Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Young, untried, but certain, the young Tesla spent every spare moment (not in classes) on his designs. He did not eat. He did not sleep. For months, he groped his weary way through corridors of thought and could focus on nothing else. Imagine a bright mind so fixated on a single pinprick of light—endlessly winding around and around the same problem. His closest friends worried about his sanity—with good reason. As early as 1835, James Cowles Prichard had identified “monomania” as a type of madness, a partial insanity “in which the understanding is disordered under the influence of some particular illusion, referring to one subject, and involving one train of ideas.”38 In 1845, the English translation* of Jean-Étienne Esquirol’s treatise added that there “has been no advancement in the sciences, no invention in the arts, nor any important innovation, which has not served as a cause of monomania.”39 Granted, the prognosis might apply to most of the genius and inventive minds we’ve so far encountered; in fiction as well as fact, it is unwise to tell a genius (even a mad one) that he can’t. But the strain did result in nervous and physical collapse.

  The AC discovery makes up the better part of Tesla’s autobiography, his heroic epic at climax, life hanging in the balance, heart racing 250 beats per minute: “I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between [. . .] A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable.”40 Emaciated, trembling, assaulted by his own sense of thwarted becoming, Tesla did not expect to recover. His friend and fellow engineer Anthony Szigeti carried him daily into open air that he might have the benefit and balm of nature—where at last, the flash of inspiration came. Watching the rays of a fading sun, Tesla recited Goethe, whose Faust he had memorized by heart. The words are of failure, of loss.† But, as soon as they left his lips, Tesla writes, “the idea came like a flash of lightning [. . .] I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.” Tesla had invented, in that instant, the first AC motors with rotating magnetic fields.

  Whether it be truth or the exaggeration of a good storyteller, it’s impossible not to hear notes of Victor Frankenstein’s triumph in Tesla’s words: “A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence.”41 His diagrams awed other engineers, not with complexity but with their simplicity. Unlike those before him, Tesla used two circuits instead of one, generating dual currents that were 90 degrees out of phase with each other. “The net effect,” writes Seifer, “was that a receiving magnet (or motor armature), by means of induction, would rotate in space and thereby continually attract a steady stream of electrons whether or not the charge was positive or negative.”42 If we return to the water wheel problem on a river whose current keeps changing direction—the trick was to have 1) a second stream of “water” and 2) a wheel that could rotate in space in either direction. It wouldn’t work on a river, but it did work in Tesla’s motor. The lightning strike had revealed what more than four years of monomaniacal thinking had not produced: Poeschl had been wrong—harnessing AC was not impossible, and more importantly, Mr. Tesla could do it. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asks Szigeti, “Isn’t it Sublime? [. . .] I must return to work and build the motor so I can give it to the world. No more will men be slaves to hard tasks. My motor will set them free, it will do the work of the world.”43 He needed only to find those who would support it—and finally the story catches up with Edison. Tesla went to see the Wizard.

  When the reporters saw Edison’s first bulb with its platinum filament, they said it was a mechanism “so simple and so perfect that it explained itself.” In reality, the filament was inferior and burned out within an hour; the reveal had been staged to please the press and gain the support of investors. It would be months of sleepless labor before the Menlo Park lab developed the carbon filaments that ultimately made the lightbulb successful. With Tesla, however, the concept of an alternating, polyphaser motor truly operated on the engineering mind as a sudden, brilliant, and obvious concept. His design—modeled above in Seifer’s metaphor—was so easy to explain, it seemed intuitive to other engineers. Surely anyone (of similar training) could have come up with it, they argued, and Tesla ultimately went to court to protect his priority. Judge Townsend ruled in Tesla’s favor, however, calling it the “doctrine of the obvious”: “The apparent simplicity of a new device often leads an inexperienced person to think that it would have occurred to anyone [. . .], but the decisive answer is that with dozens and perhaps hundreds of others laboring in the same field, it had never occurred to anyone before” [Potta v. Creager, 155 US 597, author’s italics].44 Success, but short lived; the world did not jump at Tesla’s new idea—partly because they had no need, no market. Edison’s system worked, and Tesla’s was a “quantum leap” to grasp, a Wampanoag of an idea. But surely a man of Edison’s ilk would listen, Tesla reasoned, and one late night over dinner, he explained his system. Edison’s power stations could only reach a mile in any direction; DC simply wasn’t strong enough. But now, with the ability to run motors and engines on AC current (the same way Davy’s arc light had been powered, but with far more security), Edison’s plants would power whole cities. Even the nation. The AC motor would be superior, Edison’s company would power it: the world was their oyster. But Edison would not have it.

  Tesla relays to his first biographer, O’Neil, that Edison refused on two grounds. First, he had already established himself in DC and saw no future in AC, and second, AC (with its high voltage) was dangerous in the extreme. He wanted nothing to do with Tesla’s vision. It reflects the same problem Armstrong and Brunel encountered; if you would succeed, you needed a public and investors too. But Tesla could not wait and hope, as Brunel had done with his enormous Great Eastern ship. It was the future he was after, and he needed to find a risk-taker. Perhaps not surprisingly, he found his man among Edison’s rivals: George Westinghouse. Fiction gets it wrong; the “war of currents” didn’t actually play out between Edison and Tesla, but between Edison Electric and Westinghouse Electric, to whom Tesla sold his patents. The real fight wasn’t between engineers, but among them—not between old and new technology, but between new and newer technology. Edison was a practical engineer . . . but he was also wrong. And for once, a quantum leap made the best sense.

  If Edison traded upon the engineers in his invention factory, Tesla traded upon the future—and so, in his way, did Westinghouse. An American Armstrong; he quadrupled the worth of his company from $800,000 in 1887 to $3 million in 1888, despite being embroiled in legal battles with Edison over lightbulbs and patents.45 The deal made between Tesla and Westinghouse favored Tesla and provided him with ready money and incredible royalties. But by effectively tying himself to Westinghouse Electric, Tesla became the (perhaps inadvertent) enemy of Edison in a struggle over who would control the power grids. Edison’s first argument, that there wasn’t a future in AC, didn’t offer much to the unlearned public. But the second argument moved hearts. By claiming that AC’s high voltage and extraordinary power meant certain death, Edison tapped into a very real fear; after all, plenty of accidents had already occurred. He opted for propaganda to show the danger of AC current—electrocuting dogs and even elephants in public squares, and most (in)famously, promoting the use of electricity as a means of capital punishment. H. P. Brown manufactured the first electric chair and sold it to prisons for $1,600, and the first test subject would be William Kemmler.46 Edison relished the idea; a public display of electricity’s evil work on the human body—surely, AC would lose all credit with customers.

  Kemmler had been convicted in 1889 for the murder of his common-law wife . . . with a hatchet. On August 6, 1890, he was strapped, blindfolded, into a ch
air for electrocution by AC current. But things did not go as planned. “To the horror of all present,” remarked a witness, the electrocution did not provide a swift end; in a scene that rivals Aldini’s experiments and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “the chest began to heave, foam issued from the mouth, and the man gave every evidence of reviving.”47 It took a second shock of 1,000 volts to finish the job, by which time Kemmler’s head caught on fire and the rear electrode burned through to the spine. With some irony, a deeply distressed George Westinghouse suggested they might have done better by taking up Kemmler’s own method and using an axe. Either way, the event became a public relations nightmare, and nearly sunk Westinghouse (and Tesla, and AC by extension). But Tesla remained undaunted. After all, Edison wasn’t the only showman—or the only one willing to bend the truth.

  One of Tesla’s famous photographs depicts him sitting quietly, one hand to his temple, while arcs of live fire dance all around his laboratory. The photo is a fiction. Tesla had the photographer take double exposure to make him appear to be in the room at the same time as the volts, a kind of “spirit photography” as popular at the time as séances and mesmerism [Fig. 14]. Most people didn’t know the camera could lie (an uncritical view that would lead to Arthur Conan Doyle’s support of the Cottingley Fairies, among other things). Why would Tesla, who already demonstrated live that electricity could pass through his body, take the further step of “faking” a relaxing moment in the presence of AC current? It would be one of Tesla’s early, but by no means first, attempts at fictionalizing fact, at mythmaking. And he had very good reasons. He was not, like Frankenstein, interested in bringing the dead to life—he was interested in life as an eternal and exacting force, electricity in the ether, and the possibility that he would harness it where all other men had failed. Westinghouse feared the public too much to continue work on Tesla’s big ideas, so Tesla traded again. This time, he bartered away his royalties to ensure the project would move forward despite the backlash. And, through presentations, experiments, and photographs, he would woo the public’s favor himself.

  Westinghouse used transformers at a frequency of 133 cycles and did not want to depart from their standard apparatus. Instead, he wanted Tesla to adapt his polyphase designs to fit them. The lost time meant Tesla couldn’t commit full resources to discovering how far AC could travel and with what efficiency (a necessary step for bringing the system and motors together). He didn’t have an invention factory with hundreds of willing workers . . . but there were other ways of ensuring the ideas stayed public. Tesla gave a lecture, and later that year, German engineers followed his methods and sent 190 horsepower from a waterfall to a factory 112 miles away in a stunning light display. (Plenty of headlines, lots of exclamation points!) But the Germans didn’t invent it; they merely copied from Tesla’s patents—most probably, Marc Seifer suggests, with Tesla’s full knowledge and blessing. It was within his rights to sell usage of the patents, and what better way to prove that he’d been right? The incident would become highly significant in the battle for Niagara power, but though Westinghouse would finally agree to do it Tesla’s way, Tesla himself doesn’t get all the credit. Instead, the company would promote a relative unknown named Benjamin Lamme. A new hire, he had less baggage and would be less “trouble.”‡ Edison was never Tesla’s greatest rival. His real problems weren’t caused by individual men so much as corporations—and perhaps his own vanity concerning what was or was not beneath him. He’d made enemies among other engineers, and also among investors; he had grown poor by refusing to accept a salary that would put him on par with “regular” workers. It was one of Edison’s first criticisms of Tesla and probably the one thing that haunted his genius most. Tesla didn’t value allies. He wanted to be Newton—he would stand (or fall) alone, a mad scientist indeed.

  Troubling the Future

  How did AC, branded as a vicious killer by its enemies and an expensive retrofit by its supporters, finally win over DC? For one thing, it worked. Once Tesla’s AC motor proved the efficiency of alternating current for practical uses, and in particular because it garnered so much attention not only through Tesla’s presentations but also through court cases, it was only a matter of time before other engineers put it to good use. Edison’s public campaign against it probably did more to light the fires of curiosity in a rising generation of electricians than it did to temporarily hurt business. And as those new thinkers came of age and filtered into the workplaces, not only did AC become impossible to contain, but it became harder and harder to defend those hard-won patents. By the 1880s, Edison’s career in electric light winked out, and he conceded defeat, writing in a letter that his “usefulness” to the power industry had gone, and that he sought gradual retirement from the business (though not from work; he continued active and inventive all his life). General Electric had subsumed Edison’s company, which gave them the right to make Edison’s bulbs—but in the new AC world, Westinghouse generated all the power. There must be a way around Westinghouse AC, GE argued. There was just one problem. Tesla still held all of the relevant patents to the constituent part. As Seifer puts it, “Quite simply, there was no other system.”48 And yet, in a curious twist, the years that followed saw both the “wizards” ousted from the powers they originally commanded. Edison lost to Tesla, and Tesla lost to GE and a political exile named Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

  Almost the physical opposite of Tesla, Steinmetz was small of stature (at four feet) and suffered a hunched back and a limp, consequence of one leg being shorter than the other. He was, however, an incredible mind. The solution for GE was to erase Tesla’s involvement entirely, and they played a long game to try to achieve it, starting with Steinmetz. Up until this time, Tesla’s own work (edited by T. C. Martin) offered the most comprehensive guide for young engineers: The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla. Like his later autobiography, even the title made sure to privilege Tesla’s reputation. By 1897, they began promoting Steinmetz’s competing volume, Theory and Calculation of Alternating Current Phenomena, which described the entire system without mentioning Tesla’s name—not even once. Given that young engineers had little grasp of the history, and Westinghouse’s own frustrations with Tesla kept them from leaping to the defense, a whole generation absorbed a highly edited history. “It was quite common in the later years,” Seifer remarks, “for engineers to obtain degrees, study AC and even write textbooks” and never learn Tesla’s name.49 Steinmetz spoke about AC in the very way that those early opponents spoke of the motor: it was an obvious solution, one that occurred to many engineers, and, after all, its success demonstrates it as a foregone conclusion. Tesla was not the wizard of AC current; he was merely one more engineer who once worked for the electrical giants, GE and Westinghouse (names that still remain at the forefront of power today).

  It should have crippled Tesla’s reputation, assigning him a place among the forgotten ones. But Tesla was not just any inventor, and never worked on only one thing or even in only one area of things. Lectures at Columbia, meetings in London with the Royal Society, rubbing elbows with elites that Edison himself would scarcely have a chance at (including Crookes and Lord Kelvin), Telsa might not have has as many allies as Edison, but he knew where to make friends and how to impress. He also knew how to speak multiple languages, not just national tongues, but also the language of both the educated elite and the practical engineer.

  When Tesla commanded electricity, he explained the process all the while: “the sparks cease when the metal in my hand touches the wire. My arm is now traversed by a powerful electric current, vibrating at about the rate of one million times a second.”50 All around, says Tesla, “the electrostatic force makes itself felt [. . .] hammering violently against my body [. . .] I can make these streams of light visible to all.”51 He’d realized that alternating currents of up to 10kHz could pass through the body before anyone recognized the sensation of “shock.” He’d also learned just how much a body might take of the electric fire. Usi
ng high-frequency currents, Tesla discovered that living tissue could safely be heated and that the electricity from his oscillators could work changes in blood pressure.52 He even delivered his paper to the American Electro-Therapeutic Association in 1898, when a series of electrotherapy devices were being reviewed for practicality in medicine (as opposed to the far more dangerous quack devices like the electrified bath of mid-century which was disastrous for somewhat obvious reasons). Tesla did nothing in a corner; he used the press, headlines, and lectures to make himself the center of the electrical universe.

  By 1893, Tesla had become the darling of the press, announcing in front of his greatest peers, “Is there, I ask, can there be, a more interesting study than that of alternating current?” He had become its master and arbiter, so much the master that when fire destroyed his New York lab, the world collectively gasped—Charles Dana, a revered newspaper editor, proclaimed: “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.”53 Westinghouse would go on to win the Chicago World’s Fair contract, and Tesla would go on to give his remarkable speech at Niagara Falls—a speech where he proclaims the massive station as only the beginning, only a step on a broader and more worthy path: “We have a greater task to fulfill, to evolve means for obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever [. . .] I shall see the fulfillment of my fondest dreams; namely, the transmission of power from station to station without the employment of any connecting wire.”54 We’ve arrived at Tesla’s great achievement, the height of a career still in the making and on the rise. Standing before crowds and the power of a thundering cataract in harness, Tesla’s toast commemorated the end of the war of electrical currents, all the devices and maneuvers of his adversaries notwithstanding.