Tesla (31 page)

CHAPTER 63

People from the Hat

An average American loves his family.

If he has some love left, he spends it on Mark Twain.

Thomas Edison

Robert Underwood Johnson repeatedly removed his magician’s top hat for Tesla’s benefit. Famous people kept springing out of it, removing their own hats in turn. First he introduced him to Antonín Dvořák. The two men remembered—or pretended to remember—their meeting in the National café in Prague.

At the
Century
’s office, Tesla encountered a young man with bright eyes. He wore a warm yet catlike smile. His mustache was heavy. His brow was high. His extremely black eyebrows bristled in an attempt to replace his vanishing hair. His nose was straight and thin. His eyes were bright and blue. Bowing like an officer, he said:

“Rudyard Kipling.”

Tesla complimented
The Phantom Rickshaw.
Married to an American, Kipling badmouthed Chicago and brazenly slandered New York’s Lower East Side:
disgusting endless streets, horrible people who talk through their noses, more barbaric than Hottentots.

The following Saturday, Robert invited Tesla to Delmonico’s and promised, “You’ll love him! A flaming red head! Completely red—even the mustache.”

“A Renaissance man!” Katharine added ironically.

“Benvenuto Cellini.” Martin was enthusiastic.

When Tesla’s new acquaintance blushed, blood flooded not only his face but also his hair.

“The lucky fellow,” people used to say. “That devil was born under a lucky star.”

The red blotches on the cheeks were not a gift of health but a sign of tuberculosis. Stanford White!

“They say that he is the devil,” Katharine explained.

“They say I’m the devil,” the architect humbly affirmed.

“I’ll tell you a story they recite in Bosnia,” Tesla said in response to White’s smile:

“Do you have any more wonders in your Ali Baba’s cave?” Katharine asked as they returned from dinner at the Van Alens’.

“Why don’t you drop by the cave?” Tesla asked.

“We’ll bring some friends,” Katharine muttered.

“Please do!”

One rainy day that smelled like a halved cantaloupe, a coach clopped up in front of Tesla’s laboratory on South Fifth Avenue. A straight figure of a man with bushy eyebrows stood out among the group of arrivals. Millions of those who had never seen him knew who he was—the writer who kept his word that he never smoked while he slept.

Mark Twain!

“You don’t say!” his eyes challenged Tesla even before he said anything. The expression on his face constantly changed in between his stormy eyebrows and good-natured mustache. When he addressed Tesla, a smile hovered around that mustache. “Robert says you work a lot.”

“If you don’t count thinking,” Tesla answered, “I’m the laziest man in the world.”

“Don’t argue with me, young man,” Twain interrupted him hoarsely. “I’m the laziest. My whole life, I’ve been conscientiously avoiding work. If I’ve accomplished anything at all, it’s not because of work but because of play.”

One of Twain’s eyebrows was raised and shaggy and the other was brushed down. Tesla listened to his slightly growling, almost stuttering voice, ideal for telling stories.

“Thank God,” Nikola sighed to himself, “that, among all the horse thieves and the envious, an occasional witty sage like Twain walks in this world.”

Tesla believed that humorists were smarter than philosophers and confessed to Twain that his early stories helped him get back on his feet when he had cholera as a young man. Like many other writers, Twain sometimes suspected that what he did was—nothing. Tesla’s words did away with his theatrical grumpiness and filled his eyes with tears.

In the midst of the Gilded Age, everyone got richer except the man who gave the age its name. Wherever he went during the day, people smirked and said, “Make us laugh!”

But at night, the wise clown, sleepless, paced around his room. “Like most people, I’m not quite myself at night,” he confessed to his friends.

Johnson whispered to Tesla, “You know, he invested all his money in a worthless printing system.” That black hole devoured all of Twain’s income and the even more substantial dowry of his wife, Livy. He was so deep in debt he contemplated selling his Hartford house with its multiple chimneys and gables with gingerbread ornamentation, whose soul mirrored the writer’s soul.

“You immigrated to America and I’m emigrating from America,” Twain confided in Tesla. “Maybe you could provide some electrotherapeutic machines I would sell to rich old women in Europe. Fifty-fifty?”

“Sure,” Tesla agreed.

The smiling inventor introduced Twain and his friends to his world of black machines surrounded with shimmering light.

“Do you know what the hell this is?” Twain asked Johnson in a cracked whisper.

“To a degree,” Johnson responded.

“Listen here!” Tesla announced, as straight as Virgil. “We’re not in hell yet, but we’re on our way. Per me si va ne la città dolente. A very disturbing experience for the superstitious.”

The air was so electrified it felt like they moved through cobwebs. The visitors expected phantom hands to appear in the room at any moment and brush their faces.

Tesla kept explaining:

“Some of the apparatuses here create vibrations the intensity of which has never been achieved before. When I harmonize my oscillators with the frequency of the earth, I will be able to wirelessly conduct not only energy but messages as well.”

“And what is this?” Twain asked.

Tesla did not hear his question. “The life of all energy—from the sun to the human heart—is a matter of pulsations and vibrations at certain frequencies.”

While his long fingers pointed out one nameless object after another, Tesla’s clear, ringing voice rapidly fired the words
this
and
that
at his listeners: “This is an oscillator that can demolish the Brooklyn Bridge. That is a lamp that lights up by itself. This is the ‘shadowgraphic’ machine. That is the genie that lives in my coil.”

He pulled a lever, and a fifteen-foot electrical discharge stuck its tongue out across the room. At its sound, his guests hunched. They shrank even more when tiny thunderbolts started to make friendly crackling noises all around them. “These are my minor genies,” Tesla said.

His guests reluctantly straightened up.

“This is just a more spectacular version of what constantly flows through us and the world.”

“This is us,” Twain laughed hoarsely, his black eyes becoming brighter and brighter.

While the thunderbolts snipped around the room, Tesla suggested his friends step on the platform that held the oscillating mattresses. The old writer with quivering gray hair and bright eyes was the first to do it. Surrounded by the flashes, he stood upright like a rooster. Then he said, “This is excellent.”

“Watch your…” Tesla wanted to warn him, but it was too late.

The humorist discovered that the vibrations momentarily stimulated the function of his bowels, and he had to rush to the bathroom. They all laughed when Twain came back with a very unusual expression on his face. They had a drink, floating in the amoeboid blue light.

“To our photographs!” the visitors exclaimed.

“To our photographs,” Tesla toasted them.

Using his lighting tubes, Tesla took their pictures. The big-nosed Joseph Jefferson and the chiseled-faced Marion Crawford were the first to be eternalized in that elfish environment. Then Tesla photographed Katharine’s wispy hair and her alarmed eyes. Finally, Twain’s drooping mustache was captured in the picture. Twain had a glowing unplugged lightbulb in his hand.

Those were phosphorescent photographs, the first ever made. A wall calendar called this windy day April 26, 1894.

CHAPTER 64

Così fan tutte

Sitting by the open fire, the two of us feel pleasantly dull.

And yet, two is too small a number—it takes at least three to make it lively,

especially when it snows outside…

From Katharine Johnson’s letter to Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla smiled as he looked at the floor. Robert Underwood Johnson raised his nose toward the ceiling as he looked for a rhyme. The photographs of his parents, Nimrod and Katharine, looked at them without understanding from the mantelpiece. The father’s hairstyle was characteristic of the 1850s, and we have to call it foolish. The mother was considered a woman of great beauty, which the picture did not support.

These two model rhyme makers decided to translate Jovan Jovanović Zmaj’s poems into English. The first rhyme maker provided the literal meaning. The second rhyme maker couched the poems in elegant, somewhat hollow rhymes.

Looking for the English equivalent to the Serbian phrase
crammed together
, Tesla got up and walked to the Japanese screen. He complained, “On the outside, Serbian looks like such a tiny language, but it’s so roomy on the inside.”

“Never write down with your hand anything that you wouldn’t like to read when you come back from the dead,” Johnson advised him with a quote from
A Thousand and One Nights.

Robert’s face showed the signs of settled maturity. His contemporaries considered his Roman nose to be an indication of great energy. His handsome face started to assume the agreeable expression of a Saint Bernard. The two of them communicated through messengers three times a day. In those memos, Robert signed his name as “Luka,” after Luka Filipov, the Montenegrin hero from a poem by Zmaj.

While the two of them translated Zmaj in the shadow of Robert’s eloquent clock, ornamented with suns and moons, Tesla’s coach was waiting outside.

“Daddyyyyy, may I ask you something?” Owen crooned. “Can we take a ride in Uncle Nick’s coach?” the little manipulator asked behind his cutest smile.

The coach had rubberized wheels—a miracle of shock absorption. They put a brass heater under Agnes’s and Owen’s feet and covered them with Scottish plaid.

The young Johnsons felt like grown-ups as they rode along the streets lined with floating yellow and blue lights and through the deep shadows of the park.

Clippety-clop!

Agnes started to howl and Owen worried that she might turn into a werewolf.

While the children were riding in the coach, Robert spoke to Tesla about his Katharine.

At their wedding, a journalist caught her bridal bouquet. “I kissed her stomach when she was pregnant. Before I held baby Agnes in my arms, I had no idea where the center of the world was. When I first held the baby, I said to myself, ‘Now I know.’”

The new father and mother got up at night together to see if Agnes was breathing.

“The way I proposed to her…” Robert reminisced as he widened his eyes, magnified by his pince-nez. “I took her to a cliff above the Hudson, and in that spectacular landscape I asked her if she would marry me. Just before our wedding, she got mad at me and threw her engagement ring into the fire. So I had to dig it out—with my bare hands.”

Robert interrupted his story to pull back his slipper at which Richard Higginson I yanked, growling. Robert smiled a healthy smile. “Then we made up. I embraced her tightly. She sighed and said, ‘When they hug, a man and a woman make a fortress in the cold universe.’” Robert paused and his eyes wandered away. “I’ll never forget that.”

In short, the inventor and the poet slowly developed one of those Roman-like friendships that Seneca would have praised. Whenever Tesla found himself in financial straits, Robert’s check discreetly arrived. Five years his senior, Robert turned into a brother Nikola had never had—kind, not godlike and distant like Dane.

The woman who was the center of the urban galaxy at 273 Lexington Avenue was still attractive. Her hair looked as if she washed it in cognac. After a bath, she stood naked in front of the mirror, applied some cream on her face, and wiped her fingers against the dry skin of her buttocks. Yes, I’m still beautiful! Touched by tuberculosis, she sometimes sunned her throat at a sanatorium in Colorado for a few months. Like many Victorian girls, Katharine Johnson was raised by the following rules: Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be proper even if it kills you.