The Last Days of Night

by Graham Moore

Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation.

It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable.

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.”

The man who controls it will not simply make an unimaginable fortune. He will not simply dictate politics. He will not merely control Wall Street, or Washington, or the newspapers, or the telegraph companies, or the million household electrical devices we can’t even dream of just yet. No, no, no. The man who controls electricity will control the very sun in the sky.” And with that, Thomas Edison pressed his black button again and the statue’s torch burst back to life.

Need. Power was the need for something so great that absolutely nothing could stop the getting of it. With a need like that, victory was not a matter of will. It was a matter of time. And Thomas Edison needed to win more than any man he had ever met.

All stories are love stories. Paul remembered someone famous saying that. Thomas Edison’s would be no exception. All men get the things they love. The tragedy of some men is not that they are denied, but that they wish they’d loved something else.

This was the topic at hand. Technically, the litigation was between the Edison Electric Light Company and the Mount Morris Electric Light Company, but everyone knew that these were subsidiaries and legal proxies for their parent companies. Even the attorneys litigating this $1 billion case called it simply Edison v. Westinghouse. The issue before them: U.S. Letters Patent No. 223,898, granted to Thomas Edison on January 27, 1880, which described the invention of an “incandescent electric lamp.” Quickly nicknamed the Light Bulb Patent by the press, it was without question the most valuable patent ever granted in the history of the United States. And George Westinghouse was accused of infringing on it.

First: “who.” Edison was far from a lone wolf in his lab. How many others helped him? If the work of others had been used to create Edison’s lamp, was their work his property? Or might another man lay claim to part of Edison’s supposed breakthrough? Moreover, a thousand other laboratories across the United States and Europe had been at work on this very problem—might Edison have used ideas that were first developed elsewhere and published in one of the many popular engineering journals? Theft was theft, whether it was intentional or not. Second: “invented.” Was Edison’s incandescent lamp a fundamentally new invention, or was it simply an improved version of an earlier device? The law stated that for a patent to be valid, the invention described must constitute a major breakthrough. A man can’t simply tweak another’s device and call the resulting machine his own. It must be a truly new thing. Hadn’t Joseph Swan already taken out patents on incandescent lamps? Hadn’t Sawyer and Man? What made Edison’s incandescent bulb different from the others? What made it an invention? Third: “the.” Perhaps the trickiest word of them all. Even if Edison was the one who did the inventing, and even if inventing is what occurred, did he actually invent “the” light bulb—or just “a” light bulb? Why the definite article? There could be as many varietals of light bulb as roses blooming in the gardens of Central Park. What made Edison’s preeminent? The lawyers for the Edison General Electric Comp...

“So if I spent four years working for a man, giving him my very best every day, and then was unceremoniously fired one morning because I’d failed—and my entire team had failed—to solve a problem that no one else could solve either, I’d have a bit of an axe to grind.”

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 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.

Three courses into dinner, and they were still only on the lobster. He had no idea how he was going to get all of this food into his already bloated belly. The buttons of his trousers, newly purchased at R. H. Macy’s, felt ready to rip.

Macy's was an upscale department store back then:)

“You can only eat the lobster once you’ve accurately measured its cubic dimensions?” “Well, of course not; please do not mistake me for a crazy. I can only ingest a dinner the cubic volume of which adds to a number divisible by three.” To think that Paul had once found Westinghouse difficult to talk to.

“More-experienced attorneys, like myself, we’re done no good by taking on a losing case. But someone like you…a young man, starting out. Your career will still benefit from having your name in the papers. And I’m sure you won’t be blamed personally for losing a case that no one could win.”

The paper went on to suggest, in language of unvarying vehemence, that alternating current was likely to fry the bones of any child within a hundred feet of its use. Because it ran at twice the voltage of direct current, it was, so Harold P. Brown argued, twice as deadly. There was, moreover, no legitimate scientific reason to prefer alternating current to direct; only the marketplace had caused these devious merchants of death to adopt this crooked technology. And, finally, the paper named the main proponent of this deadly system: George Westinghouse. “A villain who apparently will stoop to new lows to make an extra dollar off the naïve and gullible. “To prevent the wholesale loss of human life,” concluded Harold Brown’s editorial, “all alternating current, such as that offered by George Westinghouse, must be banned immediately by the legislature of this state.”

“You like him,” Paul said to her one night as they ascended the staircase to Tesla’s room. He’d just arrived and his cheeks were still red from the cold. Her quarrel with W. H. Foster still loomed over them, but Paul had already decided that another letter would not do the trick. He would have to come up with something better. “It surprises you that I like Tesla?” “He doesn’t seem of a piece with most of your circle.” “I’ve spent a lot of time performing. On the stage, for money, and off the stage, for respect. He’s never done so a day in his life. It would never even occur to him. He cares about no one’s opinions but his own.”

“He told Westinghouse that he had the idea for his alternating-current motor in a similar fit. This is Tesla’s process—he has a series of hallucinatory episodes and then there it is. His device is invented. And he moves on to something else.” Agnes seemed fascinated by this process, if suspicious of its efficacy. “But you haven’t ‘invented’ something until you’ve built it. If I spend an afternoon staring down at sheet music and imagining how I’m to sing it, it cannot be said that I’ve performed the piece. I don’t actually create the thing until I stand on a stage and move my mouth. My throat gets a bit tired and then there’s some applause at the end.” “It’s different for him.” “Just saying that you’ve invented something is not the same as inventing it.”

You whine to me about filaments. Platinum, cotton, bamboo? There were ten thousand more. My patent covers all of them. George Westinghouse can twiddle with his idle details. He so loves his details, doesn’t he? This precise shape of bulb, this precise angle of wiring. That’s all well and good. But knowing the steps is hardly any good if you’ve failed to make it to the dance. I hired the band; I booked the hall. I advertised the show. And you hate me because my name is on the poster. Well, I say this: The light bulb is mine. If the word ‘invention’ is to maintain even a semblance of rational sense, then it must be said that the light bulb was my idea. It was my invention. And it is my patent. Every bulb. Every vacuum. Every one of your piddling filaments. And to the mute ingratitude with which you’ve repaid me,

The current again zapped through Kemmler. But this second attempt proved no more successful than the first. The prisoner heaved against his restraints, every muscle in his body tensing and releasing and tensing again. The sponge in his mouth began to fry, like blackening chicken in an iron pan. Paul saw the faintest whiff of smoke rise from his hair to the ceiling. William Kemmler was burning alive.

The Westinghouse system of alternating current had just proven itself to be a spectacularly poor instrument of murder. If Edison and Brown had wanted to demonstrate the stubborn safety of alternating current, they could have done no better job.

“Edison and Westinghouse are dueling to the death over their respective slices of a pie that is only this big.” Paul formed a small circle with his fingers. “But working together, we could take equal shares of a pie that is this big.” Paul expanded his circle threefold. “A partnership between the two companies—a licensing arrangement—would eliminate the burden for consumers of having to choose which of our incompatible products they wanted. A/C, D/C…it wouldn’t matter. You could sell our current. We could sell your bulbs. Everyone wins. Let’s stop putting the future of these companies in the hands of the courts. Let’s stop leaving it to the vagaries of newspaper opinion and the shifting winds of the free market. Let’s put the important decisions back in the boardroom where they belong.”

“I would more charitably suggest that he simply followed the available evidence to a different conclusion. Scientists. You ask one hundred of them a simple question, you get one hundred different answers. They’re a necessary annoyance in the industrial business, I suppose.”

“Poor people all think they deserve to be rich,” he continued. “Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.”

“The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you’re ever given a thing.”

“None of my new devices shall function on the direct current….” Tesla was contemplating the dire future this posed for his work.

“If you do not do as I’m asking,” said Paul, “the national grid of the United States will be based on D/C. There will be accidents. People will die. This nation will be doomed to a medieval century. And the future you’ve seen in your visions will never take shape in America.”

Tesla stared into a hazy distance, as if he could literally see all his planned machines evaporating into the air. These marvelous creations were there bef...

But they were va...

“I care not at all about your money. But you must not let the direct current devour my world. I want only to bui...

“What did they love? The three of them? Edison loved the audience. For him, it was the performance. It was the crowd. He remains the most famous inventor in the world. I’ll bet he’ll stay that way for generations. He wanted the applause. That’s what he was fighting for. Now, Westinghouse…Westinghouse was different. He loved the products themselves. And he made them better than anyone. He is the ultimate craftsman, isn’t he? He didn’t want to sell the most light bulbs. He wanted to make the best light bulbs. If they were too expensive, if they were too late into production, he didn’t care. They had to be the best. The most useful, the most current technology. And he did, didn’t he? It’s his products that won out. He wanted to perfect the light bulb and he did it. Then there’s Tesla. He was the third leg in this tripod. He didn’t care a bit about Edison’s public, or Westinghouse’s products. No, Tesla cared only for the ideas themselves. Their promulgation did not matter. Tesla was his own audience, and his ideas were his product, for consumption by himself alone. He had the idea, then he was done. Once he knew he’d solved a problem, he moved on. He knew that he’d made A/C work; he knew that he’d made the bulbs work. Actually building the things was irrelevant. That was someone else’s problem.