Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  The Westinghouse Electric Company now set standard AC frequencies of 60 cycles per second for lighting and 30 cycles for motors. Nikola Tesla once again joined the Westinghouse effort. In late September of 1892, he was urgently ordering various apparatus from Pittsburgh “to carry out some improvements on my motor,” noting that “time is very precious.”22 He asked that all be delivered to his fourth-floor laboratory on South Fifth Avenue, a loft building in the ramshackle commercial and industrial area. By December of 1892, Westinghouse had submitted its two-phase AC design for Niagara to the Cataract Company. GE’s entry came in soon thereafter, with a design similar in all ways but that it employed three-phase AC.

  Up at Niagara Falls, the gargantuan Cataract construction project blasted and rumbled onward. In December 1892, the tailrace tunnel had been completed. By January of 1893, Professor Forbes was writing in the Electrical Engineer that the big intake canal “about a mile and a half above the American Fall … has been dug out 500 feet wide, and 1,500 feet long, with a depth of 12 feet. Along the edge of this canal wheel pits are being dug 160 feet deep, at the bottoms of which the turbines will be placed. The water is admitted to the penstocks by lateral passages (or head-races) which can be closed by gates.”23 The other notable event at Niagara Falls that January was “the most ample and substantial” ice bridge in almost three decades, since the winter of 1855. Reported The New York Times, “The steady zero weather of the past week has filled the upper river with ice which is pouring over the falls in vast quantities and adding each hour to the jam which is called the ‘bridge.’ … The heavy fall of snow and the clouds of mist from the Falls, which settle on top, freezing as fast as they fall, form a natural cement.”24

  Day after day that January, the river ice crashed over the falls, until the gorge below became a fantastical arctic landscape, a massive shifting, grinding ice field, dazzling in the winter sun and gorgeous with its towering white ice mountains. Hundreds of tourists bundled in dark winter coats and cloaks, women and girls with fanciful fur hats and muffs, streamed out onto the broad ridges of the ice bridge, tiny dark figures laughing and shouting as they gazed up at the beauteous sight of the falls frozen into hundreds of gigantic craggy icicles. Professor Forbes, who was at Niagara later that winter, marveled that “the precipices are concealed behind icicles 60 feet long. Every rock in the river is the nucleus for a dome of frozen spray rising 150 feet.”25 On cold wintry mornings, all the trees and bushes near the river were encased in a shimmering coat of ice, and visitors felt they had entered a wondrous fairyland. But the river ice had a prosaic and serious side, and keeping it out of the power plant machinery would, some winters, prove a brutal struggle.

  While the ice bridge and the thrilling danger of walking across its ever shifting, dazzling landscape was attracting winter tourists to Niagara, Cataract consultants were visiting the sprawling, noisy Westinghouse electrical plant in Pittsburgh. From January 9 to 13, 1893, Coleman Sellers and Johns Hopkins physics professor Henry Rowland, another Cataract consultant, observed and subjected to many tests the new Westinghouse AC generators and transformers, assessing if they were suitable to this biggest of all electrical projects. They watched the working of a new rotary converter that could turn AC into DC (important for street trolleys), measured safety and switching apparatus, observed how too low frequencies would make lights flicker, and tested motors. Sellers came away very favorably impressed and in his report noted, “A careful examination of the work done in this establishment showed excellent workmanship and correct engineering design in all the machinery examined…. The workmanship is beyond criticism in quality.”26 In his report, Professor Rowland concluded that Westinghouse had “the greatest experience in the practical use of the alternating system and they seem to control the most important patents.”27

  The next month, the two men visited the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, and Sellers noticed how similar—but by no means equal—the GE apparatus was to the Westinghouse equipment. He noted that “very considerable change would have to be made to make it mechanically the equal.” Moreover, he was very leery of GE’s proposed use of three-phase AC, saying, “I should incline to the biphase on account of its greater simplicity and its adaptability to a broader field of usefulness.” Knowing that Professor Forbes, who was annoyingly away in England during these crucial visits to Westinghouse and GE, favored the AC design of the Swiss firm Brown, Boveri, Coleman Sellers ended his twenty-five-page report sent from his Baring Street office in Philadelphia thus: “I do most earnestly protest against the purchase of the foreign plant if as good electrical results can be anticipated from the home made machine, even if the first cost is seemingly greater.”28 Aside from his patriotic chauvinism, Sellers the engineer could not see how a foreign firm could fix and maintain the inevitable problems in a timely fashion.

  Not surprisingly, the AC patent issue was looming larger and larger. As Coleman Sellers bluntly told Edward Dean Adams, “Until the contrary is proved by the courts, [Westinghouse] claims control of what is most important for our purpose at the present time in America. I am not aware of any claim to ownership in this country of what can stop the owners of the Tesla patents from commanding the market…. My present opinion is that no foreign company can secure the Cataract Construction Co. against all losses from patent litigation.”29 The previous month, February, Edward Dean Adams, from his office on the fourth floor of the prestigious Mills Building, had begun a private correspondence with Nikola Tesla, seeking his opinion on a variety of electrical matters, often about whether reports sent to Adams were technically correct. Other times, he was grappling to better understand the new AC technology, such as Tesla’s synchronous and multiphase motors. Tesla, acutely aware that George Westinghouse was vigorously competing for the Niagara power contract, used his private letters to Adams (scrawled on stationery from his new residence, the Gerlach Hotel) to press home again and again the broad scope of his AC patents. The inventor’s message was clear: If any other company said it could provide a multiphase AC generator and, above all, AC motors that would then power factories, they were infringing on his Westinghouse patents. In a February 2 letter, Tesla wrote, “I have not heard from Germany yet, but I have not the slightest doubt that all companies except Helios,—who have acquired the rights from my Company,—will have to stop manufacture of phase motors. Proceedings against the infringers have been taken in the most energetic way by the Helios Co. It is for this reason that our enemies are driven to the single phase system and rapid changes of opinion.”

  Modesty played no part in Tesla’s self-confident missives to Edward Dean Adams, a financier so influential, so utterly critical in deciding whether Nikola Tesla would live out one of his oldest, most cherished electrical dreams. While in high school, Tesla would later recall, “I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle I would go to America and carry out this scheme.”30 In fact, Tesla had devised something far more original than a water wheel, and now the decision about the contract hung in the balance. He lost no opportunity to trumpet his advantages. When Adams inquired whether a Thomson-Houston patent might be comparable to Tesla’s, the inventor asserted in a March 12 letter that this patent had “absolutely nothing to do with my discovery of the rotating magnetic field and the radically novel features of my system of transmission of power disclosed in my foundation patents of 1888. All the elements shown in the Thomson patent were well known and had been used long before.” When Adams sought his opinion on a DC system, Tesla wrote on March 23, barely able to contain his horror at “how disadvantageous, if not fatal, to your enterprise such a plan would be, but I do not think it possible that your engineers could consider seriously such a proposition of this kind.”31

  And in fact, on May 6, 1893, the officers of the Niagara Falls Power Company declared unequivocally that polyphase alternating current would be their choice. This was, at the time, still a very b
old and highly controversial stance. The eminent Sir William Thomson, chairman of the International Niagara Committee and just elevated to become Lord Kelvin by Queen Victoria, cabled Adams on May 1 to head off the announcement. He proposed an ambitious DC plan, urging, “Trust you avoid gigantic mistake of adoption of alternate current.”32 Edward Dean Adams, in his two-volume history of the Niagara Falls Power Company, noted how much that momentous decision was based on “faith and hope that electrical engineers could produce apparatus much larger in size than ever had been built and that new types which were then hardly beyond the stage of experiment would prove successful.”33 After all, on what did they truly base this leap of faith, this major commitment of many (steadily mounting) millions of their own hard cash? The “outstanding actual achievement in power transmission was at Telluride,” where the gold mine stamping mill had been running for two years now, sending, in truth, piddling amounts of power up through rugged mountains to run a small motor. Then there had been a highly successful—but nonetheless experimental—demonstration at the 1891 Frankfurt Exposition, where power was transmitted one hundred miles.

  Then, of course, there was the triumph of the just opened Chicago World’s Fair, with the nighttime Court of Honor awash in dazzling electricity. Wrote Adams, “The construction of twelve polyphase alternators of a thousand horsepower each and the electrical illuminations of a great White City for the first time in history were great events, but they were overshadowed in real significance by a more important though less spectacular exhibit.”34 That was, of course, the working model of Nikola Tesla’s universal AC power system, with its AC generator, transformers, transmission lines, working induction motors, synchronous motor, and Westinghouse-invented rotary converter that supplied direct current for the railway motor. George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla had finally convinced the Niagara engineers and millionaires, many of whom had been deeply skeptical, some outright hostile, that alternating current truly was the ideal for creating and distributing power in the coming age of electricity. And so, in the spring of 1893, as the Chicago World’s Fair opened, Westinghouse and Tesla verged on complete electrical triumph, with the great Niagara dream tantalizingly within their grasp.

  Their chief American rival for this sought-after prize, this ultimate showcase of electrical power, was, of course, GE, the much maligned electrical trust. For some time, George Westinghouse had been wrathfully suspicious that GE was stealing his company’s hard-won, highly valuable mechanical and electrical knowledge. Even though all Niagara submissions were supposed to be completely confidential, he had discovered the incredible similarity between his and GE’s Niagara plans, something mentioned by Sellers in his report to Adams. (GE had varied its design only by making it triple-phase.) In early May, one of the Westinghouse engineers learned that the Westinghouse Company’s blueprints and many documents about prices, labor costs, and other privileged information were indeed at GE’s Lynn plant. George Westinghouse immediately sought a search warrant, and GE was caught red-handed. Westinghouse had one of his draftsmen arrested for secretly selling the firm’s World’s Fair and Niagara blueprints for thousands of dollars to two GE men, one a general superintendent in the GE railway department. GE insisted they were only trying to see if Westinghouse was infringing on their patents. The Pittsburgh district attorney happily announced the discovery of this “conspiracy” May 8, 1893, and his intention to seek grand jury indictments of not just the underlings on both sides, but the eminent Charles Coffin, GE’s president and top executive.35

  Coffin was furious and quickly wrote an assuaging letter to his financiers, saying to Vanderbilt son-in-law Hamilton McK. Twombly, “I hope you are not disturbed … while it is altogether probable that some of their blue prints may have been in our possession, it was absolutely without my knowledge or sanction…. If there be any similarity between their [Niagara] plans and ours … it is purely accidental. Be that as it may, there is an implied charge against the Niagara Co. of very bad faith [not keeping each submission confidential] in the statements of the Westinghouse Co…. It is part of the bitter and vituperative work of the Westinghouse people…. [They] will distinctly lose prestige and business as the result of their ridiculous behavior in connection with this matter.”36 (When the case went to trial that fall, Coffin was no longer a defendant and the Pittsburgh jury deadlocked.)

  But galling as the spying case was to George Westinghouse, it paled in comparison with the perfidious deed that came next. On May 11, Edward Dean Adams and the Cataract Construction Company dropped a large, unexpected, and outrageous bombshell. Adams wrote a one-page missive to each of the four electrical companies still competing—GE and Westinghouse in America and Brown, Boveri and Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon in Europe—coolly informing them that their services were no longer needed. The Niagara dynamo contract, this most glittering, sought-after, and prestigious of electrical prizes, was not going to any of them. Instead, the Cataract Company, having had the privilege of examining every aspect of these four firms’ proprietary electrical designs, having availed themselves of the companies’ best men and technical advances, was now appointing their own electrical consultant, Professor George Forbes, to design a generator to accommodate its 5,000-horsepower water turbines.

  Most outrageous, these designs by Professor Forbes, said Adams, “are well advanced,” which meant that even as Westinghouse, GE, Oerlikon, and Brown, Boveri engineers were struggling to solve and overcome all manner of obstacles for Niagara and discussing these with Sellers and Rowland and Forbes, Cataract well knew that Professor Forbes was already working on a generator. Adams had the gall to inform the rejected American bidders that “we expect to submit the same to you, as well as to others, for proposals for construction within a brief period. Please accept our sincere thanks for the response you have made to our invitations for proposals.”37 One of the world’s most eminent electricians, Silvanus Thompson, later expressed the profession’s collective outrage, denouncing Cataract’s blatant and “ungenerous picking of the brains of others.” He deemed this “contemptible collaring of rival plans … the one discreditable episode the savour of which will ever cling about the undertaking.”38

  Adams, ever the gentleman even as he dished out such bitter soup, wrote Tesla to let him know that Professor Forbes would design the dynamo, not Westinghouse or GE, and also indicated his own Brahmin ire over the sordid public airing of GE-Westinghouse spying charges. Tesla, himself ever the gentleman, replied that same day, dismissing the GE spying brouhaha as “a trifle, to be sure, not worthy of any consideration.” The elegant Serbian inventor was the soul of cordiality, writing from his comfortable suite at the Gerlach Hotel on West 27th Street (conveniently around the corner from Delmonico’s, the gastronome’s delight), “I can assure you that your decision does not in the slightest affect my sympathies and my sincere wishes that your magnificent enterprise may meet with the success it deserves.”

  But after these pleasantries, Tesla got down to business, which was to strongly warn Adams he “could not help seeing difficulty ahead.” The obvious problems were that Cataract had been shown “in good faith” Westinghouse plans based on “long continued experience and items on the subject not found in any treatise on engineering,” and of course, there were Tesla’s patents and the many Westinghouse improvements developed since to make them commercially ready. This uncomfortable fact would, Tesla indicated, make it very difficult for Professor Forbes to design a noninfringing alternating current system. This was sufficiently worrying to Adams that he passed it along to Coleman Sellers in Philadelphia. Sellers advised letting Tesla know that it was Cataract’s intention to redesign the generators to better suit the turbines and then go back to the “competitors, with the expectation that they can find it to their advantage to aid us in the development.”39 And there the matter rested, leaving a residue of bitter ill will.

  Niagara Falls Power Company horse and wagon

  CHAPTER 12

  “Yoked to the Cataract!”
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br />   All the dappled summer of 1893, Professor George Forbes lived at Niagara and worked on the Cataract dynamo design. “I had a lovely house in parklike grounds … on the banks of the placid river above the upper rapids,” he later wrote. “I went to bed early and rose at five or six in the morning, and I shall never forget the delights of those glorious summer mornings at one of the most beautiful sites in the whole neighborhood.” From time to time, Professor Forbes squired around visiting electricians en route to or from the World’s Fair who also wished to see the marvels of the Great Falls and Cataract’s progress on its mammoth power project. The gigantic wheel pits at Power House No. 1 were well advanced, and soon the three mighty turbines would be installed deep in its bowels. Highly favored visitors were treated to the clammy stygian walk through the completed mile-and-a-quarter tailrace tunnel from the powerhouse down to the roaring river gorge.