Tesla (30 page)

His shoulders were hunched in the beginning but straightened up as he went on. Yet again, he described electricity as an all-permeating substance that connects rough matter. That substance—which Lord Kelvin nearly equated with God—had broad and safe practical uses. Tesla described the heating of iron bars and the melting of lead within the electromagnetic field. He touched upon the possibility that electricity rejuvenates and heals.

Tesla’s assistant, Gano Dunn, did not listen to the lecture. He was waiting for a sign.

Tesla waved his hand.

The kiosk drowned in darkness.

In the dark, the same thunderbolts cracked that Giambattista Vico believed had intimated the first notions of God to humans. Tesla’s coil turned into the burning bush, wrapped in flames that did not consume. With soft pings, lightbulbs and glass tubes lit up by themselves. But the climax came when the man in the smoking jacket let two hundred thousand volts run through his body. Not only did he allow them to pass through him, he turned into a cyclone of electricity. People retreated in horror when his hair stood up on end.

“Oh my goodness…” a voice gasped.

Tesla’s face would have become disfigured with triumph had he not had control over himself. Exhaustion turned into exaltation. With his crooked smile and bluish horns of Moses, the scientist turned left and right in the widening circle. No one tried to touch him. His body and clothes continued to emit a succession of fine haloes.

“What’s the meaning of this dream of beauty?” a female voice asked.

CHAPTER 61

In a Fantasy World

Thomas Commerford Martin introduced Tesla to a woman with a wisp of gray hair and a man with a Roman nose. They rubbed their eyes as they had just emerged from the dark.

The curls and waves of the stranger’s mustache flowed into his beard. He raised his nose a bit and looked at Tesla through his pince-nez.

“Robert Underwood Johnson,” he repeated, stressing each word as if Martin had failed to introduce him.

One look from his lady companion turned many a man’s knees into jelly. The flash of her necklace was as stunning as her bosom. Her nose held a mysterious air of confidence. Her eyes were cruel and bright.

“Katharine Johnson,” she said.

Her sudden laughter made the entire Pavilion of Electricity spin. Still laughing, she addressed Martin: “Why don’t you ever bring Mr. Tesla over?”

“I will. I promise.” Martin bowed.

Three weeks later, Katharine accepted an astonishing bouquet of roses from Tesla, who gingerly encircled it with both hands. At first glance, her face appeared classically serene, calm, more angular than oval. Her untamable hair gave away her nervous temper. So did her eyes. Her smile turned the air around her body into sweet liquor.

A wicker basket in the corner of the dining room was filled with wine corks. The dinner, inspired by Tuscan recipes, pleasantly surprised both Tesla and Martin. Johnson, the Italophile, believed that Apennine cooking equaled the French despite its occasional inconsistencies. He suggested he should write a guide to Italian restaurants for connoisseurs only.

“You’re a man ahead of your time,” proclaimed his guests as their faces became ruddy.

A pleasant rosy current circulated through the rooms and hallways. At sixteen, Robert and Katharine’s daughter, Agnes, was already a beauty. Little Owen was “a knee-high bundle of energy.” They had a black Labrador on which little Owen rode. The dog pounded its head hard against the table but continued to wag its tail as if nothing happened.

“His name is Richard Higginson the First.” Robert pointed out the dog offhandedly.

They also had a white cat called Saint Ives. Saint Ives constantly stalked something invisible.

“Cats tend to live in a fantasy world,” Katharine observed, with a smile that hinted at something else.

During the lively conversation, Nikola and Robert started to interrupt each other. Martin smiled with satisfaction. Robert was amazed at how much poetry Nikola knew by heart.

“Art shouldn’t be separated from life”—he put his wineglass away and almost choked with approval—“as something too precious for everyday use.”

“That’s exactly the kind of poet Jovan Jovanović Zmaj is,” Nikola exclaimed. He regretted that Robert could not read Zmaj’s poems. “They haven’t been translated…”

Robert could not stop talking about poetry. “Facts themselves won’t do,” he shouted. “They become irresistible only when they are slapped with the flame of poetry.”

Robert Underwood Johnson was generally considered to be a poet and an editor. Tesla soon understood that he was a magician. He knew everyone in New York and resembled an adult Tom Sawyer. He was a close friend of Mark Twain.

“Why didn’t Mark Twain come to the exposition?” Tesla asked.

“Actually, he did,” Johnson answered. “But…”

As soon as he arrived in Chicago, the humorist fell sick and spent ten days in his hotel bed. Other than holding a thermometer in his mouth, he did nothing but cough, so he failed to make the exhibition. He did not go on the fifty-cent around-the-world tour. He did not view the drawbridge made of soap. He did not write about the Main Canal, over which the Statue of the Republic, “Big Mary” with gilded shoulders, raised her hands in blessing. He did not see two hundred feathers trembling on Standing Bear’s headdress as the chief rode on Ferris’s wheel. He did not take the measure of the frightening cannons in the Krupp Pavilion. He did not elbow his way through a throng of police officers who were soothing lost children and the farmers who were ordering bratwurst on Fishermen’s Island. He did not catch the sight of the fleet of fifty electric gondolas floating along the canals. He did not see the New America that, thrilled by change, denied the fear of change. He did not witness Tesla and Westinghouse conduct a galaxy of lightbulbs.

“And he did not see you as you transformed into a fountain of sparks on the stage,” Johnson concluded.

The warm-eyed Martin added that Twain also missed “Little Egypt,” the belly dancer who swayed her hips on the “streets of Cairo.” Then he angrily put down his glass of cognac: “I want to ask you something else. Why didn’t Westinghouse sue Edison for pirating your motor?”

Tesla stared at Martin with his bright, impish eyes. “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” he warned.

“Why?” the fearless Martin repeated.

“Because he himself pirated Edison’s lightbulb.”

When they stopped laughing, they remembered the Saint Paul of Hinduism, Swami Vivekananda.

“Do you know what Hiram Maxim said about him?” Tesla asked. “The man, he said, is a living example of an ‘unsaved soul’ who knows more about philosophy and religion than all American preachers and missionaries put together.”

“I hear that he’ll move to New York to lecture.”

“I’ll go and hear him,” Martin promised.

“That exhibition was a visual treatise, the largest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel,” Katharine said and then yawned. “The entire town was a… sequin. One felt like whistling and blinking one’s eyes in wonder while eating cotton candy.”

Martin smiled dutifully.

Robert, however, disagreed; the World Exposition was a truly marvelous event, yet it felt empty compared to Chicago’s real problems. “Did you know that crowds of homeless people moved into the abandoned palaces of the City of the Future after the closing of the fair?”

In a word—they got tangled up in conversation. Martin was already taking his leave, but the reason they came had not been mentioned at all.

“What about you?” he asked Tesla.

“I’m not in a hurry.” Tesla shrugged.

Robert and he stayed on. They discovered that—when they were both boys—their fathers used to travel through rural areas. One was a doctor, the other a priest. Robert still remembered the underdone meat he was served in Indiana farmhouses for breakfast.

“I had to break the ice in the washbasin so I could wash my face.”

Tesla related how the bushes in Lika were black with June bugs. The branches broke under their weight. Robert became interested. Tesla discovered that his new friend combined a good temper with a love of anecdotes. His did not divorce a serious take on life from laughter.

That laughing man successfully pushed through the international copyright law, suggested to his friend John Muir that Yosemite should be made a national park, supported suffragettes, and edited the magazine
Century
with both good taste and authority. Robert was General Grant’s acquaintance and publisher. He knew the former President Harrison and was on intimate terms with the rising political star Theodore Roosevelt.

“Come sit here!” Robert told Tesla and threw a pinecone into the fireplace. It soon turned into a burning rose. The house was lavishly decorated, with Arabic incrustations. Refinement taken to a sick degree determined the shade of the wallpaper. The Bordeaux color of the room was enlivened by the blotches of two Tiffany lamps, which resembled twin jellyfish. A gold and silver clock with suns and moons ticked in its walnut case. No one knows how many glasses of wine they emptied and how many pipes of tobacco ash Johnson knocked into the fireplace that evening. Katharine was as beautiful as Venice. She swirled her skirts above her knees and settled at the piano. Glasses tinkled in the cupboard. The Labrador stood on his hind legs, and Robert waltzed with him. “Ah!” he sighed, falling back into the armchair in a paroxysm of dramatic exhaustion. When he found himself alone, Richard Higginson I got in a fight with a hissing radiator.

“My dog constantly quarrels with something, like Luther with the devil,” Robert said. “He barks at the doorbell, the rain, the thunder.”

When a nearby clock tower sounded midnight, the Labrador barked at it. But when it laconically struck one o’clock, the dog looked sad and dumb.

“You look gorgeous when you yawn,” Johnson said to his wife.

“I’m going to bed,” Katharine said. “Bye-bye.”

Blue-eyed like a husky, she smiled, looking Tesla in the eye: “We’ll become friends.”

“You think so?”

All coquetry fell from her beautiful face. The woman responded, “I know so.”

CHAPTER 62

On Top of the World

Tesla’s European tour and the World Expo made him famous.

In
Electrical Review
, the warm-eyed Martin was the first to ever use the magic word: “Prometheus!”

At Delmonico’s, they served him flaming dishes and desserts with sparklers.

Suddenly, everyone remembered him. His old friends started to write to him—the widow Bauzain from Strasbourg, his ailing uncle Branković, and even Tannhäuser, who invited him to his wedding in Vienna.

From a starving lad with bangs—in the picture from his Varaždin days—Nikola turned into a man on top of the world. His autograph became ornate. The motion of his hand became nervous and commanding. If a fly landed on his tablecloth, he demanded that the table be set again.

Lady Astor’s salon could accommodate only the Four Hundred. Tesla was one of them. In that limited space, the musicians played a sequence of numbers: a march, a quadrille, a waltz, a polka, a galop, and a couple of circular dances for each quadrille. The march was usually played before dinner. Tesla had two pairs of gloves—he wore one before dinner and the other after dinner. He attended these events but did not dance. “I waltz with my head, not with my legs,” he explained.

He also said this: “Rather than waiting for some king to knight you, who may be a fool or a villain, you should knight yourself.”

Tesla bragged about being the best-dressed man on Fifth Avenue. He tapped his cane against the top of his shoe and declared, “When it comes to clothes, people judge a man according to his own judgment, which is revealed through his appearance.”

The dandy did not wash his gloves and starched collars—he threw them away. A master shoemaker provided an endless supply of high-laced shoes. Monograms embellished each item in his wardrobe. Jackets flattered his greyhound-like figure. Each Monday, he bought a new tie in a Stendhalian combination of red and black.

Of late, he had been living on top of the world. In fact, he lived above the top—in the joy of discovery. He walked on water and danced his mental waltz. His elfish ears touched heaven. Stars revolved in his hair. The walls and frames that provided worldly limitations disappeared in moments of creation. He was an ancient Roman in triumph. Dane’s ghost stood behind his back and whispered, “Remember that you are human.”