Tesla (22 page)

The guest happily turned glass doorknobs full of light and smiled at the mirrors. A marble bust of Margaret Westinghouse in a Roman matron pose supervised the corner between two windows. The sunlight poured in through French windows, which stretched from the floor to the ceiling. The parquet floors reflected golden glints like Brünnhilde’s hair.

Telephones for calling servants were built into the walls. The main hall, with a circular ottoman in its center, was so skillfully painted that its white silver color gave the illusion of encrusted mother-of-pearl. A schedule of meals and activities written in calligraphy awaited Tesla in his room.

They arrived at Solitude in the afternoon at two sharp. Dinner was at seven. He had enough time to rest.

Both George and Margaret Westinghouse were exceptionally tall. Beds were fashioned to accommodate their size. As soon as Tesla reclined, some inner storm lifted him up like a paper kite. In the huge bed, he experienced several flashes. A personal security safeguard appeared to have failed within him, and he went through a series of spiritual orgasms. Quick and rhythmical, it almost resembled an epileptic fit.

Oh, what an ascension! What light!

He was still seeing the flashes beneath his eyelids when they called him down. The rustling of Margaret Westinghouse’s crinoline accompanied him as he entered the dining room. The power of God’s angels imperceptibly flowed through the walls. Crystal tulips shone from the chandelier. Men in coattails and women wearing low-cut dresses assumed their seats around the table. The servants’ impersonal expressions still frightened Tesla. A uniformed servant stood behind each chair to pull it out and push it back again. The quiet waiters in white served:

As soon as the last guest was served, the plates were taken away. One had to eat quickly. Westinghouse’s engineers had no appetite. As is often the case with anything that is quite logical, when they learned of Tesla’s solutions they exclaimed, “We knew that!”

They spoke little. They smacked their dry lips as they ate. They took their revenge on Westinghouse’s new favorite by casting quick and spiteful glances at him. They called him “colleague” with some hesitation. They believed that the praises they spared him would shower back on themselves. Personal spite is most often disguised as public concern. Westinghouse’s engineers were deeply concerned about the world.

“What happened to the families of those people who were snowed in during that awful blizzard back in March?” the engineer Stillwell asked Margaret Westinghouse.

Engineer Shallenberger’s gravelly throat produced some raspy sounds pertaining to the World Expo that was supposed to take place in Paris the following year. “That self-same Eiffel who constructed the base for the Statue of Liberty will build the tower there as well.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see the Eiffel Tower bathed in lights?” Tesla asked.

“Somebody needs to work,” Stillwell retorted in the voice of a Salem trial judge.

Still seeing some flashes beneath his eyelids, Tesla responded with a little ironic smile.

A row of shapely glasses trembled next to each guest’s plate. They were first filled with white wine and then with red. When the glasses were empty, gloved hands took them away. Tesla had barely a chance to take a sip of some late-harvest muscatel when cognac the color of amber appeared in the glasses. The backs of the chairs in the salon groaned under the weight of the newly fattened gentlemen. A lit cigar served as an alibi for a deep sigh.

With subdued mirth in his eyes, Westinghouse recollected how he started to pump the natural gas they had discovered right beneath the city.

“His gas actually brought industry to Pittsburgh,” Shallenberger, ever the sycophant, amended.

Westinghouse waved off the comment.

“He’s not a ripple—the man’s a wave!” Stillwell praised his boss.

“He’s a fighter who never quits!” Shallenberger exclaimed.

Stillwell did not want to be upstaged at any cost. With theatrical flair, he pointed out his employer to Tesla: “This is the man who took the fun out of stopping trains.”

Westinghouse’s chuckle turned into a merry guffaw.

“Long ago, each car had its own brakeman,” he explained to Tesla. “At a whistle, each man would start to brake as the train entered the station. Sometimes they stopped the train too early, and sometimes they passed the station and would have to back up. In both cases, passengers chased after them.”

“So when this gentleman patented his brakes,” Shallenberger put down his glass of cognac on the table, “those entertaining scenes came to an end.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” All the guests in the jolly mansion Solitude laughed.

Before he booked his trip to Pittsburgh, Tesla asked the frowning Peck about Westinghouse. He was told that the previous year his Pittsburgh-based company’s profit quadrupled and that his parents were Baltic-Russian aristocrats.

“Nothing is created without an individual,” Westinghouse raised his finger before his guests. “And nothing remains without an institution.”

The host did not utter an inappropriate word the whole evening. He signaled to the butler to place a bottle of cognac on a low table. He poured some and confided to Tesla, “My entire life was linked to the railroads. I met my wife on a train. The idea for my first invention came to me on a train.”

The huge host invoked the time after the Civil War, when railroads crisscrossed the country. People shot bison from the train. They used their hides for wall coverings. The owners of railroads bought senators like sacks of potatoes. Senators who “stayed bought” were considered honest. Poets glorified the howl and the sharp whistle of the engine as it penetrated the most magnificent landscapes in the world.

The silver on Westinghouse’s temples highlighted the deep red of his face. “A practical man is a man with a vision,” he explained. “Without a vision, he’s not practical—he’s pedestrian.”

His enthusiasm was boyish. He loved a good fight. He moved his chair closer to Tesla’s: “They said I was a bully at school. I didn’t stay long in college. I’m not an academic type. I’m good at something else: I like to roll up my sleeves and convince people. That’s what I want to do with your motor.”

With his broad chest and clear eyes, this gigantic aristocrat greatly appealed to Tesla. Whenever Westinghouse left the room, the light became dim, and when he returned everything seemed to expand.

“I always knew it was possible,” he said at the end of the evening. “I suggest we prove it together.”

Ever since he had met Westinghouse, the young inventor had a nauseating and thrilling premonition. In his large bed at Solitude, he wrestled with his oncoming success like Jacob with the angel. Success was a living creature, huge but invisible, which slept in his room at night and breathed close to him during the day. Success smelled of the February wind and enormous solitude.

CHAPTER 45

The Engineers

The evil suppress virtue much more than the good admire it.

Don Quixote

The face of the newly arrived Hungarian electrical engineer lit the mirrors in Pittsburgh. He was always excited and jovial, so everyone liked him.

“With your full cheeks and your light eyes, you remind me of a lynx,” Westinghouse laughed.

Westinghouse called him Anthony and asked him to elaborate on the discovery he witnessed in the park in Budapest. Szigety preferred Mrs. Westinghouse to anyone else.

“Did you see her cleavage?” he whispered into Tesla’s large ear. “I wouldn’t mind curling up in there like a hamster and hibernating for the winter.”

Tesla rolled his eyes and introduced him to Westinghouse’s engineers.

“These guys don’t like you, my friend,” Antal told him right after the meeting.

“Why?” Tesla was taken aback.

“They envy you because you don’t envy anybody,” Szigety responded. “They also believe that you have it in for them as much as they have it in for you.”

Tesla recalled his father’s words that
the truth is never adverse to an intelligent and honest man.
Under the influence of his arrogant naïveté, Nikola believed people would appreciate that he was in the right and they were in the wrong, which would help them lift the burden of error from their minds. The brief pauses the engineers used when talking to Tesla put him “in his place.”

Oliver Shallenberger, the inventor of the electric meter, and his assistant Lewis Stillwell, the inventor of the amplifier similar to Tesla’s reels, were the worst.

“I’ll lock horns with them for you,” Szigety promised Tesla.

Shallenberger’s smile oozed sugary revulsion.

At home, his wife was careful not to give their child the best piece of chicken, which was reserved for her husband. Shallenberger finely cut and thoroughly chewed his white meat. After the meal, he gently hugged their little daughter, looked at the ceiling with his teary eyes, and wondered,
Why, God?

The ambitious engineer was under the impression that fate had dealt him a rotten hand. Volcanic bitterness, furious impotence, and aggressive fear alternated in his chest.
He
was the former prodigy.
He
had worked on the alternating current motor for years: Why don’t the journalists ask
him
about the events in China? Why doesn’t his little daughter—after she’s finished gnawing on her chicken wing—feel proud of her father?

Lewis Stillwell rarely bothered to ponder such questions. His nose was shapely, his eyes were a mixture of steel and champagne. The handsome, cold man did not care about recognition. At night, before his second shoe fell by the bed, he grimaced: The stranger doesn’t know what to do with his money. If Stillwell had that kind of money, he would build a house above the Hudson. And he would build another house for his mother, and then a church. And he would have a stable full of horses, the best in Saratoga Springs.

People would know who Stillwell is!

There was a rumor among the engineers that Westinghouse had offered the stranger some sort of partnership. Apparently, the stranger was stupid enough to turn him down.

“But, if you don’t mind, I will still stay in Pittsburgh,” Tesla promised, “to work on adapting my motors to your system.”

“This is how we will do it,” Westinghouse proposed at a closed meeting. “I’m offering you five thousand in cash for sixty days, ten thousand at the end of that period if I buy your patent, three times twenty thousand in two-month intervals, two and a half dollars per watt by way of income, and two hundred shares in my company.”

“God damn it!” swore Shallenberger.

“It’s not going to work that way,” growled Stillwell.

The war started right after the contract was signed.

The motor could not be adapted to the higher frequencies of Westinghouse’s equipment, so Tesla suggested lowering them. Stillwell and Shallenberger used long rationalizations to grease their spiteful reluctance. Terms such as “the integrity of the system,” “technological rationale,” and “economic factor” were repeated at regular intervals.

In Pittsburgh, Tesla experienced frequent flashes behind his eyelids. Those bursts of light revealed to him things he could only helplessly ponder before. Formulas and forms floated in that liquid platinum. Tesla refused to work on what anyone else could do—he wanted to work on what only he could do. Every day, on his behalf, Szigety politely fought with the engineers.

Whenever they relaxed during dinner, Tesla began to philosophize: “In order to notice something original, one has to ignore required things. Institutions tend to promote obligatory concepts. Desirable concepts are rewarded with money and a pat on the back. Institutions train people not to focus on what is not rewarded and to never understand concepts that bring no personal gain.”

Dealing with the engineers, Szigety scratched himself out of boredom and almost fainted from formalities. Nevertheless, he persevered. His explanations to Stillwell and the man’s superior were miracles of inspired clarity. Shallenberger’s strength fed on repetition. He kept telling the same story using the same words. Every evening, this Hungarian Pan opened a bottle of wine at the Anderson Hotel. After he poured, Szigety slapped himself on the forehead and cried, “What idiots!”

Tesla responded prophetically: “It seems that a man must forgo his cognitive abilities if he wants his social standing to be recognized. Oh, institutions!” he said, raising his voice. “Your purpose is to blind people and then to lead the blind. In you, they parade their knowledge as if knowledge is devoid of any elements of mystery. In you, they gymnastically exercise being brainwashed. In you, the work horses by the names of Stillwell and Shallenberger haul the cartloads of authority.”

After the second glass, Antal felt inspired to declare, “Those two hate originality and consider it monstrous. They would want the morning paper to tell them what they already know.” After the third glass, he screamed, “I have no clue how people can live like that. These are the people with perpetually wounded pride. If Shallenberger were given a choice between catching a cold and letting someone else die, he would avoid getting ill.”