Authors: Vladimir Pistalo
Tesla (21 page)
From the Stuttering Diary
May 5 was not an ordinary day. But what made it so special, if I may ask?
What made it special? Antal Szigety arrived in New York!
Szigety hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. He looked strange in this environment. He’s a real spark of energy. He turned a cartwheel in my half-empty lab. Then he looked around, winded and happy, like a boy who just finished a drawing of a rooster’s tail. The lab smelled of paint and new wood. The tables, the chairs, the brass lamps—everything was new. “So, whose lab is this?” I asked Antal in a surprised voice. “Yours, Nikola.” “It
is
mine!” I just couldn’t believe it, so I told him how Peck gave us cigars and how we split the patent fifty-fifty.
“The Bauzains send their greetings. So do our old friends Kulišić and Tannhäuser as well as Mrs. Várnai”—Szigety almost choked—“and the Puskás brothers, and my father, and your uncle Pajo, and all your other relatives.”
I told him that, after experiencing poverty, I still couldn’t get enough kindness. For a whole year I couldn’t work up enough authority to call a waiter or play with a dog. I would constantly say “thank you” or “you’re welcome.”
My eyes filled with tears.
After those words, Szigety’s eyes also filled with tears.
To conceal his emotions, he asked, “Do you know what today is?”
“What?” Tesla asked with an ironic smile.
“Today’s my thirty-first birthday.”
Tesla leapt to his feet. “Then champagne is in order. It’s a must! I’m taking you to a Hungarian restaurant.”
Szigety smiled with his blond mustache. “You must be crazy!”
“They even have a hammer dulcimer!”
“Do you think I crossed the ocean so I can eat
székely
goulash?” the new arrival to New York protested.
It all ended with the ruddy-faced Hungarian and the pale-faced Serbian at the Midsummer’s Night Dream roof garden restaurant eating steak.
Of that night, Tesla wrote in his diary:
Szigety’s foggy accent gave off a whiff of the Old World. My unexpected success smelled like loneliness. His arrival brought a thaw. I felt my soul defrosting. “An enormous undertaking is ahead of us,” I said and my voice trembled. “You must help me.” I felt relaxed after such a long, long time. The wind hasn’t blown everyone away. After the third bottle, we shared sudden attacks of unprovoked laughter. “Our illuminated souls, lit up with wine, can’t hide the number of glasses that make us shine…”
At the Midsummer’s Night Dream restaurant, Antal started to slur his words.
“What did you do in Paris?” Nikola asked.
As if he was waiting for a prompt, Szigety showed his beautiful teeth. It turned out that in Paris he’d frequented brothels in which smiles radiated cunning and erotic fire. There, he said, a redhead and a brunette rubbed their plump breasts against one another as they shared the deepest kiss.
“I’m not talking about this just for you,” Szigaty raved. “I’m talking to mankind. Feel what I feel. You! You! Feel what I feel!”
“Oh yeah,” Tesla mocked him, raising an eyebrow.
“Imagine a man and a woman in a baroque brothel where the champagne costs twenty of your American dollars,” Szigety slurred. “Their dry lips are linked in a kiss, which is a perfect fit. She’s like a doe caught in a net of passion. He passes his spread fingers across her silky hips. She gives him a deep look: I’m yours!”
Szigety stared at Tesla’s long, monastic fingers. A smile of playful Eros hovered upon his lips: “He’s on fire. He’s shaking. The flame carries him. It lifts him up. Giggling, she’s melting like sugar in water… Furious, anxious scenes of love unfold.”
“Of love?” Tesla interrupted him. “When a paid woman puts on a show of passion for you…”
The Hungarian poet did not hear him. “She’s horrified, shocked, furious, and she keeps her eyes tightly shut with pleasure…”
A wry smile attacked Syigety’s face like an itch.
“Enough, Szigety! Stop it!” Tesla rose from the table.
“Her eyes are closed with pleasure,” the maniac continued. “Her face is dancing, she glides back and forth across his slippery stomach. She caresses her breasts… Love—”
“Love is fine, but work is glorious.” Tesla interrupted him at last. “Go to bed, birthday boy! Great deeds await us.”
CHAPTER 43
Success
Fully aware that new inventions could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, Tesla’s patent lawyers, Duncan, Curtis, and Page, opened negotiations with investors from San Francisco and with George Westinghouse from Pittsburgh.
“Things are happening!” Charles Peck informed him with a frown.
Tesla worked at a frightening pace. He broke down his plans for the induction motor into a series of patents. The progress of his work depended on the ability of his technicians to keep up. With the jaunty yet tireless Szigety, Tesla designed spindles and constructed prototypes, so that weeks of work extended into months.
One windy April morning, a young man with warm eyes appeared at his door. It seemed that the hair he was losing from the top of his head migrated to his mustache. The balding fellow introduced himself as Thomas Commerford Martin, the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
“Theologians believe that God can count every hair on one’s head. In my case, that’s not particularly difficult,” he joked at his own expense.
Martin had come to ask a question: “Would you give a lecture at our club?”
“I can’t believe it!”
For years, he had yanked at the buttons and sleeves of indifferent people, trying to tell them about his motor. Now they wanted to listen to everything that deaf Edison would not hear!
“I’m too nervous to go with you,” Szigety said. “You’ll tell me how it went.”
When an elegant landau pulled by two smart sorrels stopped in front of the laboratory at Liberty Street on May 16, 1888, Szigety jumped in anyway.
“Move over. I’m going.”
Settling next to Tesla, he turned around and wrinkled his nose. His fellow passenger smelled of violets.
Szigety, more nervous than Tesla, took a sip from a silver flask.
“Antal!”
“Everyone loves to be forgiven for something,” Szigety said by way of apology.
In less than twenty minutes, the bobtail horses pulled up to the gateway of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. The entrance was fashioned from one block of ornamental brick. Brass bars kept the carpet on the stairwell in place. From the atrium, echoing hallways rayed in different directions.
“This way,” Tesla was instructed.
“Good luck,” Szigety whispered, melting into the audience.
Their steps echoed along the checkerboard hallway.
“Follow me,” Martin mouthed near Tesla’s cheek.
The wood-paneled auditorium emitted a stuffy yet pleasant odor.
Tesla was so tall that, to the audience, he appeared to be on stilts. His face tapered from his broad brow to his long chin. His hair was parted into two black wings. His wounded, mysterious eyes burned beneath his brow.
What do they expect of me?
he thought with animosity.
To step dance? To juggle torches?
He was so nervous he wanted to flee from his own body.
As a child, he often dove into the cold Korana. Now he did the same—he simply dove in and began. Electricity, he explained, is as incompressible as liquid. It is the fundamental organizational principle of the matter in which it is bound. Only a small portion of it exists in a free state. If there were an imbalance in the electrical charge, the electrical force would rule the universe because it is many times stronger than gravity.
Tesla’s face assumed a half-inspired, half-martyred expression. With his uplifted nose and fluttering eyelashes he looked like a blind man.
He said electricity was the clean essence of a dirty world—or his audience thought that was what he said.
Electricity cannot be created or destroyed, and its quantity is always constant. It is like Allah—it has no smell or shape or sound, but nothing can withstand it when it manifests itself. The lightning’s crack is not electricity—it is hot air because electricity remains invisible.
The lecturer opened his anguished eyes. His heightened awareness made them glow.
He spoke about the phenomena of attraction and repulsion, and to his listeners it seemed as if he were talking about love and hate. He went on about the mysterious fascination of electricity and magnetism, about their seemingly dual character, unique among natural forces. The main question we face is, can we use these forces in a practical way? There is no doubt about it!
In the audience, a group of people, including the Serb Mihailo Pupin from Columbia University, started to boo and heckle him.
“Shhhhhsh, shhhhhsh!” came from all sides.
The hecklers were silenced.
All of a sudden, everyone wanted to listen to what the deaf Edison refused to hear. Warm ectoplasm circulated between the lanky lecturer and his audience. In that moment, Tesla knew:
“I have them!”
He could not remember what he said from that point on.
Choked up with emotion, he spoke about the future long-distance transfer of electricity and the day when Niagara Falls would light up the city of New York. “Why should a big city like New York need two thousand power plants when one would be sufficient?” he asked.
The gold ball of yarn sprightly rolled along his path again. He spoke so fast that he neglected the necessity of breathing. People listened to him with an embittered sense of awe. Many members of the audience were frozen with delight. Many felt as if someone had cut off the tops of their heads. In the end, the ceiling danced from the applause.
This was finally it. This was his world.
Long-legged as a crane, the lecturer smiled amid the applause. The balding, round-eyed Martin snatched up the copy of Tesla’s speech in order to publish it in his
Electrical World.
This is an awakening!
flashed in Tesla’s head.
But is it mine or theirs?
The audience—like a single being composed of many eyes and dignified mustaches—embraced him. The many-eyed creature asked, “Are you sure that the system is safe enough?” “What distance can electricity be transferred without loss?” the noisy entity uttered through a different mouth.
“Congratulations! You swept them off their feet.” Antal’s alcoholic breath hit him in the face.
Even Pupin smiled at him with a self-satisfied expression and shook his hand in the most cordial manner. “May I pay you a visit?” the new convert asked.
Above the heads of the crowd, Tesla looked for his manuscript as it was disappearing “straight to print.” He was deafened by the applause, which lifted him above the stage and above the human race. Charles Peck materialized behind him. His wooden fingers squeezed Tesla’s elbow: “I must introduce you to someone.”
CHAPTER 44
Pittsburgh
“George Westinghouse,” Peck announced like an archbishop intoning a prayer.
A huge, graying man spread his arms wide and the day became a holiday. His walrus mustache glistened. His eye was clear. Everything that had to be said he fitted into three sentences:
“I heard your lecture. You convinced me. I’ll buy your patents.”
The sun stood still.
“I don’t know what to say,” Tesla muttered.
“Don’t say anything,” said Westinghouse. “Come to Pittsburgh.”
That turned out to be a wonderful visit.
A coachman in a uniform with gold buttons and a top hat met Tesla at the station and took him to Westinghouse’s mansion, which he had named Solitude. It looked like a castle. A magnolia tree was shedding its petals on the front lawn. On the garden path, Tesla noticed a patinated bronze sundial. Two robins fought around this device of Chronos. Despite the great beauty of his uncle Pajo’s mansion near Budapest and the few Alsatian residences he had visited, Tesla had to admit that this was the most splendid house he had ever seen. The windows, walls, and parts of the roof took on unexpected curvy and oval shapes. Squeezed in between several palm trees, a fountain gurgled in the greenhouse. Through lush greenery, a redbrick path led to the coachman’s quarters above the stables, where eight horses and their companion, a little white goat, grazed on hay. A black servant with sheep-white hair was the handsomest old man Tesla had ever seen.