Free Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer Page B

Lowery. Their lamp was superior to Edison’s; it was patented, and it worked. Lowery tried to bring Edison in for a four-way discussion; however, Edison sent an emissary who “dared not relay to Edison all Lowery had said. But Edison heard enough to be jolted from his indecision…Cursing and spraying tobacco juice, he exclaimed it was the old story—lack of confidence!” 39
    Edison was adamant about not joining with Sawyer or Swan or anyone else. He continued rash publicity campaigns which announced “a veritable Aladdin’s lamp…[It is] Edison’s light, the great inventor’s triumph.” 40
    With the backing of Wall Street moguls, Edison began to illuminate Menlo Park and the private homes of the wealthy in New York City. Thefirst was that of J. Pierpont Morgan, at Thirty-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue. The year was 1881.
    To run the generator Edison designed a steam engine and boiler and placed the power plant under the stable in a newly dug cellar at the back edge of the property. Wires were connected to the new incandescent lights placed in the gas fixtures of the home via a brick-lined tunnel which ran the length of the yard just beneath the surface. “Of course, there were the frequent short circuits and many breakdowns on the part of the generating plant. Even at the best, it was a source of a good deal of trouble for the family and neighbors. who complained of the noise of the dynamo. Mrs. James M. Brown next door said that its vibrations made her house shake.” Morgan had to pile sandbags around the inside of the cellar and place the machinery on heavy rubber pads “to deaden the noise and the vibrations. This final experiment restored quiet and brought peace to the neighborhood until the winter, when all the stray cats in the neighborhood gathered on this warm strip in great numbers and their yowlings gave grounds [from the neighbors] for more complaints.” 41
    The following year, on September 4, 1882, the new Central Station at Pearl Street opened. It provided electric lighting to many Wall Street buildings, including Morgan’s office.
    Tesla’s ship dropped anchor in New York in late spring of 1884, just as the monumental decade-long project the Brooklyn Bridge was being completed and the last components of the Statue of Liberty were being hoisted into position. Twenty-eight years old, “tall and spare, [with] thin, refined face” 42 and sporting a mustache, Tesla still had the look of an adolescent.
    His first impression of the New World was that it was uncivilized, a hundred years behind the lifestyle of the great European cities. Deferring his planned meeting with Edison one day to look up an old friend, Tesla had the good fortune to pass by “a small machine shop in which the foreman was trying to repair an electric machine…He had just given up the task as hopeless.” 43 One rendition of the story has Tesla agreeing to fix the machine “without a thought for compensation.” 44 On a separate occasion, Tesla revealed that “it was a machine I had helped design, but I did not tell them that. I asked…‘what would you give me if I fix it?’ ‘Twenty dollars’ was the reply. I took off my coat and went to work, [and]…had it running perfectly in an hour.” 45 The story is important because, depending on the rendition, two different Teslas emerge, one motivated by money and one not.
    In either case, Tesla was shocked by the rough character of the New World. 46 He proceeded cautiously to Edison’s new laboratory, a former ironworks at Goerck Street, situated only a few blocks from the centrallighting station Edison was constructing at Pearl Street. 47 Batchelor probably met Tesla and introduced him to the inventor. “I was thrilled to the marrow by meeting Edison,” Tesla said. 48
    Possibly aware of the proximity of Transylvania to Tesla’s birthplace and a resurgence of interest in the tales of Vlad Dracula, the fifteenthcentury alleged vampire who lived in the region, Edison