Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  George Westinghouse’s hard-fought triumph at Niagara and the industrial spying charges had done nothing but aggravate his already acrimonious relations with GE. And many, including historian Harold Passer, have wondered why the powerful Morgan forces behind GE had not exerted their considerable influence at Cataract to win GE the coveted dynamo contract. (Early on, Edward Dean Adams had honorably divested himself of all Edison GE stock to remove his own possible conflicts.) Passer concluded that the stakes were just too high, “the financiers were afraid to go against the judgment of their engineering advisers.”16 GE did win a contract for transformers and transmission. Yet so parlous was GE’s situation as the post-panic depression settled in that its Wall Street backers decided to take another tack, eyeing a takeover of the unwilling Westinghouse. This would put GE firmly in control, not just of Niagara, but of 90 percent of the electrical market, thus creating J. P. Morgan’s favorite industrial arrangement, near or total monopoly. But there was also the paramount issue of who owned the all-important Tesla AC patents. Already that issue had made it impossible for GE to win the Niagara dynamo contract. Westinghouse and GE were reportedly locked in three hundred patent lawsuits, many over AC designs, and a “merger” would save each $1 million a year in legal fees. So the markets and rumors began to bubble and boil.

  “General Electric was most anxious to bolster its jerry-built structure with the solid Westinghouse concern,” wrote Thomas Lawson in his muckraking Gilded Age classic, Frenzied Finance, which examined how Wall Street’s robber barons made easy and unscrupulous millions through watered stock, market manipulation, and monopolies. “Suddenly the financial sky became overcast. The stock market grew panicky … Wall and State streets [were] full of talk about General Electric’s probable absorption of Westinghouse…. This was the signal. From all the stock-market sub-cellars and rat-holes of State, Broad, and Wall streets crept those wriggling, slimy snakes of bastard rumors which, seemingly fatherless and motherless, have in reality multi-parents who beget them with a deviltry of intention…. [Rumors] … seeped through the financial haunts of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and kept hot the wires into every financial centre in America and Europe, where aid might be sought to relieve the crisis. There came a crash in Westinghouse stocks and their value melted.”17 In this era long before any such regulating body as the Securities and Exchange Commission, Westinghouse fought back with the weapons of the time. He hired Lawson, a specialist in stock market manipulation, and Lawson masterminded a retaliatory attack on GE stock, an attack so ruinous that the Morgan forces retreated. The Westinghouse stock recovered, and George Westinghouse got on with his Niagara power contract. Eventually, a wiser Westinghouse reached an 1896 patent-sharing agreement with GE that allowed the firm use of the all-important Tesla patents, ending such GE takeover attempts.

  As George Westinghouse moved the mammoth Niagara Falls Power Company project steadily to completion, Nikola Tesla’s aura of fame glowed more brightly. Thomas Commerford Martin, the ever ambitious editor of Electrical Engineer, had been faithfully promoting his friend’s work and career since Tesla’s reluctant but momentous first lecture at Columbia College in mid-1888 on the AC induction motor. In late 1893, Martin and Tesla published a thick book titled The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, which included all the inventor’s major lectures, as well as a brief profile by Martin and many of Tesla’s early patent applications. Martin, a distinctive figure in Manhattan social circles with his handsome bald head, soulful eyes, bristling mustache, and energetic ways, had decided the time was ripe to introduce Tesla beyond the confines of the world of electrical science. So Commerford, as his friends called him, had set off in the December cold to the Union Square offices of the genteel and middlebrow Century magazine, there to persuade associate editor Robert Underwood Johnson, amid his towering stacks of manuscripts and books, that Nikola Tesla was the next wizard, a figure comparable to Edison. Commerford proposed to write a profile of this fascinating Serb. Johnson, a handsome man with a close-cropped black beard and gold-rimmed glasses, was sufficiently intrigued to tell him to bring Tesla to a dinner party at his Lexington Avenue brownstone, where the editor and his vivacious wife, Katherine, cultivated a wide range of famous and lively luminaries, writers like Mark Twain, the shaggy naturalist John Muir, musician Ignace Paderewski, and popular actors and actresses playing the New York stage. Just before Christmas, Tesla dutifully accompanied Commerford to dine, the tall, slender inventor wearing one of his elegant tailored evening suits. Tesla appeared haggard and wan, but he proved to be a riveting conversationalist.

  Both Johnsons were completely enchanted by the charismatic and courtly Tesla. Robert Johnson had met a great many famous and accomplished men and women and was more than familiar with all the usual egotism combined with notable limitations of real learning and intellect. In Tesla, Johnson believed he had found that rare man, one steeped in the most abstract electrical science, but also “widely read in the best literature of Italy, Germany and France as well as much of the Slavic countries to say nothing of Greek and Latin. He is particularly fond of poetry and is always quoting Leopardi … or Goethe or the Hungarians or Russians. I know of few men of such diversity of general culture or such accuracy of knowledge.” Yet this electrical and cultural prodigy was also a lovely human being. Johnson described his new friend’s personality as “one of distinguished sweetness, sincerity, modesty, refinement, generosity and force.”18 So that evening began a long and warm friendship. Commerford, of course, secured his magazine assignment. The Johnsons insisted that the exhausted-looking inventor return a few days hence for a rejuvenating Christmas dinner, a jovial celebration with their two teenage children and others.

  Christmas Day in Manhattan dawned wonderfully balmy and springlike, a great blessing for the poor in their cold tenements. The widespread economic misery brought on by the summer’s panic had reduced so many to destitution and so many others to outright beggary that The New York Times described a muted holiday largely dedicated to alleviating want. Every church gathered clothing and food for the needy, while many served large, filling meals and provided small presents for the ragged, unwashed children of the new poor. A thousand newsboys—abandoned urchins ever present on the city’s streets eking out a living selling papers—gobbled down their annual Noel feast of turkey, ham, and mincemeat pie served at the Newsboys’ Lodging House on Duane Street. At the Gerlach Hotel, where such want was out of sight, Tesla donned his elegant clothes and strolled forth, joining the fashionable Christmas crowds thronging Broadway, window-shopping the stores bedecked with winter greens. The whole city, rich and poor, was out enjoying the April-like respite from winter. Many were streaming up to Central Park, but Nikola Tesla was going east to Lexington Avenue.

  Tesla so enjoyed the Johnsons’ gaiety and intelligence that day, and it was such a strangely warm evening, that he invited them after dinner to venture downtown to see his laboratory, the first of many such nocturnal visits. Long after, Robert Johnson recalled those extraordinary forays down to South Fifth Avenue and the tromp up the stairs to Tesla’s laboratory loft. These outings eventually included other favored guests like Twain and architect Stanford White, whose Power House No. 1 at Niagara was to shelter all three of Tesla’s thirteen-foot-tall AC dynamos. Wrote Johnson of those lab visits, “Lightning-like flashes of the length of fifteen feet were an every-day occurrence, and his tubes of electric light were used to make photographs of friends as souvenir of their visits. He was the first to make use of phosphorescent light for photographic purposes—not a small item of invention in itself.”19

  Through the Johnsons and then White, Tesla became something of a society darling, a sought-after guest swirling through Manhattan’s most glittering homes, private salons, and lavish restaurants. Tesla reciprocated by hosting elaborate dinner parties in private rooms at the delectable Delmonico’s. At Stanford White’s urging, Tesla and Robert Johnson joined the arty Player’s Club across from Gramercy Park. Te
sla still worked prodigious hours and frequently declined the invitations that showered down. But when he allowed White to cajole him into going sailing late one November, the architect wrote gleefully, “I am so delighted that you have decided to tear yourself away from your laboratory. I would sooner have you on board than the Emperor of Germany or the Queen of England.”20 It was something of an odd pairing, for Tesla, with his priestly devotion to electricity and his phobias for germs, showed no interest in women or sex, while White was a sexual satyr whose lubricious pursuit of delicious young females eventually led to his shooting death by an outraged husband.

  In February of 1894, Commerford’s Century profile of Tesla ran, complete with a moody engraving from a handsome Sarony photograph. The article was Commerford at his most florid, gushing that “Mr. Tesla has been held a visionary, deceived by the flash of casual shooting stars; but the growing conviction of his professional brethren is that because he saw farther he saw first the low lights flickering on tangible new continents of science.”21 This admiring (if overwrought) article in a major national magazine naturally caused quite a stir, prompting the New York press to become interested. A few months later on Sunday, July 22, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Manhattan’s biggest daily, ran a long and prominent profile. Written by popular columnist Arthur Brisbane, the headline and subheads ran OUR FOREMOST ELECTRICIAN, “Greater Even Than Edison,” “The Electricity of the Future,” and so forth. Brisbane, unlike Commerford, did not understand anything about electricity, nor did he pretend to. “Every scientist knows his work,” wrote Brisbane of Tesla, “and every foolish person included in the category of New York society knows his face. He dines at Delmonico’s every day. He sits each night at a table near the window … with his head buried in an evening paper.”

  Brisbane’s article was illustrated with a full-length drawing of Nikola Tesla resplendent in formal cutaway coat and striped dress pants and radiating “the Effulgent Glory of Myriad Tongues of Electric Flame After He has Saturated Himself with Electricity.” This was, of course, Tesla’s most famous lecture stunt, running many thousands of volts through himself until electrical flames licked all about his person. He confessed to Brisbane, “My idea of letting this current go through me was to demonstrate conclusively the folly of popular impressions concerning the alternating current. The experiment has no value for scientific men. A great deal of nonsense is talked and believed about ‘volts’ AC…. You see voltage has nothing to do with the size and power of the current.” Brisbane, like most who met Tesla, found him mesmerizing, and the two sat up all that hot, still night at Delmonico’s talking, leaving only when the dawn broke and the scrub ladies appeared with their mops and pails to swab the restaurant’s marble floor. Brisbane told the New York World’s 280,000 Sunday readers: “When Mr. Tesla talks about the electrical problems upon which he is really working he becomes a most fascinating person. Not a single word that he says can be understood. He divides time up into billionths of seconds and supplies power enough from nothing apparently to do all the work in the United States. He believes that electricity will solve the labor problem. That is something for Mr. [Eugene] Debs to ponder while he languishes in his dungeon. It is certain, according to Mr. Tesla’s theories, that the hard work of the future will be the pressing of electric buttons.”

  That fall, The New York Times weighed in on Sunday, September 30, 1894, with multiple columns on NIKOLA TESLA AND HIS WORK, with the subhead “Advancing with Certainty to Greatest Triumphs.” In contrast with Brisbane’s lighthearted romp, The New York Times made an exhaustive attempt to explain Tesla’s work in high frequency and the science behind his wireless lights. Oddly, Niagara was not even mentioned. The truth was that even as work on the Westinghouse dynamos was advancing steadily, Tesla was passionately and utterly absorbed with a new and more abstruse electrical frontier. Daily he labored away in his laboratory, oblivious to the commercial cacophony wafting up from the busy street below. Nikola Tesla was deep into a completely new electrical dream, one that he had confessed to New York World reporter Arthur Brisbane in their long evening at Delmonico’s: “I look forward with absolute confidence to sending messages through the earth without any wires. I also have great hopes of transmitting electric force in the same way without waste.”22

  Wireless transmission of power. While Tesla would speak openly of his work in a general way, he was highly secretive about the specifics of his research into what we know today as radio. By mid-1894, Tesla had built a small portable radio transmitting station, and all that year he continually tested and improved it. Many an afternoon and evening he climbed the stairs with one of his draftsmen to the broad roof above his laboratory and set up the transmitter. Then he would take his receiver and head out to high-up places progressively farther away, testing to see how far his wireless radio signals could travel. By winter Tesla was setting up on top of where he himself lived, the Gerlach Hotel (a “Strictly Fireproof Family Hotel”), thirty blocks uptown, a mile and a half north of his laboratory. Up on the Gerlach roof, ten stories above the stylish and exclusive shops of Broadway, Tesla would carefully send up a tethered balloon filled either with helium, hot air, or hydrogen. The balloon and its string were holding aloft, as high as was practical, an aerial. A cable was attached to the hotel’s water main. Tesla would then tune in his receiver to successfully receive his draftsman’s broadcast signals from the lab roof downtown. All that winter, Tesla fine-tuned his primitive radio, knowing that as soon as the Hudson River was clear of ice in the spring, he would take a river steamer north and see just how far he could sail toward Albany and still receive transmissions. So as the year ended, Tesla was in fine fettle, with every reason to feel triumphant.

  Certainly the year 1895 promised yet more glory for Nikola Tesla, for even as he perfected his new radio, he could anticipate the turning on of the electric power at Niagara Falls. At long last, seven years after the unknown electrician had first sold his patents to George Westinghouse, four years after he gave up his royalties to help save the company, Tesla’s Westinghouse AC dynamos would be installed in Stanford White’s cathedral of power. The great moment was on the horizon, when the inlet gates to the Cataract canal would open and Niagara’s glass-green waters would flood through. Funneled into the three giant penstocks, the cold river water would fall with a tumbling roar toward the water turbines. As those great sunken wheels revolved in a frothing, whirling blur, each steel shaft, too, would whirl. Up in the glowing riverine light of the powerhouse, atop the gleaming, whirling steel shafts, Tesla’s trio of great dark dynamos would also whirl, creating magnetic fields of power. And from those humming dynamos would flow an invisible river of electricity, quietly crossing the bridge to the transformers, there to become high voltage and mighty, flashing out into the world, where individual transformers would again lower its invisible and silent flow to light tens of thousands of bulbs, to power great industries, to run the Buffalo streetcars, to brighten man’s nights and lighten his load. They had called him a dreamer, but this was no dream.

  And so great glory would rightly be Tesla’s. Others in time surely would have solved the problem, for the conundrum of the AC motor and the polyphase generator had been very much in the air. But he, Nikola Tesla, had been there first. His place in history was secure. Yet it was not just glory Tesla sought, but the financial means to work as he would. He fervently believed AC was just the beginning, an interim stage in a far more sophisticated yet simpler system of power he was already working on: wireless transmission. And no one less than Edward Dean Adams, a much admired judge of men, money, and prospects, wished to be his financier. Adams had, it turned out, been quietly courting Nikola Tesla for some time. Adams, that wise old frog, understood far more than almost any other Wall Street money man the enormous value of Tesla’s AC patents. And Tesla was quite forthright in asserting that these were just the first of his revolutionary inventions to be developed and commercialized. In mid-February 1895, a one-paragraph story in Electrical En
gineer announced the formation of the Nikola Tesla Company, which would “manufacture and sell machinery, generators, motors, electrical apparatus, etc.”23 The company had a gilt-edged group of directors—Edward Dean Adams and his son Ernest, the hardworking and ambitious William Rankine, Tesla’s long-ago rescuer Alfred S. Brown, one Charles Coaney of New Jersey, and Tesla. The story spoke of $5,000 in capital, but this seems a laughable sum, and Tesla later said Adams alone invested $100,000. So as the spring of 1895 neared, Nikola Tesla was an inventor to be much envied.

  Then calamity struck. At 2:30 in the morning on March 13, 1895, Nikola Tesla’s laboratory burned to the ground in a fire so intense, the whole loft building imploded and his whole floor collapsed into the inferno, obliterating every single piece of his electrical apparatus. When the cold gray dawn shed its light, all that was to be seen at 33-35 South Fifth Avenue, reported the New York Sun, were “two tottering brick walls and the yawning jaws of a somber cavity aswim with black water and oil.” Charles Dana, one of the most revered newspaper editors of his time, wrote, “The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s workshop with its wonderful contents, is something more than a private calamity. It is a misfortune to the whole world. It is not in any degree an exaggeration to say that the men living at this time who are more important to the human race than this young gentleman can be counted on the fingers of one hand; perhaps on the thumb of one hand.”24 Fortunately, Tesla had not been toiling away late that night or he might have been trapped in the conflagration and incinerated.