Tesla (17 page)

Under the slow fan, Tesla was like a young dog. His almond-shaped eyes gleamed. Two starched triangles protruded beneath his chin. Two thick waves of hair parted in the middle of his head. He looked like a fresh young man who wanted to leave a favorable impression. He thought,
Ah!
and then he thought,
Oh!
Then he strode across the office in two steps and handed Bachelor’s letter of recommendation to Edison. The gun-slit eyes took him in one more time. At last, cordiality displaced the wary smile. With a theatrical gesture, the king of inventors dropped the letter. His face rounded up.

“If you want, you can start tomorrow.”

And that was that.

Tesla was so excited he almost fainted.
This will decide everything!
he thought.
Everything!

And he liked the first step—as Whitman would say—so much.

Radiant with hope, he strode an inch above the ground. The sky tickled him—the sky was his soul’s namesake. He could not wait to wake up the next day so he could go to work. That was so fascinating, so
painfully
fascinating, like gambling, like alcohol, like… There must have been something about his face, some airy, happy expression, because people looked at him and smiled. He worked from 10:30 in the morning until 5:00 a.m. the next day.

During Tesla’s second week at Edison’s, two dynamos on a transatlantic ship, the
Oregon
, shorted out simultaneously.

“It can’t be done!” The workers frowned and shrugged their shoulders.

“What do you mean it can’t be done!” raged Edison.

“It can’t be fixed!” the electricians repeated.

Edison fired the whole lot.

The
Oregon
was the first transatlantic ship lit by his system.

They sent Tesla. He rushed off.

His troubleshooting was based more on intuition than knowledge: This is the problem! This isn’t… Covered in soot, he left just before dawn, looking like he’d been beaten with torches.

“Is that our Parisian! So, how was the party?” Edison greeted him outside the laboratory.

An unexpected answer hit him in the face: “I fixed the problem on the
Oregon.
”

“Well done,” Edison acknowledged, huskily.

Tesla smiled readily.

“It’s an honor for any engineer to work for you.”

Often he talked about his motor to Edison in Edison’s absence. His excitement pushed the walls of the surrounding buildings away.

“In my case, that honor is even greater because I’ve long desired to show you my alternating current motor. Its huge advantage over direct current is that the existing power stations can only cover a one-mile radius…”

While the young man spun the golden yarn of his eloquence, his heart pounded.

“Imagine how many direct current power stations need to be built in New York alone!”

Connelly the grouch, who again assumed the role of secretary, leaned toward Tesla’s ear and whispered, “He’s hard of hearing.”

The young man had to repeat what he had already said.

The narrowed eyes and disgusted smile were part of Edison’s charm. In the first light of the morning, his face remained impassive. His words caught Tesla by surprise: “Ninety percent of an inventor’s skill is in his ability to judge what is and what isn’t possible, and this is”—he made a reassuring gesture toward Tesla. Since Tesla did not react, Edison concluded, “impossible.”

“But I have already built a working model,” stammered the Parisian.

Edison put on his disgusted smile again. “You know, when I started to build my first direct current power stations, I had to battle the natural gas industry. My journalists wrote, ‘Gas is poisonous,’ and other things like that up until I was able to open my plants. Imagine,” he added, this time with a rakish smile, “if I had to oppose your competing system…”

Connelly and a man with a beat-up hat, called Little Benny, laughed in unison.

“Imagine if I had to pay reporters to write ‘Beware of alternating current!’ One gets tired of such things, you know.”

Edison clapped his hands and exclaimed, “Let’s just drop those… those fantasies. Fortunately, your system is absolutely inapplicable.”

“It’s not…”

“Inapplicable! But, look, if you can really improve direct current motors the way you’ve said you can, there’s—there’s fifty thousand dollars in it for you.”

Tesla looked at him with fire in his eyes.

Edison’s eyebrows were a straight line. He emitted a sour odor because he bathed once a month “whether he needed to or not.” There was a rumor that his wife was going insane. There was a rumor that he managed her condition himself. There were all kinds of rumors. His slimy lips throttled his cigar. His nose resembled a vegetable. His hair was limp like grass in a drought.

Tesla stared at him—he simply could not believe it. He depended on that man so much he did not dare see him in a different light. He did not dare get angry with him.

He was hesitant to admit that this sweaty deaf man with drooping ears and dead hair disappointed him. If Edison could not understand him, who else could?

He would continue to work. He would prove his point.

He spent every day installing lightbulbs in the power plant on Pearl Street and in the nearby Gerk Steel Mill. He stepped over springs, cartons of glass tubes, and boxes labeled with mystical names. Those were shipments of materials for their experiments from places with names like Paramaribo, Malaysia, Congo, which Tesla imagined to be colonial mirages, swarming with lemurs and parrots.

The laboratory was the entire world. For him, New York did not exist.

And yet…

That year he got to know the New York summer heat for the first time. Financiers paid visits to the famous laboratory. John Pierpont Morgan, the Sultan of Wall Street, also came, with his top hat resembling the smokestack of a train. The millionaires in black looked like funeral home officials, and Morgan was the owner of the funeral home. Tesla saw him only from a distance and the man left a disquieting impression.

“As if someone put a sack over my head,” he said to Little Benny.

As he worked on designing new arc lamps and direct current motors, Tesla met a man with a long face, cold eyes, and thin, extremely agile lips. The man smiled with effort and introduced himself: “Robert Lane.”

With an air of intrigue, he handed Tesla his business card. “In case you need someone to back your lamps financially.”

“No. I’m fine where I am,” Tesla responded.

“I know you’re fine,” Lane said pointedly.

At the Gerk Steel Mill, experiments sometimes went on for twenty hours. There, with ant-like persistence, the engineers tried and tried and tried. One night, Edison locked his assistants in the laboratory. Another night he decided that they should have some fun.

“Let’s go, my insomniacs,” he yelled. “It’s time, my insomniacs.”

Like dogs released from their chains, Edison’s insomniacs charged into the summer night. They first invaded a Hungarian restaurant at 65 Fifth Avenue. Its floor was strewn with pine shavings. A melancholy saw cried under the musician’s bow.

“Beer! Meat! Pickles!” they shouted, scraping chair legs across the floor and shoving tables together.

“Goulash for me!”

“Me too!”

“Excuse me, what’s that huge lump on your shoulders?” Tom Connelly asked old Johan, who came to wait on them.

The owner disappeared, came back, and put glasses and plates on the table.

Outside barked the golden dogs of summer.

Little Benny flashed the most charming smile that ever adorned a complete bum. He slapped Johan on the back and laughed until he choked. “I’ve never seen such a sullen mug on such a fine waiter!”

From the side of his mouth, Connelly told them how New York was endowed with one of the wonders of the world—the Brooklyn Bridge—just a year before Tesla “got off the ship.”

“The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are no more, but our bridge still stands,” the learned Edison pointed out to his assistants.

Not a week after the opening, someone shouted, “The bridge is falling!” and caused a stampede in which a dozen people were crushed to death.

“How we ran!” Connelly whistled.

The miserable, drunken musician played on his saw, his head swaying and his eyes closed.

Like a multiheaded hydra, Edison’s group got up and left the restaurant. They commandeered an omnibus. With his hands deep in his pockets, Bachelor, who had recently returned from Paris, joined them.

Cracking jokes and shouting each other down, the insomniacs took a ride to the Golden Garter on Bowery. They hushed and shoved each other while a frowning German led them to their table. Sitting, they guarded their glasses of rum with their elbows. A woman with smeared makeup pushed those greasy elbows aside and sat at their table. “Hon, won’t you buy me a drink?” she said.

“It’s a feudal system,” Benny explained. “Brothels pay policemen. Policemen pay captains. Captains pay politicians.” He let out a hellish belch that singed the hair on his chest, and he swore.

“You know what Steve Grady said as he jumped off the bridge?” The green-eyed Connelly was on fire. “Going down!” He downed a shot of rum.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Exaggerated, almost frightening joy reigned at the table. Their mugging stripped their words of meaning. Edison’s mood always improved after a meal. That was when he hijacked conversations. As a young man, he electrified a metal urinal at a railway station and watched men shake and wet themselves while urinating.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!”

He presided over a table full of fogged spectacles and gaping jaws. It was hot in the bar.

The door was open. Outside, the lions of summer roared, and its mighty bulls bellowed down unfamiliar streets. The fragrant dust teased the soul and intoxicated the nostrils. The broken lights and the distant voices of the city turned into a painful temptation. All eyes filled with longing. Smoke rolled out into the night through the open door.

The main characteristic of the music was speed.

Everyone bolted down their drinks.

Benny lit Connelly’s mustache instead of his cigar.

A red-haired woman sang with a cracked voice. From time to time she disappeared only to reemerge in a shorter skirt. Hawk-like waiters tripped over women’s crinolines and charged double for everything except beer.

“What’s this?” Edison asked with a huff.

“An error, sir,” the sly waiter said apologetically.

The prince of electricity warned him with a shake of his finger and continued to cackle. “Mrs. Peterson asked me what kind of material burned in my lightbulb.” He reddened. “So you know what I told her? Limburger cheese!”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” The insomniacs thundered, like a chorus in an opera.

Edison did not drink, but he still crowed, tears in his eyes, drunk on other people’s intoxication.

“And once I frightened a black man to see if he would turn white with fear.”

Tesla grew scared because it seemed that Edison, who did not drink, was more drunk than the others.

Connelly cut in. “And do you remember that Swiss fellow, you know, the prim and proper one, the one who ate salad for breakfast? So one time he sat at our table and I pulled out a gun this big. Says I, I’m gonna rub you out!”

“So he never showed up for work again,” Benny roared.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” The insomniacs were delighted.

Right there, in the whirl of those grimacing masks, Tesla celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday. He was learning. His eyes were opening up.

The very moment Edison left for the bathroom, the insomniacs started to talk behind his back.

“He’s stingy and he lies.”

“You know, Benny, his folks were Tories. They were loyalists during the Revolution, you know.”

“His father whipped him because he set a barn on fire,” Bachelor declared in a funereal voice.

“A conductor boxed his ears because he set a railroad car on fire.”

“That’s how he lost his hearing,” Benny asserted.

“He lost as much as it suits him.” Bachelor stroked his epic beard.

“What are you talking about?” Edison asked suspiciously when he returned to the table.

“Nothing.” Connelly was glad to see him. “We’re talking about what a good fellow you are.”

CHAPTER 35

The Death of the Skeleton

Two things worked against Tesla.

First of all, he came from Paris. The insomniacs knew that he still figured prices in francs and therefore called him a “Parisian.” And when they heard that he liked opera, they started nudging each other and mocking him behind his back.

“Look at that triangular cat face! Look at those bat ears!”

Perhaps he wore ladies’ undergarments?

Second of all, Tesla was not a true Parisian.

On one occasion, Edison coughed dryly and asked him if he had ever partaken of human flesh as a child.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t find Smiljan, Lika, on the map of the civilized world,” the prince of all inventors replied, sneering.

“You mean the same map on which Milan, Ohio, is marked in gold letters?” was Tesla’s polite response.

Edison imagined fanged birds and carnivorous butterflies living in Smiljan.