Tesla (23 page)

“What about Stillwell?” Tesla was becoming amused.

“He would envy a blind man his seeing-eye dog.”

CHAPTER 46

The Blind Say That the Eyes Stink

Are not golden-winged myths in the long run much more lasting than dull rows of numbers? How can we not love legends that brush our feverish brows with their rosy wings and dress our wounds with the golden cotton of fluffy clouds?

Humankind calls on myth all the time: Deliver us from dark reality, O legend! Have mercy on us, O legend!

In the legend, Tesla turned his proud profile to the audience, raised his hands, and tore into pieces a check for a million dollars.

“You trusted me,” the legend spoke through Tesla’s mouth.

But in reality, George Westinghouse howled:

“Never!”

The chief of all undertakers, J. P. Morgan, bought out Edison’s company and offered to buy out Westinghouse’s as well.

“Never!” Westinghouse bellowed, like a dying brontosaurus.

After this outburst, he formed a partnership with a few small manufacturers. The sky above Pittsburgh grew dark. The investors became nervous. With their fingernails, they underscored the item of the contract that specified Tesla was entitled to receive two and a half dollars per watt. They repeated:

“Get rid of this!”

When Tesla opened the door, Westinghouse looked like a tuxedoed armoire rocked off balance. The frowning giant stared into the wind that swept the last snowflakes past the window. “The big gorilla sent his barking monkeys to buy my company,” he said, sighing.

Two bluish little horns sprang from Tesla’s temples. He did not listen to what his visitor was telling him. He listened to the marrow of Westinghouse’s bones. Between his nose and his mouth, he caught a taste of the man’s soul.

“I have no choice,” Westinghouse broke down. “Please, give up your dividends.”

Tesla was still a fresh young man who wanted to be liked. His eyes radiated warmth and attention. His hair was divided into two wings down the middle of his head. The whiteness of his shirt could have made Westinghouse snow-blind.

The inventor craved success with every fiber of his being and prepared himself for it. Yet he felt debilitating fear from the enormity of the approaching success he was preparing for. Everything worked against him: endless delays, ill-willed engineers, pirate competitors.

“Fine,” Tesla sighed, and swapped money for fame.

From that point on, Westinghouse turned into a surging wave again. He pressured the engineers who had been stalling the project for more than a year.

All the available equipment had to be modified to fit the detested motor. Shallenberger and Stillwell closed their ears. Something had to be done. This was when the young engineer Benjamin Lamey came on the historical scene, squinting like a groundhog on Groundhog Day. He looked sleepy all the time, even when he was hunting. Westinghouse put him in charge of bringing the motor to the equipment, like Muhammad to the mountain. The good-natured Lamey simply embraced Tesla’s old suggestions about adapting the system to the motor that worked at sixty cycles.

“It’s out of the question.” Shallenberger reddened and left the meeting.

“Wait a minute.” Stillwell took hold of his shoulder in the echoing hallway. “There’s something to this.” The two of them whispered to each other like two scorpions kissing under a rock. Stillwell spoke with excitement; his superior’s face lit up. From Shallenberger’s hocuspocus grin glimmered something truly sweet, almost sincere. “You think so?” he asked.

“Of course,” Stillwell responded.

“You think so?” Shallenberger repeated, moved.

Whispering, Stillwell explained that this time the idea was not coming from Tesla, which made it a new idea. They could accept it, give all the credit to Lamey, and thus shut out the intruder, who was packing his bags to return to New York anyway. They would be as persistent as crickets. In Tesla’s absence, their constant chirping would make the story true.

While a maid was putting his starched shirts in his trunk, Tesla threw documents in his bag while humming incessantly. In Pittsburgh, he had been battling the engineers for a year, like Siegfried fighting the evil dwarves.

“From flowers, a spider only gathers spite—while a bee gathers honey in her flight,” he mused.

“The blind say that the eyes stink,” Szigety quipped.

The maid pressed down on the lid of the stuffed trunk with her whole weight.

“Are you positive you don’t want to stay at Westinghouse’s?” Szigety asked.

“Don’t those bureaucratic dirtbags know that what they say isn’t true?” Tesla said as he closed his bag with a vengeance.

Szigety shrugged. “Didn’t Goethe say that even slanderers should be taken seriously because it’s impossible for people not to believe what they desire with all their hearts?”

CHAPTER 47

For Everything That Lives

The law of competition, which is sometimes hard on an individual,

is the best for the human race,

as it enables the survival of the fittest in every field.

Andrew Carnegie

He pushed his way through the crowd of porters with dust on their shoulders and took a seat on the train. Two sisters with large noses and their similarly endowed mother were sitting across from him. Laughter bubbled through Tesla’s nostrils like champagne as he remembered the words from a lecture he gave as a student: “My dear colleagues, spirited colleagues—follow your noses!” He hid his smile inside a newspaper. Then he pulled his nose out of the paper and anxiously looked at the sky: It was going to rain! He had Stevan Prostran’s letter in his pocket. Looking at the address written in a workman’s hand on brown paper moved him.

He got off the train at nearby Homestead.

So that was where Blake’s dark, satanic mills were—the workshops of the divine blacksmith, the crippled Vulcan!

A whistle sounded from afar. The factory bellowed and breathed fire like a dragon. The
fallahs
hurried to build pyramids. The air was sour from the smoke.

For twelve hours without a break, they fed the smelters with ore. Held captive inside the furnace, the sun flailed its fiery tentacles through the door. The heat singed smelters’ eyebrows.

That was where people with crippled tongues lived and shared their broken memories. Tesla walked by sooty smiles. In the workers’ hovels, Slovakian women sang the most melancholy songs. In front of the huts, old Serbian and Croatian women talked of aches and pains.

“How are you?” asked one.

“Bad,” the other drawled.

A morning drunkard expressed strong emotions in an unknown language. Workers in muddy boots, broad shouldered, with large mustaches, told stories about a Pole who kicked a skunk.

“It was a big mistake.” They all laughed.

“Hey Gramps, have you ever been young?” they teased an old man.

“If I could only have your head, kid,” he replied, “so I could sleep soundly for three days.”

There was a rumor about the coming strike.

Shoulders swaying above his thin waist, Tesla approached the mustached men.

“Excuse me, do you know Stevan Prostran?”

“Sure.” The workers were surprised that the gentleman spoke their language. They immediately posed a mute question with their eyes: Being so great and successful, do you disown us who are so poor and wretched?

No, I don’t.

They told him that Stevan had recently moved to Rankin, where they paid more—fourteen cents an hour.

“You’ll wear out three pairs of iron shoes getting there,” the men laughed. “You’ll need to take the ferry to Keating, but it’s not running today.”

He was looking for his Stevan, but his Stevan was not to be found.

At times like this, it appeared to Tesla that he was surrounded by ghosts who vanished one after the other.

“Ooooo, lassie!” someone sang with a drawl under the sour sky.

The cold wind brought refrains:

“Don’t look back…”

“Forget me…”

He walked along the train tracks toward the station, inhaling the lukewarm smell of machine grease. As he went, he heard a worker, obviously from Serbia proper, who talked to an old woman about someone who had died in the C smelter explosion.

“The poor soul… He was a good man, married to that Mara. His father, Radovan, was also a good man. Those were good people. Be well, Granny.”

The simple words saddened Tesla.

He felt very sorry… for people and small children…

For everything that lives…

CHAPTER 48

The Bearded Lady

Edison’s eyes were slits in a bunker. With a disgusted smile on his face, he inquired, “So what are their weak spots?”

“Their system may pose some danger,” Bachelor muttered, ironing his beard with his palm.

Edison pointed his index finger:

“Their system is deadly. They will release demons into our houses.”

Edison’s hair looked like frostbitten grass. His nose resembled a pickled beet. His fingers danced over the surface of the table.

“This isn’t anything new. This is how we fought the gas companies. Go call Joe Gamshoe. Sam Emew as well.”

Bachelor rubbed the magic lamp. Staring with dark, shifty eyes, Gamshoe and Emew sauntered up and cried, “What’s your wish, Master?”

The relentless mouth gnawed at the cigar. The ashes fell on Edison’s suit. His fingers still drummed the table. “I’m concerned about Westinghouse!” the inventor barked, narrowing his eyes. “The man will never quit!”

They called Westinghouse a “human wave” for a good reason. He tirelessly bribed politicians and businessmen. He gave interviews. He sent his agents and salesmen all over America. He had already sold his alternating current system to a coal mine in Colorado.

As dangerous as an underground stream, Edison plotted with Gamshoe and Emew. He was the first to believe the ideas he tried to sell others. In various newspapers, he raised hell against the “electric murderers.”

At Edison’s ruthless orders, circus tents sprang up all across the state of New York and all of the Midwest.

“Let the show begin!”

In Peoria, Illinois, a frightened dog yelped on the stage. A menacing assistant attached wires to the dog and connected them to an apparatus. Hunched down, he squeezed the animal’s neck and fastened the electrodes.

“Let the dog go, man!” an onlooker shouted.

With a Cheshire Cat’s grin, the demonstrator resembled one of those “professors” who peddled snake oil in small Kansas towns.

The horrified-looking professor yelled at the top of his lungs as if they were children, or deaf. “Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues! Mr. Westinghouse of Pittsburgh wants to bring a new kind of electricity into your homes. Where your women play with your kids, he wants to install so-called alternating current. I know what you’ll say! You’ll say”—the snake-oil salesman produced a good-natured smile—“we already have safe direct current, generously bestowed on us by Mr. Edison.”

Those present only knew about sooty oil lamps and flickering candles. Still, they nodded their heads in agreement.

The professor’s theatrical grimaces and gestures were just as important as his words.