Tesla (29 page)

“‘How long has it been since we saw each other last?’ He sighed and squeezed my hand.

“I returned the squeeze and said:

“‘Time doesn’t exist!’”

CHAPTER 59

You Will See!

Whenever the ship fell from the ridge of a wave into the trough, it looked as if the water might swamp the smokestacks and extinguish the fires in the boilers. In place of a prayer, Nikola kept repeating the words of Tiresias to Odysseus: “A fair wind and the honey lights of home are all you seek.”

The center of his world had been in Gospić, at Mother’s home. Now, his world did not have a center.

And his home was Manhattan.

The moment Tesla put his foot on American soil, Westinghouse and his assistant Gano Dunn sandwiched him.

“For God’s sake, where’ve you been? There’s so much going on here!”

Westinghouse slapped him on the shoulder with a folded newspaper: “Read.”

No man in our time has with one stroke achieved such a universal scientific reputation as this gifted electrical engineer.

“It’s your trip they’re writing about,” Westinghouse exclaimed in his bright tenor.

Dunn laughed. “Did they bring the blind and the crippled for you to touch while you were over there in Europe?” he asked.

“There’s one more thing,” Westinghouse shouted over the ships’ horns. “Edison’s General Electric is switching over to alternating current. They’re hiring engineers to redesign your motor so they can get their own patents.”

With a capricious, wild grimace, Tesla tried to conceal his joy. “Really?” His voice was distorted.

“I’m not done yet,” Westinghouse bellowed amid the noises of the harbor. “You know who’s going to build the electrical plant at Niagara Falls?”

“What?” Tesla cupped his ear with his hand.

“Not
what
,” Westinghouse shouted into his large ear, “but
who!
”

“So
who?
” Tesla yelled back.

“Us!”

“Naturally, General Electric carved out a piece of the pie for themselves.” The talkative Gano Dunn crooked his mouth. “That has to be. Pierpont Morgan is backing them.”

Westinghouse’s eyes had a boyish gleam. “That’s it, Nikola! It’s over. We won.”

Tesla turned into a tomcat. The tomcat dashed under the bed, grabbed the rooster by the throat, and snapped its neck.

“I’d like to get some rest now,” Nikola sighed.

“There’s no time for rest,” Westinghouse whispered and ground his teeth. “Never!” Then he added: “Let Gano take your luggage to the Hotel Gerlach. We’ll celebrate at Sherry’s.”

All of a sudden, the screeching of streetcars in the city of Walt Whitman appeared to be part of a great song. When Tesla first came to America, he felt the country was lagging a hundred years behind Europe. Westinghouse’s news now gave him the impression that it was leading by seven-league-boot steps. He, Nikola Tesla, was part of Whitman’s poem. He noiselessly ran before the change, like a blind figurehead on the prow of a ship.

When a uniformed doorman closed the door of Sherry’s behind them, Nikola felt like a mouse that had crawled into the soundboard of a piano. Silence deepened like a yawn. There was an atmosphere of calming security. The discreet aromas of roasted meat and side dishes were more intriguing than the smell of flowers on the tables. The mirrors emitted tempestuous reflections. The silverware gleamed amid the starched napkin tiaras. Ice chinked in silver buckets and sparkled in glasses.

A galaxy of waiters quickly surrounded the famous arrival from Europe.

“This way, please. This way!”

In the partitioned area of the restaurant, a group of men with straight backs and heroic gray hair practiced putting on their friendliest smiles.

“The bankers!” Westinghouse whispered to him. “Our new investors.”

Near the head of the table, Tesla noticed a few faces straight out of the herbarium, the grandchildren of the Anglo-Dutch elite dating back to the city’s beginnings.

With an absentminded smile, Nikki Vanderbilt presided over the meeting. The warm-eyed Martin, Tesla’s biographer, was the most glad to see him. A man with lively eyes, gray hair, and black eyebrows was sitting next to Westinghouse.

Westinghouse introduced him:

“Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun.”

He turned to Tesla:

“Hiram hates priests.”

He turned to Maxim:

“Nikola is a longtime admirer of Voltaire.”

The two inventors exchanged smiles while the headwaiter droned on about fifty different oyster dishes. Each guest picked one dish, but they all ordered champagne together. Frosty images on the bottles and silver dragons on the pitchers drew Tesla’s attention. White-gloved hands served them food and drink. Silent waiters brought trays arranged with red pliers, lobster tails, and crab cakes topped with swirls of mayonnaise. They served candied lotus flowers for dessert. Nikola was different from the man he was when he came to America long ago. He had turned into a lotus-eater. Futuristic New York was an ideal place for amnesia.

“To Niagara!” Tesla raised his glass.

“To Niagara!” Westinghouse echoed. He inflated his bull-like chest, stroked his mustache, and added, “Although… there’s something more important to celebrate.”

“What’s that?”

Westinghouse assumed a comically serious expression. “Now you must speed things up, Nikola. Borrow a machine gun from Hiram and threaten your assistants. Put the screws to your glass blowers.”

Tesla looked at him with mute amazement.

“Leave the presentation to me,” Westinghouse addressed Tesla, but he looked at the investors. “Create a show that will shock scientists and enchant the public. President Cleveland has invited members of the Spanish and Portuguese royal families to the most spectacular event of the modern times.”

“What in the world…”

“Nikola, we got commissioned.”

“What for?” Tesla asked.

“We’ll light up the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.”

Only the angelically absentminded Vanderbilt, with his granite chin and white sideburns, could get away with inquiring, “What exposition?”

George Westinghouse looked each of them in the eye. His fierce smile broke out like a geyser. “You will see!”

CHAPTER 60

The World Expo

President Cleveland, sporting a double chin and a heavy mustache, turned the “key to the future.”

“Ah!” millions sighed in relief.

The lake mirrored the images of the palaces. Gondolas skated across the rippling water. The wind undulated the plumes of the fountains. At the exposition, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the continent was finally settled. At the conference of the world’s religions, Swami Vivekananda lectured about the illusion of personality within the eternity of time. The Duke of Veragua, one of Columbus’s descendants, took in the spectacle with dreamy satisfaction. The Maharaja of Kapurthala exhibited his spectacular mustache—the sight of which made twenty women faint. Princess Eulalia of Spain took Harun al-Rashid walks across Chicago and even smoked in public. The Ferris wheel, propelled by sighs, rotated on the largest axle in the world.

“What’s the meaning of this dream of beauty?” Henry Adams, the writer, whispered.

The masses rolled in through the gates on the Midway. Ladies sweated underneath their corsets. Those sweating ladies had traveled a long way from their boring farms where the howling wind and sputtering oil lamps kept them company. For the first time in their lives, in the World of Light they could see Eastman’s camera, Benz’s automobile, Krupp’s cannons, the zipper, chewing gum, and the electric kitchen. While they sighed wistfully, their children dragged them toward a Venus de Milo sculpted in chocolate. Shrill voices resounded everywhere.

“Let’s see the lion tamer!”

“Let’s go to the Lapland and the Algerian villages!”

“Let’s go to Buffalo Bill’s circus!”

“Let’s take a balloon ride!”

“Let’s do it all!”

Freckled kids with upturned noses saw the Statue of Liberty made of salt and other products of useless ingenuity, such as a locomotive made of silk and a drawbridge made of soap. At the Kansas Pavilion, a herd of buffalo made of wheat lolled about. At the Agricultural Pavilion, there was a map of America made out of pickles, and a monstrous cheese that weighed a ton.

“Would you like a piece of the monster cheese?” George Westinghouse asked Nikola Tesla.

“I can’t wait!” the inventor laughed. Our hero was in a champagne mood. “You know what this is?” He grew excited. “This is a rite of passage. In Europe, they still imagine that America is full of wild Indians and buffalo. America has come of age.”

“Our light casts a new light on America.” Westinghouse acknowledged his words with slow pride.

MacMonnies’s fountain and the exhibition palaces lined with lightbulbs were the work of Tesla and Westinghouse. Their lights used more electricity than the city of Chicago.

They raised their batons, and hundreds of thousands of bulbs responded with mute music.

In the midst of this glare—the glare they created—Tesla remembered the gold stripe that burned under the door and the candles he made as a child so that he could read in secret. And now? He was a ray that shimmered among other rays, trying to make his way through people who did not exist.

That season, purple, turquoise, and violet dresses were in fashion. Someone had to light them up! Someone had to light up Don Quixote made of plums! The Venus de Milo made of chocolate and Princess Eulalia—all of that had to be lit up.

An ideal city rose next to the “city of broad shoulders,” of slaughterhouses and sooty factories. The real city was grotesquely fierce and dingy. The other one was dazzlingly white. The first was dangerous; the second was safe. Untouched by the spectacle of triumphant modernity, twenty thousand unemployed were on strike in the first one. In the second one, visitors were moved to tears.

“Thank God my miserable life isn’t the measure of all things,” people from Kansas whispered. “Thank God something like this is possible!”

On the roof of the Electricity Pavilion, a spotlight rotated as if asking:

“What? What? What?”

In a blue watercolor, the painter Childe Hassam immortalized Westinghouse and Tesla’s small kingdom.

A fifty-foot-tall kiosk rose in the middle of the Electricity Pavilion: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. Tesla Polyphase Systems. Glass neon signs burned coldly and pointedly on it. With its blue glimmer, the name of the Serbian poet Zmaj stood out among them. The signs crackled, and the explosions of tiny thunderbolts could be heard all over the building. Only the members of the International Electrical Congress and their wives were admitted to Tesla’s lecture—if they had passes.

Tesla shook hands with the dignitaries Westinghouse introduced to him. His biographer, Martin, presented a man with full lips, a small nose, and almond-shaped eyes: “This is our guest who came from India for the conference of world’s religions. Swami Vivekananda!” Tesla dove into the stranger’s extraordinary eyes.

“It would be good for us to talk,” Vivekananda simply said.

Tesla’s smile was fierce. “I’d love to!”

Westinghouse coughed impatiently.

The kiosk buzzed with excitement. On a velvet-topped table, Columbus’s egg spun in an electric whirlpool. Smaller balls revolved around bigger ones like planets around suns. Not even other electrical engineers knew what exactly those apparatuses were. Our cartographer of the unknown was engaged in the magical act of naming things.

In that magnificent exhibition, he presented oscillators so small they could fit in one’s hat. He also presented a radio wave transmitter the purpose of which no one could figure out.

At his lecture, Tesla appeared in a white smoking jacket. He stood in front of his audience while that other one whose hair was slowly rising stood next to him. Tesla’s black hair was parted in the middle. His ears stood out. His tired eyes were the color of the sky before a storm.

The reader should become concerned about him because he looked so ill, he had to excuse himself. “Mr. Westinghouse invited many electrical engineers to give this lecture, but when the time came I was the only healthy one.”