“I get the impression,” said Paul, “that you might be in need of a new job.” He gestured out the window toward the open expanse of Indiana fields. In the distance, a pair of old workhorses carried pails of water across the arid dirt.
He’d prepared the offer days before: Pittsburgh. Westinghouse’s laboratory. Head of engineering. When Paul described the position, Fessenden’s lips quivered. Would George Westinghouse, Fessenden asked, really offer such a senior position to someone so young?
“Well,” Paul answered, “I might be able to think of another fairly senior position in his organization that he offered to someone a good deal younger than expected.”
When Fessenden leaned back, the rusty wheels of his chair squeaked. “You enjoy it there?”
Paul shrugged. “If you can find a better position somewhere else, do let me know.”
Fessenden grinned. “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”
They signed the paperwork then and there. The terms were generous enough that Fessenden did not bother to consult his own attorney. He would be extremely well compensated.
“So what do you want to know?” Fessenden asked as Paul slipped his fountain pen back in his pocket. The answer was: quite a bit. How did Edison’s laboratory function? What was its organizational structure? Though Fessenden hadn’t been there when Edison filed for the light-bulb patent, what had he heard from the men who had?
“Edison dictated the problems,” Fessenden explained. “We solved them. Experimentation, that’s how he did it. Endless, tedious experimentation. Invention, you know, it isn’t like the way the press describes it. It’s not Edison in a dark room with a box full of wires. It’s a system. It’s industry. It’s the man at the top, Thomas, saying, We’re going to build a light bulb. Here are all the ways people have tried to build light bulbs before. They don’t work. Now, let’s you lot find a way that does. And then he’d set fifty of us on that task, for a year. And eventually…a light bulb.”
“So,” said Paul, excited, “Edison was in fact making use of existing technologies in his light-bulb design?”
“Well, of course.”
“Did he look at any of the preexisting patents? Sawyer and Man? Houston?”
“I wasn’t there, of course, but based on what I know, he must have.”
Paul’s heart sped. This was everything he’d hoped to hear. “Which ones?”
“I’m sure he looked at all the previous patents, Mr. Cravath. But not in the way you’re thinking. Thomas wasn’t using them to see how he should solve a problem. He used them to see how he shouldn’t.”
Paul’s heart sank as Fessenden continued. “That’s how Thomas works. It’s not What’s the right answer? It’s Let’s try every answer until we find one that isn’t wrong. And the intellectual property that your client owns—Thomas was very pleased by how wrong those answers were.”
Paul was dejected. He pressed on for some hours, but Fessenden gave him nothing that helped. According to everything Fessenden had learned, Edison truly had developed his light-bulb design in his own laboratory.
Paul had never heard of anything quite like Edison’s factory full of geniuses. Westinghouse was responsible for tremendous feats of manufacturing—extremely well-built devices made by a factory of hundreds, each one supplying a part. A chain of construction. Edison, on the other hand, had built himself a factory that did not produce machines, but rather ideas. An industrial process of invention. Hundreds of engineers set to work on a great problem from the top down, each man in charge of his own small part. In this way they could tackle problems more difficult than anyone else’s.
It was ingenious. It was annoyingly, confoundingly, disastrously ingenious.
The sun was just starting to descend toward the cornfields by the time Paul finished. It had been a long and unproductive interview. Fessenden would head to Pittsburgh the following week, to begin work in Westinghouse’s laboratory. He’d be questioned again by the engineers, but Paul did not hold out much hope that this would produce much of use. Perhaps there was a spare technical detail that might benefit the lab. But he had found nothing that could help the legal case on which that lab’s existence depended.
“I’m sorry,” said Fessenden as Paul rose to his feet. “I fear this wasn’t as helpful as you’d hoped.”
“Mr. Westinghouse will have his own questions, no doubt, but I’m quite satisfied.” There was no point in making Fessenden feel dejected. Westinghouse would need him at full enthusiasm when he arrived.
“You know,” said Fessenden offhandedly as Paul shook awake his legs, “if you’re interested in finding another former engineer of Edison’s who might toss you more dirt than I have, there’s a man you might look up.”
“I’d be grateful. Who is he?”
“An awful jerk, but that might come in handy, given your present needs. He’s an engineer’s engineer, if you catch my meaning. Conversation is not his strong suit. Speaks with this impenetrable accent—Serbia, I think? Fresh from the South Street docks, still smelling of sea salt, he got a job at EGE a few years ago. Roundly hated by everyone from the very minute he arrived, which was likely the only accomplishment he managed during his tenure. You couldn’t deny that he was smart, but it wasn’t much use. He couldn’t work with anyone, always off on his own projects. Finally he and Edison got in some terrific row—nobody ever found out what it was about, but we could hear the yelling. Charles Batchelor had to escort the poor man from the building. That was the last we saw of him. Three years ago, perhaps it was? But if you’re looking for somebody who’d be eager to speak ill of Edison—he might be the man for you.” Fessenden looked to the ceiling as he muttered, “If you can manage to understand a word out of his mouth.”
“His name?” asked Paul, removing his fountain pen.
I don’t mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.
—TIM BERNERS-LEE
NIKOLA TESLA WAS dead. Or, if he wasn’t, Paul felt he might as well be.
Not a soul had heard from him since his sudden and angry departure from Edison’s lab three years previous.
The community of electrical engineers, so Paul was learning, was tight-knit. They talked, they gossiped. Trading between firms—such as Fessenden had just done in coming to work for Westinghouse—was not uncommon. Which made it all the more remarkable that Tesla had not been heard from at all.
No one had spoken to him. No one had seen him, no one had received a letter from him, no one had gotten a telegram from him. Perhaps, Paul reasoned, he’d returned to Europe. Perhaps he’d gone into another line of work entirely. Or perhaps he’d fallen to tuberculosis. It was as if, having jettisoned the coils of Edison’s lab, Tesla had jettisoned the mortal one as well.
He was a ghost. An amusing anecdote passed from engineer to engineer. Do you remember that tall fellow? Funny accent? What a loon! Whatever became of him, do you think?
Nothing at all, apparently.
On Paul’s next trip to Westinghouse’s estate, he sought to mention the missing engineer to his employer along with updates on his recent courtroom appearances. His strategy, thus far, amounted to little more than stalling for time. And yet time, if it could be acquired, might prove quite valuable. Edison’s patent on the light bulb expired in six years. If Paul could argue his way against any definitive rulings against them for such a length of time, they’d be in the clear. Losing very slowly was almost as good as winning.
When Paul arrived, the butler informed him that the main house’s portico was being repainted. Would Mr. Cravath mind coming around to the back?
Paul tried to shake the thought that this might be a sign of something. He sat on a small chair that had been placed in a back hallway, and the minutes drew on.