3. IMMIGRANTS OF DISTINCTION
Telegraphs were in operation in the United States and Europe. The transatlantic cable had been laid. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was sweeping the Continent when the news came in 1881 that an exchange would soon be opened at Budapest. It was one of four cities chosen to be so honored by Thomas Alva Edison’s European subsidiary.
Tesla left for Budapest in January of that year. He at once found a job, with the help of an influential friend of his uncle’s, in the Central Telegraph Office of the Hungarian government. It was certainly not what the young electrical engineer would have chosen, being a drafting position at very low pay. However, with his usual zest he threw himself into the work.
Then he was stricken by a bizarre affliction which, for lack of a better name, his doctors called a nervous breakdown.
Tesla’s senses had always been abnormally acute. He claimed that several times in boyhood he had saved neighbors from fires in their own homes when he was awakened by the crackling of flames. When he was past forty and carrying on his lightning research in Colorado, he would claim to hear thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles, although the limit for his young assistants was 150 miles.
But what happened during his breakdown was astonishing even by Tesla standards. He could hear the ticking of a watch from three rooms away. A fly lighting on a table in his room caused a dull thud in his ear. A carriage passing a few miles away seemed to shake his whole body. A train whistle twenty miles distant made the chair on which he sat vibrate so strongly that the pain became unbearable. The ground under his feet was constantly trembling. In order for him to rest, rubber cushions were placed under his bed.
“The roaring noises from near and far,” he wrote, “often produced the effect of spoken words which would have frightened me had I not been able to resolve them into their accidental components. The sun’s rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me. I had to summon all my willpower to pass under a bridge or other structure as I experienced a crushing pressure on the skull. In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object at a distance of twelve feet by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead.”1
During this period his pulse fluctuated wildly from subnormal to 260 beats per minute. The continuous twitching and trembling of his own flesh became, in itself, a nearly unbearable burden.
Understandably the medical profession of Budapest was fascinated. A renowned doctor prescribed large doses of potassium while at the same time pronouncing the ailment unique and incurable.
Tesla writes, “It is my eternal regret that I was not under the observation of experts in physiology and psychology at that time. I clung desperately to life, but never expected to recover.”2
Yet not only did his health return but, with the assistance of a devoted friend, he soon recovered greater vigor than ever. The friend was Anital Szigety, a master mechanic with whom Tesla often worked and an athlete. Szigety convinced him of the importance of exercise and, during this period, the two often went for long walks through the city.
In the years since he had left the Polytechnic at Graz, Tesla had never ceased to struggle with the problem of the unsatisfactory direct-current machine. He later wrote, in his usual flamboyant way, that he did not undertake the problem with a simple resolve to succeed. “With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life and death. I knew that I would perish if I failed.”
But in fact he already sensed that the battle was won. “Back in the deep recesses of the brain was the solution, but I could not yet give it outward expression.”3
One afternoon toward sunset, he and Szigety were walking in the city park, and Tesla was reciting Goethe’s Faust. The sinking sun reminded him of a glorious passage:
The glow retreats, done in the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
Then, “the idea came like a flash of lightning, and in an instant the truth was revealed.”
Tesla’s long, waving arms froze in midair as if he had been seized with a fit. Szigety, alarmed, tried to lead him to a bench, but Tesla would not sit until he had found a stick. Then he began to draw a diagram in the dust.
“See my motor here; watch me reverse it,” he exclaimed.
The diagram that he drew would be shown six years later in his address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, introducing to the world a new scientific principle of stunning simplicity and utility. The applications of it would literally revolutionize the technical world.
It was an entire new system that he had conceived, not just a new motor, for Tesla had hit upon the principle of the rotating magnetic field produced by two or more alternating currents out of step with each other.4By creating, in effect, a magnetic whirlwind produced by the out-of-step currents, he had eliminated both the need for a commutator (the device used for reversing the direction of an electric current) and for brushes providing passage for the current. He had refuted Professor Poeschl.
Other scientists had been trying to invent AC motors but had used only a single circuit, just as in direct current, which either would not work or worked badly, churning up a great deal of useless vibration. Alternating currents were being used to feed arc lights as early as 1878–79 by Elihu Thomson, who built a generator in the United States. The Europeans, Gaulard and Gibbs, had produced the first alternating-current transformer, which was necessary for increasing and decreasing voltages in power transmission. George Westinghouse, an early advocate of AC with great plans for the electrification of America, bought the American rights to the Gaulard and Gibbs patents.
Yet with all this activity there had been no truly successful AC motor until Tesla invented his—an induction motor that was the heart of a new system and a quantum jump ahead of the times.
But of course it is one thing to create a significant invention and quite another to make people aware of it. Tesla had already begun to picture himself as rich and famous, a strong tribute to the power of imagination, since his paycheck barely sustained him. As he wryly observed, “the last twenty-nine days of the month were the hardest.” But even hardship now seemed more tolerable for he knew that at last he could call himself an inventor.
“This was the one thing I wanted to be,” he recalled. “Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.”5
In the days that followed he gave himself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of devising new forms of alternating-current machines.
“It was a mental state of happiness about as complete as I have ever known in life,” he was to recall. “Ideas came in an uninterrupted stream, and the only difficulty I had was to hold them fast.
“The pieces of apparatus I conceived were to me absolutely real and tangible in every detail, even to the minutest marks and signs of wear. I delighted in imagining the motors constantly running…. When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances toward his goal in seven-league boots. In less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system….”6
He conceived of such practical alternating-current motors as polyphase induction, split-phase induction, and polyphase synchronous, as well as the whole polyphase and single-phase motor system for generating, transmitting, and utilizing electric current. And indeed, practically all electricity in the world in time would be generated, transmitted, distributed, and turned into mechanical power by means of the Tesla Polyphase System.
What it signified was vastly higher voltages than could be obtained through direct current and—with transmission possible over hundreds of miles—a new age of electric light and power everywhere. Edison’s carbon filament light bulb could burn either AC
or DC, but electricity couldn’t be carried economically when a generator was required every two miles. And Edison was less adaptable than his light bulb, being emotionally locked into DC.
The year was 1882, and Tesla’s ideas were still raging inside his head. Having neither the time nor the money for building prototypes, he turned his thoughts to the work of the telegraph office, where he was soon promoted to engineering. He made several improvements to the central-station apparatus (including inventing a telephone amplifier which he forgot to patent) and in return, the job gave him valuable practical experience.
Through family friends—two brothers named Puskas—he was next recommended for a job with Edison’s telephone subsidiary in Paris, where he went in the fall of 1882.
Of paramount interest to him was to sell the officers of the Continental Edison Company on the enormous potential benefits of alternating current. The young Serb was bitterly disappointed, however, on being told of Edison’s aversion to so much as the mention of this subject.
To be young and in Paris simultaneously provided opportunities for consolation that he did not overlook. He made new friends, both French and American, resumed his old proficiency at billiards, walked miles every day, and swam in the Seine.
At work he was given the job of troubleshooter, to cure the ills of Edison power plants in France and Germany. Sent to Alsace on a job for the firm, he took along materials, and there built his first actual alternating-current induction motor—“a crude apparatus, but [it] afforded me the supreme satisfaction of seeing for the first time, rotation effected by alternating currents without commutator.”7
Twice during the summer of 1883 he repeated his experiments with the aid of an assistant. The advantages of AC over Edison’s DC were so obvious to him that he could not believe anyone could close his eyes to them.
In Strassburg, Tesla was asked to see what could be done with a railroad-station lighting plant that the client, the German government, had refused to accept. And for good reason. A large chunk of wall had been blown out by a short circuit during the opening ceremony—in the presence of old Emperor William I. The French subsidiary, being faced with a serious financial loss, promised Tesla a bonus if he could improve the dynamos and soothe the Germans.
It was a ticklish operation for a relatively inexperienced person, but at least Tesla’s ability to speak German helped. And in the end, not only was he able to correct the electrical problems, but he made friends with the mayor, one M. Bauzin, whom he then tried to recruit to support his invention. The mayor did in fact round up several wealthy potential investors to whom Tesla demonstrated his new motor. But although it functioned perfectly, the burghers simply could not see its practical advantages.
The disappointed young inventor was only partly consoled when the mayor produced some bottles of St. Estèphe 1801, left over from the last invasion of Alsace by the Germans. No one, he said kindly, was more worthy of the precious beverage than Tesla.
Having successfully completed his job, the inventor returned to Paris, looking forward to collecting his bonus. But to his dismay, it did not materialize. Of three administrators who were his superiors, each passed the buck to the next until Tesla, angered at being cheated, summarily resigned.8
The manager of the plant, Charles Batchelor, who had been a close friend and assistant of Edison’s for many years, recognized the young Serb’s abilities. He urged him to go to America where both grass and currency were greener.
Batchelor was an English engineer who had worked with Edison when the latter was improving Bell’s first telephone. Edison had invented the transmitter that made it possible for voices to be heard over long distances, and it was Batchelor who helped him test the telephone in a boisterous public demonstration, uttering what a New York journalist described as “vociferous remarks and thunderous songs.”
Subsequently, the Englishman and Edison together had supervised the installation of Edison’s first commercial self-contained lighting plant on the S.S. Columbia, and the ship had made a brilliant display as she sailed down Delaware Bay on her voyage around Cape Horn to California.
Thus Batchelor had reason to think he knew Edison well, and he wrote Tesla a glowing letter of recommendation, introducing the one egocentric genius to the other. As events would prove, however, Batchelor understood Edison less well than he supposed.
“I liquefied my modest assets,” Tesla later recalled, “secured accommodations and found myself at the railroad station as the train was pulling out. At that moment I discovered that my money and tickets were gone. What to do? Hercules had plenty of time to deliberate, but I had to decide while running alongside the train with opposite feelings surging in my brain like condenser oscillations. Resolve, helped by dexterity, won out in the nick of time….”9
He found enough change for the train and swung aboard. Later he talked his way aboard the ship Saturnia when no one showed up to claim his berth.
To America, beside the few coins in his pocket, he brought some poems and articles he had written, a package of calculations relating to what he described (without further elucidation) as an insoluble problem, and drawings for a flying machine. To be sure, at twenty-eight he was already one of the world’s great inventors. But not another soul knew it.
4. AT THE COURT OF MR. EDISON
At least no one mistook Tesla in his smart bowler hat and black cutaway coat for a Montenegrin shepherd or fugitive from debtors’ prison that June day he strode ashore at the Castle Garden Immigration Office in Manhattan. It was 1884, the year the people of France gave America the Statue of Liberty. As if in response to the words of Emma Lazarus, 16 million Europeans and Asians were to sweep into this country in a very few years, and they would keep coming. Men, women, and even children were needed as fuel to run America’s fulminating industrial revolution. It was also the year of the Panic of 1884.
Tesla did not go to the Immigration hiring hall, where new arrivals were signed up for labor gangs to slave thirteen-hour days on the railroads, in mines, factories, or stockyards. Instead, with his letter of introduction to Edison and the address of an acquaintance in his pocket, he asked directions of a policeman and set out boldly onto the streets of New York.
Passing a shop where the owner was cursing at a broken machine, he stopped and offered to fix it. When he had done so, the man was so pleased that he gave Tesla twenty dollars.
As he walked on, the young Serb smiled to himself, remembering the joke that he had heard on shipboard. A Montenegrin shepherd who had just arrived in America was walking down the street when he saw a ten-dollar bill. He bent down to pick it up and then stopped, saying to himself, “My first day in America! Why should I work?”
Thomas Alva Edison, already graying at age thirty-two, buttoned to the chin in one of Mrs. Edison’s hand-sewn, hand-styled, gingham smocks, was an ungainly, swinging, stooping, shuffling figure. At first glance his plain face might have seemed unremarkable, but it never took visitors long to be impressed by the light of fierce intelligence and relentless energy that shone in his eyes.
At the time, Edison was spread uncomfortably thin, even for a genius. He had opened the Edison Machine Works on Goerck Street and the Edison Electric Light Company at 65 Fifth Avenue. His generating station at 255–57 Pearl Street was serving the whole Wall Street and East River area. And he had a big research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where a large number of men were employed and where the most astonishing things could happen.
Sometimes Edison himself could be seen there, dancing around “a little iron monster of a locomotive” that got its direct current from a generating station behind the laboratory, and which had once flown off the rails at a speed of forty miles per hour to the delight of its creator.1 To this laboratory, also, Sarah Bernhardt had come to have her voice immortalized on Edison’s phonograph. She had politely remarked upon his resemblance to Napoleon I.
The Pearl Street generating station served a few hundred individual mansions of wealthy New Yorkers w
ith electric lights, but Edison also supplied direct current to isolated plants in mills, factories, and theaters all over the city. Also he was getting more and more requests to put lighting plants on ships—a particular headache since the danger of a fire at sea was a persistent nightmare.
And in addition to everything else, he still had to uphold his famous reputation as a man of pithy sayings: “Everybody steals in commerce and industry,” went one of his apothegms. “I’ve stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal. They don’t know how to steal. …” They were Western Union, for whom he had worked while at the same time selling a competitive invention to their opposition.
There was also his contemptuous saying that he didn’t need to be a mathematician because he could always hire them. Formally trained scientists might take umbrage, but at this particular stage of America’s technological development there was no gainsaying that engineers and inventors probably were making more significant contributions to national life than their academic contemporaries. And just so no one would miss the point, Edison liked to add that he could always tell the importance of one of his inventions by the number of dollars it brought and that nothing else concerned him.
Julian Hawthorne observed, “If Mr. Edison would quit inventing and go in for fiction, he would make one of the greatest novelists….”
On a particularly trying summer day in 1884, the American inventor had rushed straight from an electrical emergency at the Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue to his Pearl Street generating station. The house had caught fire from two wires that got crossed behind wall hangings that contained fine metallic thread. The flames had been smothered but Mrs. Vanderbilt, hysterical from the ordeal, had learned that the source of her problems was a steam engine and boiler in the cellar. Now the unreasonable woman was demanding that Edison remove the whole installation.2