The Invention of Everything Else (7 page)

At one of the worst moments of illness, ready to quit, I came across a book by a new author, a young writer from America. Yes, Sam. There you were. The text was like a cold compress on my forehead. The book counseled, "I'm no doctor but let me advise. Get even sicker, child, and your father might change his mind about all this religion. If his choice is whittled down to you becoming an electrical engineer or you becoming dead, my thought is he'll choose the former."

"Brilliant!" I said and fell into a slumber most resembling a coma. When I woke days later both my parents were standing over me. My mother and two sisters were crying, my father looked half-mad, wild, and there was a gypsy woman smiling as she licked her lips and mashed together a stinky medicine that would save my life.

"Papa," I managed to say before swallowing her concoction, "perhaps if I had something to live for I would get better."

"Yes, dear, yes, anything."

"Engineering school."

"Of course, of course, yes. Anything."

And the cure was nearly instant. Nine months after I went to bed, I rose again and left for a school with a very special concentration on all things engineered.

Which is not to say that I bloomed into the portrait of good health afterward. No. All through school and even later in Budapest, once I'd changed my mind about school's utility, I was thin-skinned, weak. I was ill. Illness, it seems, had become the very matrix for many of my ideas: fever dreams. I saw a ring built around the equator, held aloft by gravity. The ring remained stationary as the globe below it spun. Humans lined up to travel around the world in one day aboard my ring.

There was a tremendous pressure on me. It was youth. Either I needed to prove my ideas or I would suffocate inside them. So, perhaps at great risk to my body, I would forgo meals. I would forgo rest in order to continue working. It was during this period that one day I woke with a start, which was odd because, as I said, most regularly I did not sleep. A Morse code manual sat open on the table before me. I must have dozed off.

There was a noise so violent that I came awake immediately. "Don't leave me! Oh, I am a wretch! I am a worm! I am a speck of wretched worm dust!" The noise rattled the floorboards with a power certain to trigger earthquakes.

I clasped my hands over my ears, which made only the smallest inroads at waylaying such a large noise. I've always been sensitive. "Swear that you will see me tomorrow! You must swear or I will stop breathing!" The noise seemed to enter my brain through my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I prayed to stop breathing, anything to stop this noise before my mind and body burst, my brain hemorrhaged, and all the studying I'd done in Graz got splattered across the wall of my room. I could see it. The calculus, the physics, the courses in engineering would coat my desk, my bed, my books.

The screaming man paused momentarily and began instead to weep and moan, so with both hands over my ears I took that opportunity. I dashed from my room and knocked on the first door down the
hallway, imagining that the screaming culprit must be within. I entered only to find my neighbor sleeping soundly, and so I moved down the hall of the boarding house, trying each door in the building. Everywhere I found the same: sleep.

The voice came again. "My darling, please! My heart! My fig! My only one!" I dragged myself out the front door and into the street, where I thought I'd find relief from this noise that threatened to halve my person. The sound grew in intensity; the vibrations rattled my very frame so that my teeth and skeleton shook. I raced through the city streets desperate to find the screaming man and muzzle him. I removed my coat and bound it around my head as a turban to buffer the vibrations. I pinched my upper arms to either side of my head, yet still, "Oh, I am a wretch!" cut through, pierced my senses to the absolute core, every syllable like the blade of a knife that had first been dipped in a nauseating poison, slicing open my very bones, my very veins.

I ran toward the noise, crossing three avenues and the river. It grew more intense. I was certain that the ripples of the water's current were not being stirred by the wind but rather had risen in reaction to the sonic bomb that was blowing me away. Soon I'd run so far that my legs and lungs grew weary. I pushed on, nearing the outskirts of town, a distance of approximately 3.2 kilometers from my boarding house. I had to stop his shrieking. The noise grew louder. My molars were ready to pop from my jaw. Finally I stopped, the sound and the distance having sapped my strength. I walked. I was nearly crawling when at last, at a distance of 4.1 kilometers from my room, I spied the young man whose voice had launched this assault on my very being. He stood in the street before a house, looking up to a window where I imagined the man's beloved must reside. Up to her window the man yelled, "Dearest, I am lost!"

The outburst quite literally blew me off my feet. It lifted me into the air and deposited me five feet from where I'd been. "Sir," I attempted to say, but the man could not hear me. My strength had been so depleted by the sound assault that I could not muster my voice. "Sir, I beg you," I said louder, but the man heard nothing.

With one last bellow he shouted, "I would give you my heart but there is nothing left, dear lady. You have crushed it to bits!" I was knocked unconscious, felled by the sound vibrations. Discarded and broken as an old dust rag in the rubble of the street, I gave over to complete breakdown, though not without first registering two last thoughts that crossed my mind just before the flood of unconsciousness. The first: there is tremendous potential energy in sound waves. The second: if I am to be an inventor I must never fall in love.

I have always been extremely sensitive, it's true.

In the days and weeks that followed this incident my senses did not subside from their hyperactive state. I heard watches ticking three rooms away. The sound of a fly landing on the scratchy material of my bedsheets rocked my head with a dull thud. A horse and buggy passing miles away sent tremors through my body as if this carriage tolled an approaching apocalypse, while a locomotive on the outskirts of the city made my joints tremble in their sockets. Even the rays of the sun created enough pressure that I felt they would crush my head like a melon. I wrapped my bed's legs in a foam-rubber cushion, a barrier to absorb the vibrations that assaulted me, but even this was no match for the sound that surrounded me everywhere. Like a Hindu, I swaddled my head in a thick wool blanket. I took refuge in my room and would not leave. I could get no rest, though not owing to the pain—I'd been groomed for illness—but rather to the wonder this condition presented. What could such heightened sensory powers mean? How could they be of use? I've often regretted that I was not, at the time, put underneath the microscope of medical experts who might have gained some new understanding of the human body.

After days, a knock came upon my door, causing me to nearly vomit as my stomach ratcheted from side to side with the knocking. It was my friend, a fellow engineer, Anital Szigety. "Enough of this. I won't have it," Szigety whispered, and after pulling at the tongues of my shoes he fit one boot onto my left foot and one onto my right. Lacing both, he sat me straight up on my bed. "Athletic exertion is the certain cure for all your ailments and so athletic exertion it will be for you."

I was too weak to resist.

I had withered, but Szigety helped me down the stairs and out the door, where we began walking—hobbling, really. Szigety dragged me down to the river. We passed below a bridge and I surrendered. I was certain it would kill me. The pressure of such a structure overhead could crush the very cells of my body. Szigety disagreed. He was relentless in his friendship. I trembled. Applying his shoulder to my backside he forced me to pass below the bridge. And when we emerged alive on the other side, hope struck a spark. We continued walking.
A slight sensation of life again returned to my limbs. In a short distance, in light of the evidence that sounds would not kill me, we were running. In an even shorter distance we began to leap and laugh. "A miracle," I yelled, but I do not believe in miracles. Miracles simply mean that the world of science is much greater, much odder, encompassing many more dimensions than previously imagined. I sprinted. I yelped, and the sound did not kill me. I skipped and jumped, and in that moment, that joyous return to health, I saw it like the most beautiful flash of God, though I also do not believe in God. I saw the alternating-current engine, running without a tick across the synapses of my brain. I understood. The puzzle I had for so long been trying to assemble I finally understood, as if the past weeks of illness had been a pregnancy, a delivery of sorts, and there on the streets of Budapest I became the happy parent of my life's work.

"Szigety!" I yelled. "Come quick. Look!" I pointed to the air directly in front of me where I could see the engine spinning as clear as day.

"What is it?" he asked. He saw nothing.

I reached out my hand. "You don't see it, do you?"

"See what?"

"Here," I said, and with a dead branch as a stylus, the dirt below as a sketchpad, I drew the machine exactly as I saw it whirling before me, every last coil and magnet in place.

He studied it for only a moment before demanding, "How does it work? How does it work?" just as you might, Sam. And so I explained how it begins with a magnet, an iron rod where the charge has been separated, negative at one end, positive at the other. The iron rod is then wrapped in copper wire, which, of course, is a marvelous conductor, meaning that a charge can move very easily through it. The wire is twisted around the iron bar, and this creates a highly unusual magnetic field. When electrons are sent through the copper wire and the entire apparatus is rotated, a wonderful thing happens. Rather than creating a simple linear flow of charge, the wire instead produces a force that causes the charge to flow around the wires, circling the magnet. Once the wire loop has rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, the force, of course, reverses and the charge moves in the alternate direction along the wire. The current changes. After a second one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation the current changes back once again, and an alternating current is produced.

"Ah," Szigety said.

I continued, telling him how it is different from DC because of the way electrons travel through the wires. "It is better than DC because if you care to change the voltage you can simply wrap a second wire around the magnet core. And most importantly, DC cannot travel far from home. If we wanted to power the world with DC electricity, we'd have to build a power plant every two miles."

Szigety nodded, not quite understanding. Just as you might. I suppose I could try to tell you again how it works, but you would be horribly bored by the telling, and even when I was done you still might not understand entirely. But that is all right, old friend. There is a much better way for you to understand what I invented. Plug in your phonograph. Plug in your toaster or your reading lamp. Plug in your ceiling fan and refrigerator. That is the best way for you to know my alternating current.

With the dregs of my modest furnishings and possessions hawked to fund my American journey, I had set out from Gare de l'Ouest, Paris. Case in one hand, letter to Thomas Edison and train ticket in the other hand, bowler on my head. My thoughts swam. The intricate metal framework of the train station was trying to give me one last lesson. I could barely hear it. "What?" I asked.

"
Faites attention!
" the grillwork exhaled, and so I stopped still, causing a pileup in the flow of foot traffic. I was instantly walloped from behind. "
Excusez-moi, monsieur.
" As I turned, a boy more than ten years my junior straightened up, returned my case to the hand from where it had been dislodged. "
Ah, merci,
" I whispered and looked. The letter, the train ticket were still in place. No harm done. I turned again. The boy had disappeared into the crowd.

"
Messieurs et mesdames,
" a conductor called above the heads of the crowd. He called for my train. The train that would carry me to the boat that would carry me across the sea where I would march directly into the offices of the heroic Mr. Edison, who, I liked to imagine, would kiss me on both cheeks, receiving me as a long-lost son.

I saw my train just ahead. They were calling for the last riders to board. I reached for my wallet in my back pocket, where I had safely stored the funds from the sale of all I owned, as well as the ticket for passage aboard the sailing ship
Saturnia.
The wallet was gone. The train whistle hollered as if it knew the agony I felt at that moment. The wheels, though stiff and tired, began their slow departure.

"That is my train to America," I thought. "It is leaving." I stood struck dumb. I checked my pockets one last time. No wallet. No ticket. I did find a scrap of paper where I had, days before, sketched a design for a flying machine. The sight of these hopeful lines kicked me into action. I picked up my case and began to sprint alongside the body of the moving locomotive. I had my eye on a door, and by concentration and tremendous speed I caught it and hurled myself inside, landing against a very surprised, elderly French woman who shoved me off her and spit the word "
Cochon!
" The word made me smile.

When I reached the harbor I was able to recount every single detail of my original sea ticket. I had, of course, lovingly memorized its every feature, the eleven-digit number, the berth, even the departure gangway and the first mate's name. I talked myself on board.

After such a panic, my steps were slow as I circled the deck, walking my way to America. My berth lay below the waterline, and so I spent nearly the entire crossing, night and day, strolling the decks. I was in love with my latest invention and, like a lover, I'd stare out at sea, imagining my beloved, a machine I would build once I reached America. The alternating-current polyphase generator. I could picture holding it in my hands, the curve of it, the touch of its metal skin. The possibility was palpable. Here before me was the ocean, infinite, impossible, fantastic, yet there I stood with it, a part of it. The ocean was no different from electricity. Currents, indeed. I would go to America, and when I got there I would build a machine that would generate an electrical ocean. Had anyone ever before made an ocean? I thought not.