Edison flicked ashes from his cigar onto a gold tray.
“In the past year,” he said, “I have had many opponents to whom I might direct my attention. After today I will have only one. Your client. Either I will win, or Mr. Westinghouse will win. It’s that simple. My company is ten times the size of his. I have a seven-year head start on manufacturing this technology. J. P. Morgan himself has promised us bottomless coffers for our expansion. And me…Well. I think you know who I am.”
Edison took a deep puff from his cigar before blowing a plume into the air. “I brought you here to ask you this: Do you really think you have a chance?”
He regarded Paul as a dogcatcher might look upon a soon-to-be-euthanized stray.
“Mr. Cravath, I invented the light bulb. George Westinghouse did not. So I’m suing him for everything he’s got. He’s a rich man, and you’re about to squander his fortune trying to beat me at a game I’ve already won. By the time this is over, I will own Westinghouse’s company. I will own your law firm. So stop. The line is drawn. Whoever is in my way is going to get hurt. For your sake, I am asking that you not be one of them.”
There was a strange crinkle at the corners of Edison’s gray eyes. It took Paul a long moment to recognize it. Thomas Edison was regarding him with…concern.
This was what stirred Paul’s anger.
“I’m glad you asked me here tonight,” said Paul. “You’ve saved me the trouble of having to make an appointment.”
“Oh? And what was it you’d wanted to speak with me about?”
“To deliver some bad news. You’re being sued.”
“I am?” said Edison, the slightest of smiles forming on his lips. “By whom?”
“By George Westinghouse.”
“My boy, I think you’ve gotten it the wrong way around.”
“We’re countersuing you.”
Edison laughed. “For what?”
“For violating our patent on the light bulb.”
“I invented the light bulb.”
“So said the patent office. Only…weren’t there existing light bulb patents before yours? Hadn’t anyone else filed claims on any similar designs?”
Edison quickly determined what Paul was getting at. “Sawyer and Man? But that’s a joke. Their designs were an ocean apart from my own. If they want to sue me, they’re welcome to.”
“They can’t, I’m afraid. Because they don’t own their patents anymore.” Paul held up the folder he’d pocketed before leaving his office and slid its contents across Edison’s mahogany desk. “We do.”
Edison examined the papers before him. His fingers drummed a quiet orchestration on the thick desktop as he read that the Westinghouse Electric Company had entered into a licensing arrangement with William Sawyer and Albon Man. Westinghouse now owned the exclusive rights to manufacture, sell, and distribute electrical lamps employing the design those men had patented.
“That is exceptionally clever, Mr. Cravath,” said Edison at last. “Really. I can see why George likes you.”
The familiar use of Westinghouse’s first name was a calculated move. Edison slid the papers back across the desk. He reclined in his deep chair before he spoke again. “I’ve looked you up. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Can’t imagine there’s much to find.”
“Graduated first in your class from Columbia Law School two years ago. At which point you were given a tutorship by Walter Carter personally. Terribly impressive. A year and a half later, Carter leaves and you follow him to his new firm. You’re made partner, instantly. At twenty-six years of age.”
“I’m precocious.”
“You’re ambitious. Six months ago you were the junior partner at a new firm. You had never tried a case. And then, somehow, you managed to acquire your very first client: Mr. George Westinghouse, the man I had just sued for more money than you, your children, and your grandchildren will ever see in the total of their pedestrian lives.”
“Mr. Westinghouse has an eye for talent.”
“You are a child hired to be the lead litigator in the largest patent suit in this nation’s history.”
“I’m very good at what I do.”
Edison’s laugh was a deep rumble. “Oh, come on, Mr. Cravath. No one is that good. How did you get George to hire you?”
“Mr. Edison,” Paul said, “why are you pretending to be impressed by me?”
“What makes you think that my admiration isn’t genuine?”
“Because I’m standing on the fourth floor of the Fifth Avenue offices of the most successful inventor in the history of God or man, who registered his first patent at twenty-one and made his first million by thirty, whose every utterance is printed in thirty-eight-point type across the front page of The New York Times as if he were the Oracle at Delphi, and whom the president of the United States—and most of its citizens—believes literally to be a wizard, whose name instills awe in the heart of every child with a wrench and a dream, and fear in the heart of every banker on Wall Street, and he thinks that I’m ambitious.”
Edison nodded calmly. Then he turned for the first time to his associate by the door. “Mr. Batchelor, might you do me a kindness and bring in those files on Maryanne’s desk?”
Batchelor returned bearing a stack of documents almost three feet high.
“Just on the desk here would be lovely, thank you,” said Edison. “Now, Mr. Cravath, you don’t need me to tell you that these things here are lawsuits.”
“A great many of them, by the look of it,” said Paul with the briefest glance at the pages.
“Three hundred and ten,” said Edison. “There are, I believe, three hundred and ten lawsuits in that pile. And they are all against Westinghouse subsidiaries.”
“Three hundred and twelve,” corrected Batchelor. “The Rhode Island and Maine suits were completed this evening.”
“Quite right. Three hundred and twelve. You see, I’m not only suing you. I’m suing everyone you do business with. I’m suing everyone you’ve ever done business with. Every Westinghouse subsidiary, every local and state manufacturer, every factory, every sales office. The thing is, I don’t have to win all of these suits. Or even most. I only have to win one. You’re countersuing me? Best of luck. Because you won’t need simply to beat me once. What you’ll need to do is to beat me three hundred and ten—I’m sorry, three hundred and twelve—times. Straight.”
Edison ran his fingers across the mahogany desk, past the mysterious boxes and sealed glass tubes and thin copper strips to a black button at the far edge.
“Do you like the view?” Edison turned to the windows. Beyond the glass, lower Manhattan rose from the ocean. The city shimmered in a glow of burning oil and gas, punctuated by the occasional flicker of an electrical bulb. “You can see the statue from here.”
There it was: Lady Liberty, just visible all the way from Bedloe’s Island. Paul thought back to his first visits to the city, when the arm was still on display in Madison Square Park, before the city had raised enough funds to build the rest. Paul and his friends would picnic under the shade of her elbow.
The light from the statue was dim this far away. But its source was unmistakable: electricity. The statue’s torch was powered by an electrical generator on Pearl Street, on the southern tip of the island. It was Edison’s generator. It was Edison’s light.
“We’ve been having trouble with the Pearl Street station recently,” said Edison. “Some instabilities.” He tapped his black button.