But then his luck took another unexpected turn. Having heard of his induction motor, the foreman of the work crew on which the inventor was suffering so bitterly took him to meet A. K. Brown, manager of the Western Union Telegraph Company, who not only knew about alternating current but was personally interested in the new idea.
Where Edison had failed to see the revolution ahead or, more likely, had seen in it the death knell of his own direct-current system of electrification, Brown correctly gauged the future. With his help another company was created in Tesla’s name. The Tesla Electric Company had the specific goal of at last developing the alternating-current system that the inventor had conceived in the park in Budapest in 1882.14
5. THE WAR OF THE CURRENTS BEGINS
The laboratory and shops that the ecstatic Tesla found for his new company were at 33–35 South Fifth Street, only blocks from the Edison workshops. The Tesla Electric Company, capitalized with half a million dollars, opened for business in April 1887. To the inventor, who had waited so long for this moment, it was the fulfillment of a dream. He began laboring like one of his own dynamos, day and night without rest.
Because it was all there in his mind he needed only a few months to start filing patent applications for the entire polyphase AC system. This was in fact three complete systems for single-phase, two-phase, and three-phase alternating currents. He experimented with other kinds too. And for each type he produced the necessary dynamos, motors, transformers, and automatic controls.
Hundreds of central stations were operating in America at this time, using at least twenty different combinations of circuits and equipment. Usually these were centered upon one invention or group of them. Thus Elihu Thomson had installed a small alternator and transformers in the factory of the Thomson-Houston Company at Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1886, supplying incandescent lamps in another factory. But it was to be another year before he evolved a safe system for wiring houses. So, too, George Westinghouse, inventor of the railroad air brake, having acquired patents to the AC distribution system of Gaulard and Gibbs, set his chief engineer, William Stanley, to building a transformer system. It was successfully tested in 1886. Westinghouse operated the first commercial AC system in America at Buffalo in November of that year and by 1887 had more than thirty plants in operation. In addition there was of course the direct-current system of the Edison Electric Company, one of the earliest contenders in the field.
But still no satisfactory alternating-current motor existed. Within six months after opening his shop, Tesla sent two motors to the Patent Office for testing and filed his first AC patents.* In all, through 1891, he applied for and was granted a total of forty patents.† So original and sweeping were they that he met with no delay.1
And now, recognition was mercifully swift in coming. William A. Anthony, who had established a course in electrical engineering at Cornell University, saw the significance of the Tesla system at once and spoke out in its favor. This was not just a new motor but quite possibly the foundation of a new technology. The essence of the system, as Anthony noted, was the beautifully simple induction motor, which had almost no wearing parts to break down.
The news of such unheralded activity in the U.S. Patent Office rocked Wall Street as well as the industrial and academic worlds. At Professor Anthony’s suggestion the almost unknown young Serb was invited to lecture to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on May 16, 1888.
Tesla, to his surprise, discovered himself to be a natural and brilliant lecturer; and his address became a classic. His subject was “A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers.”2
Dr. B. A. Behrend, commenting on the presentation, said, “Not since the appearance of Faraday’s ‘Experimental Researches in Electricity’ has a great experimental truth been voiced so simply and so clearly…. He left nothing to be done by those who followed him. His paper contained the skeleton even of the mathematical theory.”3
Tesla’s timing could not have been better. His patents were the missing key that George Westinghouse had been waiting for. The Pittsburgh magnate, a stocky, blunt, dynamic fellow with a walrus mustache, had a taste for fashionable dress and for adventure. Like Morgan he would soon be commuting in his private railway car—at first from Pittsburgh to New York but finally to Niagara Falls. In his reputation as a plunger, Westinghouse somewhat resembled Edison. And like Edison he was a fighter. The two men were to be well-matched in the battles ahead.
Westinghouse was a hard-driving businessman but he was the antithesis of a robber baron: he did not see the buying up of politicians and the fleecing of the public as essential to success in business. What he did see, what he had appreciated from the very first, was the potential of a power system that could send currents of high voltage surging across the great spaces of America. Like Tesla he had even dreamed of harnessing the hydroelectric potential of Niagara Falls.
He called on the inventor in his laboratory. The two men, who shared both the romance of the new energy and a taste for personal dandiness, felt a quick rapport. Tesla’s workshops and laboratory were crammed with intriguing apparatus. Westinghouse moved from machine to machine, sometimes bent forward, hands on knees, peering, or sometimes with his head tilted, nodding with pleasure at the smooth hum of alternating-current motors. He needed few explanations.
There is a story, unfortunately without documentation, that he then turned to Tesla and offered him $1 million plus a royalty for all of his AC patents. If ever made, the offer must have been declined, for the records show that for his forty patents Tesla received about $60,000 from the Westinghouse firm, which included $5,000 in cash and 150 shares of stock. Significantly, however, according to Westinghouse historical records, he was to earn $2.50 per horsepower of electricity sold.* Within a few years these royalties would be worth such a stupendous amount of money that they would pose a curious problem.
For the present, however, since the monies received by Tesla had to be shared with Brown and other investors in his firm, he was far from having joined the super-rich. Nevertheless his transition from threadbare to fashionable in the social circles of Manhattan was both agreeable and slightly dizzying.
He agreed to work as a consultant for Westinghouse in adapting his single-phase system, at a salary of $2,000 per month. While the extra income was welcome, it meant moving to Pittsburgh just as exciting social invitations had begun to trickle in from members of the New York “400.” He left reluctantly.
As might have been anticipated with a completely new system, difficulties lay ahead. The 133-cycle current then used by Westinghouse was wrong for Tesla’s induction motor, which was built to 60 cycles. When he so informed the engineers, he succeeded in rubbing them the wrong way and only after months of futile and costly experiments doing it their way did they finally accept his word. Once they had done so, the motor worked exactly as it had been designed to do. Sixty cycles has ever since been the standard for alternating current.
Tesla soon achieved another milestone as important to him as the development of his inventions. On July 30, 1891, he became an American citizen. This, as he often told friends, he valued more than any of the scientific honors to come to him. Honorary degrees he tossed into drawers, but his certificate of naturalization was always kept in his office safe.
After several months he finished his duties in Pittsburgh and returned to New York, feeling physically and mentally exhausted. To a large extent he felt those months wasted since they had kept him from moving ahead with new research.
In September he left for Paris to attend the International Exposition and, from there, in the company of his uncle Petar Mandić, departed for Croatia. Petar had once been a monk in the monastery of Gomirje near Ogulin, and here the exhausted inventor went to recover his health.
He then visited his sisters and mother. Of the circumstances in which his widowed mother then lived or whether he ever contributed to her support once he began to earn money in America, unfortunately no records have been foun
d. That she often dominated his thoughts, however, future events were to disclose.
Edison felt a flood of outrage when he first heard the news of Tesla’s deal with Westinghouse for his alternating-current system. At last the lines were clearly drawn. Soon his propaganda machine at Menlo Park began grinding out a barrage of alarmist material about the alleged dangers of alternating current.4 As Edison saw it, accidents caused by AC must, if they could not be found, be manufactured, and the public alerted to the hazards. Not only were fortunes at stake in the War of the Currents but also the personal pride of an egocentric genius.
By now the bad times had turned to boom. The country was expansion-minded. There were steelworks in Pittsburgh, a new Brooklyn Bridge, towers reaching toward the sky above Manhattan. Railroads, land, and gold were making fortunes for those who speculated in growth at the right time. Edison himself had become one of the leading industrialists in America, employing almost 3,000 workers at his various plants.
Michael Pupin, who later joined with Edison and Marconi to form a damaging trinity against his fellow Serb, was among those who immediately saw the superiority of Tesla’s AC system. In fact he claimed that he came near to being fired from the electrical-engineering faculty at Columbia University for “eulogizing” this new technology.
Pupin, a farm boy who had grown up on the military frontier of Serbia, had arrived in New York at the age of fifteen with a nickel in his pocket (one cent more than Tesla), had shoveled coal for fifty cents a ton, and later won scholarships to Columbia University and Cambridge. Like Tesla he became one of America’s greatest physicists and electrical engineers.
But it disturbed Pupin that the captains of the electrical industry were paying so little attention to highly trained electrical experts. All they seemed to worry about, he charged, was that their direct-current systems would not be supplanted by alternating current.
“A most un-American mental attitude!” said this new American. “It was clear to every impartial and intelligent expert that the two systems supplemented each other in a most admirable manner.”
The patents held by Westinghouse were challenged by a number of litigants, primarily rival manufacturers claiming that their inventors had anticipated Tesla. Suits were filed in behalf of the inventors Walter Baily, Marcel Deprez, and Charles S. Bradley. In addition, in an attempt to evade the Tesla patents, General Electric filed an application for what was called the “monocyclic” system of their brilliant mathematician, Charles Steinmetz. Steinmetz himself, however, never questioned Tesla’s preeminence in the AC field.
Such actions confused the public, and even some members of the engineering profession never clearly understood that the system almost universally adopted was Tesla’s. This confusion is, to some extent, still true, despite the sweeping and eloquent ruling in Tesla’s favor issued in September 1900 by Judge Townsend of the U.S. Circuit Court of Connecticut. If for no other reason than that, Judge Townsend’s words are worth quoting here:
It remained to the genius of Tesla to capture the unruly, unrestrained and hitherto opposing elements in the field of nature and art and to harness them to draw the machines of man. It was he who first showed how to transform the toy of Arago into an engine of power; the “laboratory experiment” of Baily into a practically successful motor; the indicator into a driver; he first conceived the idea that the very impediments of reversal in direction, the contradictions of alternations might be transformed into power-producing rotations, a whirling field of force.
What others looked upon as only invincible barriers, impassable currents and contradictory forces he seized, and by harmonizing their directions utilized in practical motors in distant cities the power of Niagara.
A decree may be entered for an injunction and an accounting as to all the claims in suit.
At West Orange, New Jersey, families living in the neighborhood of Edison’s huge laboratory began to notice that their pets were vanishing. Soon they found out why. Edison was paying schoolboys twenty-five cents a head for dogs and cats, which he then electrocuted in deliberately crude experiments with alternating current. At the same time he issued scare leaflets with the word “WARNING!” in red letters at the top. The gist of these messages: if the public were not alert, they might find themselves being terminally “Westinghoused.”
Edison had been laying the groundwork for his vendetta for two years. He had written to E. H. Johnson: “Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically. It will never be free from danger….”5
Now he was accusing Westinghouse of doing what he himself had done to the gas companies when he sent agents around the country propagandizing the virtues of direct current: “None of his plans worry me in the least; only thing that disturbs me is that W. is a great man for flooding the country with agents and travelers. He is ubiquitous and will form numerous companies before we know anything about it….”6
Westinghouse, his eyes on the challenges ahead, paid only reluctant attention to Edison’s hectoring but at last he agreed to carry on an educational campaign to combat it. He would make speeches, he said; he would write articles; he would do anything to get the truth before the people. He was, he told Tesla, determined to win for his company the right to harness Niagara Falls.
He also had his eye on Chicago and the Columbian Exposition to be held there in 1893. Planners were already beginning to speak of this event—commemorating the 400th anniversary of America’s discovery— as the World of Tomorrow, the White City that would light up the land. He could not have asked for a better showcase.
Unfortunately, Lord Kelvin, the famous English scientist, had been named chairman of the International Niagara Commission established to choose the best means of harnessing the Falls, and Kelvin had declared himself squarely on the side of old-fashioned direct current.
When the commission offered a prize of $3,000 for the most practicable plan, about twenty were submitted. But the Big Three electrical companies, Westinghouse, Edison General Electric, and Thomson-Houston, elected not to participate. The commission had been set up by a New York group called the Cataract Construction Company, the president of which was Edward Dean Adams. As Westinghouse saw it, this firm was “trying to get one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of information for three thousand dollars.” When they were “ready to talk business,” he said, he would submit his plans.
As usual in these years of rapid growth, George Westinghouse had money problems. It had cost a great deal more than he had expected to convert his plants over to the Tesla polyphase system. And now when he needed funds for expansion, the bankers were giving him mingy responses.
His only consolation was knowing that Edison was in trouble too. The rumors on Wall Street were that, unless Edison consolidated, his problems were acute. To take his mind off them, he blustered. Westinghouse, he said, should stick with his air brakes, for he knew nothing about the electricity business.
Edison’s opening feint in the War of the Currents was to lobby legislators at Albany to pass a law limiting electrical currents to 800 volts. That way, he figured, AC would be stopped. But the legislators didn’t buy it since Westinghouse countered with a threat to sue the Edison firm and others for conspiracy under the laws of the State of New York.
“The man has gone crazy,” ranted Edison of his nemesis in Pittsburgh, “and is flying a kite that will land him in the mud sooner or later.”7
In addition to waging a virulent campaign in press, pamphlet, and by word of mouth, Edison initiated Saturday demonstrations for newspaper reporters with strong stomachs. He called them in to witness the frightened dogs and cats that schoolboys had snatched off the streets being shoved onto a sheet of metal to which were attached wires from an AC generator with a current of one thousand volts.8
Batchelor sometimes helped with these demonstrations of the perils of alternating c
urrent. Once while trying to hold a wriggling puppy, he himself received a terrible shock. He described having “the awful memory of body and soul being wrenched asunder … the sensations of an immense rough file thrust through the quivering fibres of the body.” Still the killing of animals continued.
Edison was in this fight literally to the death, although not his own. He, Samuel Insull, and a former laboratory assistant named Harold P. Brown worked out a scheme to finish Westinghouse once and for all, or so they thought—through the death of a third party.
Brown managed by subterfuge to buy a license to use three of the Tesla AC patents without Westinghouse knowing of their intended purpose. Brown then made a trip to Sing Sing Prison. Shortly afterward the prison authorities announced that the death house would carry out future executions not by hanging but by electrocution, and more specifically by alternating current, courtesy of the Westinghouse patents.
Prior to the next execution “Professor” Brown went on the road with Edison’s traveling show. On stage he electrocuted a number of calves and large dogs with AC and referred to having “Westinghoused” them. In effect he was asking Americans, “Is this the invention you want your little wife to cook dinner with?”
Public concern had been fired to the desired pitch when New York State prison authorities announced the first scheduled electrocution of a condemned murderer. One William Kemmler would die on August 6, 1890—Westinghoused.
Kemmler was strapped into the electric chair and the switch thrown. But Edison’s engineers, all their experiments having been with smaller creatures, had erred. The electric charge was too weak, and the condemned man was only half-killed. The dreadful procedure then had to be repeated. A reporter described it as “an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging.”9
Westinghouse through the long, sordid campaign doggedly continued to try to set the public straight about AC, citing facts and figures to support its safety. Luckily he had prestigious help from Professor Anthony at Cornell, Professor Pupin at Columbia, and other respected scientists.