Free The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt Page B

thought, superb—"could you direct me to 65 Fifth Avenue?"
    "To 65 Fifth?" he spat back as though the words were an insult hurled between us. "To 65 Fifth?" he roared again, tipping his head high, trying to lift it above mine.
    "Yes." I stood my ground. "That's the street I am looking for."
    And with that he pointed quite generally in a northerly direction, which was absurd. The only thing not in a northerly direction from where we stood was water. I walked north.
    The volcanic sense I had had on board remained. The streets, though rudimentarily cobbled, were packed with people and carts, animals and grime. All the scents of the city—roasting corn, the stinging odors of horse urine, grilled meats, candied nuts, and the starchy scent outside each public house I passed—were terrifically intensified by my empty stomach.
    At 65 Fifth Avenue a number of pigeons swooped in and out of view overhead. There was no sign, just a tiny card tucked into the jamb of the doorway. I was scared to look at it. I worried what might happen to someone whose dream has come true.
    THOS. ED.

    was all the card said. The print had blued in the weather. My heart thrumped. It was pounding. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer, and soon my palms were damp with nerves. I raised my hand up to the doorknob. It was not locked, and after a deep breath I pushed my way inside, sick and expecting, in my nervous state, to find the laboratory vacated outside of a spool of thin wire rolling across the bare floor.
    But this was not the case.
    Entering Edison's laboratory was like entering the circus halfway through the grand finale. Everything was in motion. Men dressed in dark suits ran this way and that, tinkering with alkaline storage batteries, casting forms in the metallurgy room, machining tiny screws to be fitted into an advanced phonograph's stylus, typing upon a row of Royal typewriters, engaging in heated arguments with one another. One such fellow passed right by the tip of my nose yelling, "All right. Who's the rotten dog who finished wiring the fan oscillator and then forgot to turn it on?" A circus indeed. Elephants could have barred and lions roared and invention would still have soared above it all, the star of the show.
    In the chaos my presence was noted, a few foreheads ruffled, but
my intrusion caused little stir. The men in dark suits looked right through me, their heads filled with circuits, cylinders, cymbals. Which was how I managed to walk directly up to a desk piled landslide-high with papers, right up to a man who was simultaneously conducting multiple conversations, at least two per ear.
    Clients and assistants surrounded him. I recognized the man immediately. It was Thos. Ed., a handsome man, if a bit dogged. His mouth seemed to be turned down in a permanent scowl. He had graying hair and a very broad forehead that he rubbed again and again. I approached and he pulled away from one conversation, tilting his head so as to give a bit of distance between his eardrum and the river of berating insults that flowed from one very angry man standing to his left. As the recipient of this abuse, Edison seemed immune. He raised his eyebrows to me as if to ask, "What could you possibly want?" I did not answer but chose to wait until I had his undivided attention. And wait I would: five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen. I shifted my footing and after standing before him for over twenty minutes, witnessing a number of assistants interrupt the stream of several conversations, I realized that undivided attention was not ever going to happen. I stepped up. I began to speak.
    "I am Nikola Tesla. I have a letter from Charles Batchelor," and with that I presented the letter to him, unfolding it and placing it in his free hand. He read or at least he pretended to.
I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.
    Mr. Edison chuckled when he was through, adding its paper to one of the mounds threatening to topple down to