostles of Parsimony,” shysters foisting inferior equipment on the unsuspecting.21 Edison had no interest in acknowledging the great strength of the AC system—its ability to serve large areas and expand as needed.
But Edison reserved his greatest fury for AC’s sheer dangers. Decreed the WARNING! booklet, “It is a matter of fact that any system employing high pressure, i.e. 500 to 2,000 units [volts], jeopardizes life.”22 The Edison people warned that if a transformer failed to step down the current, the whole building served would be a possible death chamber reverberating with high-voltage electricity. Thomas Edison had always prided himself on his system’s safety: “There is no danger to life, health, or person, in the current generated by any of the Edison dynamos” and “the wires at any part of the system, and even the poles of the generator itself, may be grasped by the naked hand without the slightest effect.”23 No other electrical company had invested such time and energy in devising safe insulation for its wires and careful placement in the ground far away from the public as had Edison. In contrast, Edison detailed in his WARNING! pamphlet the gruesome deaths by high-voltage AC of numerous AC workers. DC was a gentle, friendly current. AC was a stone killer. Edison suggested the AC people were criminally indifferent to safety just to save a buck and get ahead.
Edison’s rancorous corporate diatribe culminated by rallying the electrical troops to rise up against the infidels of AC: “All electricians who believe in the future of electricity ought to unite in a war of extermination against cheapness in applied electricity, wherever they see that it involves inefficiency and danger.” Edison humbly volunteered to serve as the moral compass in this holy war. Those, like George Westinghouse, who dared to forge ahead on an alternate and alternating path, however shimmering and promising, were now the official enemy, the besmirchers of the sacred ways. George Westinghouse is, they sneered, “the inventor of the vaunted system of distribution which is to-day recognized by every thoroughly-read electrician as only an ignis fatuus, in following which the Pittsburg company have at every step sunk deeper in the quagmire of disappointment.”24 The first open, public shots had now been fired toward Pittsburgh in the War of the Electric Currents.
In the spring of 1888, even as the papers began to track every instance of “electrocution by wire” and the Edison Electric Light Company had made known its ire with AC, the small world of New York electricians began to buzz with rumors about the former Edison man Nikola Tesla. He was said to have reappeared and to be up to something big down on Liberty Street, filing a steady stream of patents related to an AC system. And indeed Nikola Tesla had been wonderfully productive, churning out one new AC machine after another. To handle all the work, he had summoned from Europe his old school chum and fellow engineer Anthony Szigety, who had sailed into the choppy waters of New York Harbor on May 10, 1887, to the rousing sight of Auguste Bartholdi’s long-aborning Statue of Liberty. For six months now, the monumental goddess had been gleaming forth through each gray dawn, her torch of enlightenment radiantly lit from within by electricity and her bronze robes and grave face aglow from the thousands of candlepower at her feet. This luminous figure of welcome had been dedicated the previous winter with festive fanfare, after working-class readers of the New York World had sent in their pennies and dimes, showing the nation that ordinary people—not millionaires—would be the ones to finally erect the majestic sculpture on her Bedloe’s Island pedestal. And so, emerging from Castle Garden to see the greensward of Battery Park, crisscrossed by shaded gravel paths and so wonderfully cooled by the harbor breezes, Szigety was reunited with his old friend Tesla. The two were soon putting in intense all-night hours constructing numerous variants on the AC induction motor Tesla had drawn for him in the sands of the Budapest park.
Years later, Tesla’s first biographer, science writer John O’Neill, would recall how proud Tesla had been about the integrity of his vision. “When the machines were physically constructed not one of them failed to operate as he had anticipated…. Years had elapsed since he evolved the designs. In the meantime he had not committed a line to paper—yet he had remembered perfectly every last detail.”25 The rest of 1887 was a frenzy of creativity and secret construction as Tesla and his helpers turned out all the necessary components for three complete AC systems—single-phase alternating current, two-phase, and three-phase. He designed and built copper and iron models for each system—a dynamo (without the commutator!) that generated the electric current, an induction motor with its rotating magnetic core (again no commutators) to produce power, and then transformers to step up and step down that power. At the end of a whirlwind six months, Tesla had in his laboratory a whole system based on polyphase AC. On October 12, 1887, Tesla submitted an omnibus patent application, but the patent office requested it be broken down further. In November and December, Tesla filed for the first of what would eventually be forty patents covering the whole range of his AC system with its revolutionary induction motor. He was perfecting his AC system even as his old boss was denouncing AC to the world.
The ambitious young editor of Electrical World, Thomas Commerford Martin, a personable and ambitious bald English immigrant who sported a giant mustachio, stopped by Tesla’s lab. He quickly grasped that this little-known but highly charming Serb was going to be the next electrical titan, a visionary whose radiant dreams rivaled Edison’s. As a journalist, Martin savored the further drama that the unknown Tesla’s electrical dreams clashed with those of the world-famous Edison—AC versus DC. Tesla, just thirty-one, was as much a true humanist as ever, seeking to ease the hard labor of the whole world with his spectacular induction motor and alternating current system. What AC had lacked up until now was a workable motor that it could power (although many a well-placed inventor was struggling to solve that puzzle and cover himself in glory). Now here was Nikola Tesla, a little-known electrician of minor accomplishment, seizing that prize.
Thomas Commerford Martin appreciated immediately the epochal nature of Tesla’s AC motor and polyphase system and began considering how best he could shepherd this new genius to certain fame and millions of dollars. Martin was, fortunately, in a uniquely influential position. Not only was he the editor of the electrical field’s top American journal, he was also the current president of the prestigious American Institute of Electrical Engineers (an organization all of four years old). He was therefore well versed in the feuds and cutthroat rivalries of the electrical universe and knew how best to introduce such a large and brilliant star into its heavens at such a delicate and stormy moment. Martin departed Tesla’s Liberty Street lab in a great thrill of excitement, planning his campaign to launch Nikola Tesla. The English editor’s first task was to get others equally enthralled with Tesla’s system.
First, the AC polyphase machines needed to be tested and their revolutionary nature acknowledged by an outside expert of high standing. Martin arranged for Professor William Anthony, an eminent academic of electrical engineering at Cornell University, to come to Liberty Street and meet Tesla and his machines. Then machines were sent to him and several others for further testing. In March of 1888, Professor Anthony excitedly wrote a friend that he “was shown the machines under pledge of secrecy as applications were still in the Patent Office…. I have seen an armature weighing 12 pounds running at 3,000, when one of the (ac) circuits was suddenly reversed, reverse its rotation so suddenly I could hardly see what did it. In all this you understand there is no commutator. The armatures have no connection with anything outside…. It was a wonderful result to me … in the form of motor I first described, there is absolutely nothing like a commutator, the two (ac) chasing each other round the field do it all. There is nothing to wear except the two bearings.”26 So, just as Martin hoped, Tesla’s name and riveting invention were filtering out among the people who mattered. Professor Anthony, a completely disinterested party, had judged Tesla’s motors the equal in efficiency of existing direct current
models.
Now Martin recommended to Tesla that he prepare a lecture to establish himself before the electrical world. Tesla demurred. When the first seven of Tesla’s fourteen foundation patents were granted May 1, 1888, Martin again urged the Serbian inventor to make formally known to his electrical peers his magnificent breakthrough. Again Tesla excused himself politely, pleading exhaustion from the tremendous exertion of designing and constructing his whole complex system so swiftly. Professor Anthony then joined T. C. Martin in pressing Tesla to speak as soon as possible. Franklin Pope, editor of the Electrical Engineer and a Westinghouse engineer and patent attorney, had also been invited to Liberty Street, and he added his voice. Some years later, Martin would write that he “had great difficulty in inducing Mr. Tesla to give the Institute any paper at all. Mr. Tesla was overworked and ill, and manifested the greatest reluctance to an exhibition of his motors, but his objections were at last overcome. The paper was written the night previous to the meeting, in pencil, very hastily, and under the pressure just mentioned.”27 Martin brushed aside Tesla’s worries about discussing aspects of his system for which he had not yet even filed patents. Nikola Tesla needed to establish his preeminence in this field. So on the cool Tuesday evening of May 15, Tesla traveled up to Columbia College on Madison and 47th Street, where the American Institute of Electrical Engineers was convening.
The meeting that evening commenced with various laudatory remarks celebrating Martin’s energetic term as president. Then Nikola Tesla, tall, slender, his hair parted in the middle above a wide forehead, stood before the assembled electricians, a sea of men attired in high hats and dark frock coats, the crowd interspersed with the occasional interested lady. Tesla, with his high cheekbones, looked like a foreign, somewhat eccentric aristocrat in his preferred swallowtail coat. Speaking in his excellent but accented English, he first thanked his benefactors, Professor Anthony and Mr. Martin and Mr. Pope, men any ambitious electrician would wish as patrons. Then he excused his wan and weary appearance and the inadequacy of his presentation. “The notice,” he said in his high voice, “was rather short, and I have not been able to treat the subject so extensively as I could have desired, my health not being in the best condition at present. I ask your kind indulgence, and I shall be very much gratified if the little I have done meets your approval.”
