The last days of night, p.20
The Last Days of Night, page 20
Henry Jayne was the latest in a long line of shipping heirs whose family fortune had recently been extended to real estate. The Jaynes owned half of Philadelphia and had recently begun snapping up wide swaths of Manhattan as well. Henry Jayne, who was only a few years older than Paul, managed his family’s foothold in New York. The quarterlies all agreed that he was the most philanthropically inclined of his siblings, and the standard-bearer of the family’s fine-art holdings to boot.
“Are they to marry?” Paul asked. It was only after the words had come out that he realized how impolite they were. It was shame speaking. He wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Well, I most certainly can’t say,” snapped Fannie. “But I will say that Mr. Jayne is quite an interesting young man. Completed his studies in Leipzig. Speaks five languages.”
“How fascinating.”
“My daughter’s company is in high demand, Mr. Cravath. Will she marry Mr. Jayne? I’m not sure. Her gifts, not to mention her grace, have afforded my daughter a rare opportunity. It is her intention not to waste it. And it is my earthly duty to make sure she doesn’t.”
She crossed her arms before her small frame.
“Mrs. Huntington,” said Paul, “I wish you both the very best. I’m proud to be your and your daughter’s attorney. It is a position I cherish, and one that I hope to maintain for a very long time.”
This emphasis on Paul’s position seemed to satisfy Fannie. Her goodbye was peaceable.
Paul found his way to the front door as quickly as he could. He’d made an ass of himself.
But he gave a start as he opened the door. Agnes stood on the stoop, fishing in her handbag for her key.
“Cravath!” she said with a smile, pleased by the magic of the opening door. “Perfect timing, as always.”
Agnes looked a little tipsy. She was in good spirits, clearly happy from her night out. Had she been with castmates? Or with Mr. Jayne? He realized how little he knew of her activities when they were apart. He couldn’t imagine being in Tesla’s room with her ever again.
He moved aside so that she could come in from the cold.
“Will you join me for a nightcap?” she asked. “You will never believe the night I’ve had. Did you know that swans bite? They bite hard; it’s horrible. You’ll love this story.”
But Paul did not remove his hand from the door. “I’m sorry, Miss Huntington,” he said. “I must be off. Good evening.”
Before she could remove her coat and place it on the brass rack, Paul had already walked out and shut the door behind him.
He descended the steps quickly, walking determinedly into the night.
He did not look back to see if her face was in the window. Instead, he kept his eyes on the black leather of his shoes. He wished for sleep to come quickly, for his dreams to pass unremembered, and for the dawn to greet him soon.
He needed to get back to work.
—
Paul’s four associate attorneys were waiting for him when he entered their ramshackle offices on Greenwich Street the next morning. It was time for their weekly appointment. They appeared to have slept there the night before. The men’s shirt collars were loosened, their ties undone. The single room smelled of sweat and dried coffee. For once, he envied them.
With flair, one of them handed Paul a folder full of papers.
“Why don’t you summarize it for me, Mr. Beyer?” asked Paul as he opened the folder.
The associate exchanged a look with his fellows.
“What?” said Paul.
“It’s only…well…I’m Bynes.”
Paul looked up. He could have sworn that Beyer was the one with the mustache.
“Apologies. What do you have to show me?” asked Paul.
“Well, sir,” said whichever one of them it was. “I think we’ve got him.”
The associate gestured to the top document within the folder. “That is an interview with Thomas Edison in The New York Sun from October twentieth, 1878. In it, he clearly states that his new electrical lamp consists of a glass bulb, hollowed out into a vacuum, with a platinum filament inside. The filament is the part that glows.”
“I know what a filament is,” said Paul.
“Well, Edison’s patent, granted January twenty-seventh, 1880, refers to a glass bulb, hollowed out into a vacuum, with a cotton filament inside. He changed the filament.”
Paul realized what this meant. “He told the press he was using one kind of filament. But by the time he filed for the patent, he was already using a different kind. He hadn’t gotten the lamp to work as early as he’d claimed.”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“But,” added one of the associates who Paul was certain was neither Beyer nor Bynes, “that’s not even the best part. All that proves is that Edison lied to the press.”
“Which is not a crime,” said the one with the mustache.
“Right,” said the fourth of the associates. “So then what if we can show that Edison lied on the patent itself?”
“That would be something, Mr….?”
“I’m Beyer,” said the boy.
Paul had a hard time believing that to be the case, but it could not have mattered to him less.
Beyer continued. “The bulbs that have been coming out of Edison General Electric plants use bamboo filaments.” He showed Paul a sketch of the device in question. There was no mistaking the material that composed the filament, even to a layman’s eyes.
“First he told the press it was platinum,” said Paul. “Then he told the patent office it was cotton. But it’s actually bamboo.”
“Yes.”
“He was just making things up. He didn’t actually get the bulb working with bamboo till after the patent was granted.”
This was the moment Paul had been waiting for. The four associates tried to hide their proud smiles behind professionally blank expressions. They’d done well, and they knew it. But they seemed to feel that convincing Paul of their competence required masking their youthful exuberance. Watching these boys pretend to be older than they were made Paul feel even older himself.
“What will you do now?” asked the mustached associate, who was probably Bynes.
Paul did not try to hide his smile. “I think it’s time that we took the deposition of Mr. Thomas Edison.”
Everybody steals in science and industry. I’ve stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal. They don’t know how to steal.
—THOMAS EDISON
FOR OVER A year, the name Edison had haunted Paul’s days. He had met Thomas Edison only once, and yet the inventor was ever present in his thoughts. His daily life was a groove in the invisible orbit around Edison’s solar mass. Practically every slip of paper that crossed Paul’s desk bore Edison’s name. Edison’s presence dominated the work of Paul’s waking hours and often his sleeping ones. He had spent many times more hours dreaming of Edison than speaking to him.
Paul arrived early for the deposition. At barely seven in the morning, he entered Grosvenor Lowrey’s Broad Street law offices. The wallpapered rooms crackled with activity. Assistants, apprentices, secretaries, and errand boys flitted about in preparation, bursting with energy. As Paul waited, the whole office primped itself for the great man’s arrival. The brass was polished with vinegar, the wood rubbed with alcohol and wax, and every stray paper was tucked into a drawer or filing cabinet.
When Edison finally arrived, late, Paul was instantly struck by the change in his appearance. He’d aged in the past year. His hair had gone almost completely gray. He’d grown plumper around the middle. His clothes had been applied haphazardly.
He was, in short, a human being. And that seemed strangest of all. The devil himself could barely knot his own bow tie.
Edison sat at the long table as if this deposition was but one of the many chores to which he would be forced to attend that morning. No doubt it was. He whispered a few words to Lowrey, his attorney, who took the seat to his left. To Edison’s right sat the court secretary, here to transcribe his every word.
“All right,” said Edison. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Good morning,” said Paul, fastidiously laying out his papers on the table.
“And you are?”
Paul stopped. Edison smiled. The inventor was taunting him. Trying to rattle him before the questioning had even begun. Edison’s act was terribly good. He would feign a discombobulated indifference to these worldly affairs before lashing out at just the right moment.
“I am Paul Cravath, attorney for Mr. George Westinghouse.”
The court secretary dutifully typed as the men spoke.
“Grosvenor Lowrey, attorney for Mr. Thomas Edison.”
“And I am Thomas Alva Edison.”
“Please state your place of birth, for the record,” said the court secretary.
“Ohio. But I grew up in Port Huron, Michigan.”
“And the place where you currently reside?”
“I have an estate in West Orange, New Jersey. I have my offices at sixty-five Fifth Avenue, New York City.”
The secretary nodded. “It is March eleventh, 1889,” she informed the room. “Mr. Cravath, you may begin.”
Paul had been practicing his questions for days.
“What was the first thing you invented, Mr. Edison?”
Edison laughed. “It was a…well, it’s called an automatic repeater.”
“And when was this?”
“Is George Westinghouse planning on claiming that he invented that now too?”
“What year was it?”
“Eighteen sixty-five. I’d been a butcher boy before that, selling candy on the rails. Left home with a single bag to my name. Rode the line for a few years. I learned the trains well. Found odd jobs, here and there. Things that needed fixing, repairing. I’ve always had a way with machines.”
“So it would appear.”
“I became friendly with the Western Union men at the stations. Now, they had some fun devices, didn’t they? I started to do what it is that I’ve always done. I tinkered. I asked a lot of questions. Some the men could answer, some they could not. If not, then I was required to develop my own answers. There were things they would discuss—I would overhear their conversations. If only we could loop messages automatically. If only we had a device to relay the signals. But then they wouldn’t do a thing about it. They would just move along, drown their complaints in their beer. So I did what it is that I have done ever since: I recognized a problem, and then I set about solving it. There was use for a small machine that might automatically relay telegraph messages? Fantastic. I spent a few months fiddling until I’d built one that worked.”
“And then,” said Paul, “you sold the design to Gold and Stock. For two hundred dollars.”
“You know this story?”
“You’ve recited it many times to the press.”
“It’s a good story.”
“It’s a very simple one,” said Paul. “But your tales of invention always are, aren’t they?”
“This is what your kind—and let the record reflect that by ‘your’ I am referring to Mr. Cravath and by ‘kind’ I am referring to idiots—can never wrap your brains around. It genuinely is simple. I identify the gap in existing technology and then I plug it. With these hands right here. Oh. I just realized. You were trying to get a rise out of me, weren’t you?”
“If Mr. Cravath is being argumentative,” offered Lowrey, “I can instruct the court—”
“No, no, Grosvenor,” said Edison. “Mr. Cravath and I are just having a bit of fun with each other, aren’t we?”
Paul agreed, silently. He had expected some sparring. He would have been disappointed without it.
“This process you’ve described,” said Paul. “Your plugging. You’ve applied it ever since?”
“After the repeater, Western Union made me a deal. I invented a number of things for them. And then I came to New York, where I opened up my own shop. A place to tinker.”
“You were a teenage vagabond. Riding the rails. And by twenty-two, you’d made it to New York.”
“And by thirty I was a millionaire. People seem to find some value in my tinkerings, it would seem. From the telegraph to the telephone to the phonograph to the light bulb. They were all problems, out there for the solving. I did so, and have—no thanks to your efforts—been comfortably compensated for it.”
“You invented the telephone?” asked Paul.
“Yes.”
“Funny. I thought Alexander Graham Bell did that.”
“It’s a lie,” said Edison, “but so far the courts have failed to recognize the truth of what happened. I invented the telephone, not him. I had the idea; I crafted the device. He just got his application to the patent office before I did.”
“Whoever files first holds the patent.”
“Says the lawyer. To which the inventor at this table says, ‘Why?’ Why should it be so? It wasn’t always.”
“That’s true. The courts have not always held that the first to file gets the patent. But they do now.”
“Men like you have reduced my profession to a game of paperwork. It’s tedious, and it’s absurd.”
“You weren’t first to the telephone,” said Paul, “but here you are claiming the invention was yours. What about the light bulb?”
“Much to your chagrin, the courts have steadfastly upheld my claim on that.”
“We’re working on it.”
“I was first to the light bulb.”
“Were you, though? Surely the ‘problem,’ as you put it, had been around for decades. A thousand engineers had tried to create indoor electrical lamps.”
“But only I succeeded.”
“What about Sawyer and Man?”
“What about them?”
“Their patent on incandescent light—which my client licensed—predates yours by a few years.”
“I suppose so,” said Edison indifferently. “But their device wasn’t complete. It didn’t work. Their patent was quite broad. It was a suggestion of the thing, not the thing itself.”
“For instance,” offered Paul, “the Sawyer and Man patent did not specify a type of filament?”
Edison’s face lit up. “Oh my! That’s very technical coming from you. Yes. The Sawyer and Man patent suggests, among its vagaries, that there should be some sort of carbonized filament. A thin thread in the center, which emits light when it gets hot. But it doesn’t go further on that point, or on many others.”
“And then on your patent claim, you did specify a filament, didn’t you?”
“I most certainly did.”
“And what was that filament?”
Edison gestured to the papers on the table. “You must have the claim among that pile of documents before you.”
“I want you to tell me. For the record.” Paul nodded toward the typist.
“You will be disappointed, then,” said Edison. “I’m not sure I remember.”
“Then I’ll help. Your application says it was a cotton filament.”
“All right.”
Paul selected one of the papers from his neat piles. “Was it?”
“Was it what?”
“Was it a cotton filament that, after decades of trying, finally made the lamp work?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? Because you told the New York Herald that it was made of platinum.”
“As you said earlier, Mr. Cravath, I give many interviews.”
“Is there cotton in the bulbs that you currently ship to your customers?”
“What are you getting at?”
“It isn’t bamboo?”
Lowrey spoke quickly. “Don’t answer that.”
“I’m happy to,” said Edison.
“Don’t,” insisted Lowrey.
Edison turned his wrath away from Paul and toward his own attorney. “I said that I’ll answer, Grosvenor. Don’t give me that goddamned look.” He turned his attention back to Paul. “It’s all three.”
“All three?”
Edison shook his head. “You have never understood what it is that I do.”
“So tell me.”
Edison leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “I create things, Mr. Cravath. Things that did not exist before. Someone like you will never understand what it is to bring something new into the dull world.”
“Didn’t your staff do that? All the engineers in your lab. The army of technicians who do the actual work of experimentation at EGE.”
“Yes,” said Edison. “That’s my point exactly. I hired those engineers. I set them to their task. I defined the scope of their inquiry and then set the method by which they might inquire. For a century scientists had failed to build an indoor electrical lamp. Until me. How did I do it? That’s what you want to hear? It was this: I surveyed all the designs that had been tried before. I saw what had gotten close; I saw what had fallen short of the mark. I found the cracks and I set my men to paving them. This is what science is, Mr. Cravath. This is what discovery is. It’s not a flash of color. It’s not a moment of divine inspiration. It is not the hand of God reaching down to press the pointed finger. It’s work. It’s drudgery. It is trying ten thousand different shapes of bulb. Then trying ten thousand different air fillings. Then, yes, ten thousand different filaments. It is realizing that those are the three components that matter and then trying ten thousand times ten thousand times ten thousand combinations until one of them works. And then selling it to a public who never thought such a thing was possible. It is this last part that you are really accusing me of. And of that, I will confess. I am guilty as sin. Yes, Mr. Cravath, I sold the light bulb. Americans did not have them. Then they did. Then they bought them by the trainload, and is there any part of you that doubts you owe all of that to me? Is there any part of you that believes that without me Americans would have electrical light inside their homes? Of course not. You want the light but you don’t want to know how I made it. You privilege the effect, but you’re horrified that someone had actually to cause it. I invented the goddamned light bulb. I gestated it in the minds of the public. 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, I will say only one last thing.”
“Are they to marry?” Paul asked. It was only after the words had come out that he realized how impolite they were. It was shame speaking. He wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Well, I most certainly can’t say,” snapped Fannie. “But I will say that Mr. Jayne is quite an interesting young man. Completed his studies in Leipzig. Speaks five languages.”
“How fascinating.”
“My daughter’s company is in high demand, Mr. Cravath. Will she marry Mr. Jayne? I’m not sure. Her gifts, not to mention her grace, have afforded my daughter a rare opportunity. It is her intention not to waste it. And it is my earthly duty to make sure she doesn’t.”
She crossed her arms before her small frame.
“Mrs. Huntington,” said Paul, “I wish you both the very best. I’m proud to be your and your daughter’s attorney. It is a position I cherish, and one that I hope to maintain for a very long time.”
This emphasis on Paul’s position seemed to satisfy Fannie. Her goodbye was peaceable.
Paul found his way to the front door as quickly as he could. He’d made an ass of himself.
But he gave a start as he opened the door. Agnes stood on the stoop, fishing in her handbag for her key.
“Cravath!” she said with a smile, pleased by the magic of the opening door. “Perfect timing, as always.”
Agnes looked a little tipsy. She was in good spirits, clearly happy from her night out. Had she been with castmates? Or with Mr. Jayne? He realized how little he knew of her activities when they were apart. He couldn’t imagine being in Tesla’s room with her ever again.
He moved aside so that she could come in from the cold.
“Will you join me for a nightcap?” she asked. “You will never believe the night I’ve had. Did you know that swans bite? They bite hard; it’s horrible. You’ll love this story.”
But Paul did not remove his hand from the door. “I’m sorry, Miss Huntington,” he said. “I must be off. Good evening.”
Before she could remove her coat and place it on the brass rack, Paul had already walked out and shut the door behind him.
He descended the steps quickly, walking determinedly into the night.
He did not look back to see if her face was in the window. Instead, he kept his eyes on the black leather of his shoes. He wished for sleep to come quickly, for his dreams to pass unremembered, and for the dawn to greet him soon.
He needed to get back to work.
—
Paul’s four associate attorneys were waiting for him when he entered their ramshackle offices on Greenwich Street the next morning. It was time for their weekly appointment. They appeared to have slept there the night before. The men’s shirt collars were loosened, their ties undone. The single room smelled of sweat and dried coffee. For once, he envied them.
With flair, one of them handed Paul a folder full of papers.
“Why don’t you summarize it for me, Mr. Beyer?” asked Paul as he opened the folder.
The associate exchanged a look with his fellows.
“What?” said Paul.
“It’s only…well…I’m Bynes.”
Paul looked up. He could have sworn that Beyer was the one with the mustache.
“Apologies. What do you have to show me?” asked Paul.
“Well, sir,” said whichever one of them it was. “I think we’ve got him.”
The associate gestured to the top document within the folder. “That is an interview with Thomas Edison in The New York Sun from October twentieth, 1878. In it, he clearly states that his new electrical lamp consists of a glass bulb, hollowed out into a vacuum, with a platinum filament inside. The filament is the part that glows.”
“I know what a filament is,” said Paul.
“Well, Edison’s patent, granted January twenty-seventh, 1880, refers to a glass bulb, hollowed out into a vacuum, with a cotton filament inside. He changed the filament.”
Paul realized what this meant. “He told the press he was using one kind of filament. But by the time he filed for the patent, he was already using a different kind. He hadn’t gotten the lamp to work as early as he’d claimed.”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“But,” added one of the associates who Paul was certain was neither Beyer nor Bynes, “that’s not even the best part. All that proves is that Edison lied to the press.”
“Which is not a crime,” said the one with the mustache.
“Right,” said the fourth of the associates. “So then what if we can show that Edison lied on the patent itself?”
“That would be something, Mr….?”
“I’m Beyer,” said the boy.
Paul had a hard time believing that to be the case, but it could not have mattered to him less.
Beyer continued. “The bulbs that have been coming out of Edison General Electric plants use bamboo filaments.” He showed Paul a sketch of the device in question. There was no mistaking the material that composed the filament, even to a layman’s eyes.
“First he told the press it was platinum,” said Paul. “Then he told the patent office it was cotton. But it’s actually bamboo.”
“Yes.”
“He was just making things up. He didn’t actually get the bulb working with bamboo till after the patent was granted.”
This was the moment Paul had been waiting for. The four associates tried to hide their proud smiles behind professionally blank expressions. They’d done well, and they knew it. But they seemed to feel that convincing Paul of their competence required masking their youthful exuberance. Watching these boys pretend to be older than they were made Paul feel even older himself.
“What will you do now?” asked the mustached associate, who was probably Bynes.
Paul did not try to hide his smile. “I think it’s time that we took the deposition of Mr. Thomas Edison.”
Everybody steals in science and industry. I’ve stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal. They don’t know how to steal.
—THOMAS EDISON
FOR OVER A year, the name Edison had haunted Paul’s days. He had met Thomas Edison only once, and yet the inventor was ever present in his thoughts. His daily life was a groove in the invisible orbit around Edison’s solar mass. Practically every slip of paper that crossed Paul’s desk bore Edison’s name. Edison’s presence dominated the work of Paul’s waking hours and often his sleeping ones. He had spent many times more hours dreaming of Edison than speaking to him.
Paul arrived early for the deposition. At barely seven in the morning, he entered Grosvenor Lowrey’s Broad Street law offices. The wallpapered rooms crackled with activity. Assistants, apprentices, secretaries, and errand boys flitted about in preparation, bursting with energy. As Paul waited, the whole office primped itself for the great man’s arrival. The brass was polished with vinegar, the wood rubbed with alcohol and wax, and every stray paper was tucked into a drawer or filing cabinet.
When Edison finally arrived, late, Paul was instantly struck by the change in his appearance. He’d aged in the past year. His hair had gone almost completely gray. He’d grown plumper around the middle. His clothes had been applied haphazardly.
He was, in short, a human being. And that seemed strangest of all. The devil himself could barely knot his own bow tie.
Edison sat at the long table as if this deposition was but one of the many chores to which he would be forced to attend that morning. No doubt it was. He whispered a few words to Lowrey, his attorney, who took the seat to his left. To Edison’s right sat the court secretary, here to transcribe his every word.
“All right,” said Edison. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Good morning,” said Paul, fastidiously laying out his papers on the table.
“And you are?”
Paul stopped. Edison smiled. The inventor was taunting him. Trying to rattle him before the questioning had even begun. Edison’s act was terribly good. He would feign a discombobulated indifference to these worldly affairs before lashing out at just the right moment.
“I am Paul Cravath, attorney for Mr. George Westinghouse.”
The court secretary dutifully typed as the men spoke.
“Grosvenor Lowrey, attorney for Mr. Thomas Edison.”
“And I am Thomas Alva Edison.”
“Please state your place of birth, for the record,” said the court secretary.
“Ohio. But I grew up in Port Huron, Michigan.”
“And the place where you currently reside?”
“I have an estate in West Orange, New Jersey. I have my offices at sixty-five Fifth Avenue, New York City.”
The secretary nodded. “It is March eleventh, 1889,” she informed the room. “Mr. Cravath, you may begin.”
Paul had been practicing his questions for days.
“What was the first thing you invented, Mr. Edison?”
Edison laughed. “It was a…well, it’s called an automatic repeater.”
“And when was this?”
“Is George Westinghouse planning on claiming that he invented that now too?”
“What year was it?”
“Eighteen sixty-five. I’d been a butcher boy before that, selling candy on the rails. Left home with a single bag to my name. Rode the line for a few years. I learned the trains well. Found odd jobs, here and there. Things that needed fixing, repairing. I’ve always had a way with machines.”
“So it would appear.”
“I became friendly with the Western Union men at the stations. Now, they had some fun devices, didn’t they? I started to do what it is that I’ve always done. I tinkered. I asked a lot of questions. Some the men could answer, some they could not. If not, then I was required to develop my own answers. There were things they would discuss—I would overhear their conversations. If only we could loop messages automatically. If only we had a device to relay the signals. But then they wouldn’t do a thing about it. They would just move along, drown their complaints in their beer. So I did what it is that I have done ever since: I recognized a problem, and then I set about solving it. There was use for a small machine that might automatically relay telegraph messages? Fantastic. I spent a few months fiddling until I’d built one that worked.”
“And then,” said Paul, “you sold the design to Gold and Stock. For two hundred dollars.”
“You know this story?”
“You’ve recited it many times to the press.”
“It’s a good story.”
“It’s a very simple one,” said Paul. “But your tales of invention always are, aren’t they?”
“This is what your kind—and let the record reflect that by ‘your’ I am referring to Mr. Cravath and by ‘kind’ I am referring to idiots—can never wrap your brains around. It genuinely is simple. I identify the gap in existing technology and then I plug it. With these hands right here. Oh. I just realized. You were trying to get a rise out of me, weren’t you?”
“If Mr. Cravath is being argumentative,” offered Lowrey, “I can instruct the court—”
“No, no, Grosvenor,” said Edison. “Mr. Cravath and I are just having a bit of fun with each other, aren’t we?”
Paul agreed, silently. He had expected some sparring. He would have been disappointed without it.
“This process you’ve described,” said Paul. “Your plugging. You’ve applied it ever since?”
“After the repeater, Western Union made me a deal. I invented a number of things for them. And then I came to New York, where I opened up my own shop. A place to tinker.”
“You were a teenage vagabond. Riding the rails. And by twenty-two, you’d made it to New York.”
“And by thirty I was a millionaire. People seem to find some value in my tinkerings, it would seem. From the telegraph to the telephone to the phonograph to the light bulb. They were all problems, out there for the solving. I did so, and have—no thanks to your efforts—been comfortably compensated for it.”
“You invented the telephone?” asked Paul.
“Yes.”
“Funny. I thought Alexander Graham Bell did that.”
“It’s a lie,” said Edison, “but so far the courts have failed to recognize the truth of what happened. I invented the telephone, not him. I had the idea; I crafted the device. He just got his application to the patent office before I did.”
“Whoever files first holds the patent.”
“Says the lawyer. To which the inventor at this table says, ‘Why?’ Why should it be so? It wasn’t always.”
“That’s true. The courts have not always held that the first to file gets the patent. But they do now.”
“Men like you have reduced my profession to a game of paperwork. It’s tedious, and it’s absurd.”
“You weren’t first to the telephone,” said Paul, “but here you are claiming the invention was yours. What about the light bulb?”
“Much to your chagrin, the courts have steadfastly upheld my claim on that.”
“We’re working on it.”
“I was first to the light bulb.”
“Were you, though? Surely the ‘problem,’ as you put it, had been around for decades. A thousand engineers had tried to create indoor electrical lamps.”
“But only I succeeded.”
“What about Sawyer and Man?”
“What about them?”
“Their patent on incandescent light—which my client licensed—predates yours by a few years.”
“I suppose so,” said Edison indifferently. “But their device wasn’t complete. It didn’t work. Their patent was quite broad. It was a suggestion of the thing, not the thing itself.”
“For instance,” offered Paul, “the Sawyer and Man patent did not specify a type of filament?”
Edison’s face lit up. “Oh my! That’s very technical coming from you. Yes. The Sawyer and Man patent suggests, among its vagaries, that there should be some sort of carbonized filament. A thin thread in the center, which emits light when it gets hot. But it doesn’t go further on that point, or on many others.”
“And then on your patent claim, you did specify a filament, didn’t you?”
“I most certainly did.”
“And what was that filament?”
Edison gestured to the papers on the table. “You must have the claim among that pile of documents before you.”
“I want you to tell me. For the record.” Paul nodded toward the typist.
“You will be disappointed, then,” said Edison. “I’m not sure I remember.”
“Then I’ll help. Your application says it was a cotton filament.”
“All right.”
Paul selected one of the papers from his neat piles. “Was it?”
“Was it what?”
“Was it a cotton filament that, after decades of trying, finally made the lamp work?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? Because you told the New York Herald that it was made of platinum.”
“As you said earlier, Mr. Cravath, I give many interviews.”
“Is there cotton in the bulbs that you currently ship to your customers?”
“What are you getting at?”
“It isn’t bamboo?”
Lowrey spoke quickly. “Don’t answer that.”
“I’m happy to,” said Edison.
“Don’t,” insisted Lowrey.
Edison turned his wrath away from Paul and toward his own attorney. “I said that I’ll answer, Grosvenor. Don’t give me that goddamned look.” He turned his attention back to Paul. “It’s all three.”
“All three?”
Edison shook his head. “You have never understood what it is that I do.”
“So tell me.”
Edison leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “I create things, Mr. Cravath. Things that did not exist before. Someone like you will never understand what it is to bring something new into the dull world.”
“Didn’t your staff do that? All the engineers in your lab. The army of technicians who do the actual work of experimentation at EGE.”
“Yes,” said Edison. “That’s my point exactly. I hired those engineers. I set them to their task. I defined the scope of their inquiry and then set the method by which they might inquire. For a century scientists had failed to build an indoor electrical lamp. Until me. How did I do it? That’s what you want to hear? It was this: I surveyed all the designs that had been tried before. I saw what had gotten close; I saw what had fallen short of the mark. I found the cracks and I set my men to paving them. This is what science is, Mr. Cravath. This is what discovery is. It’s not a flash of color. It’s not a moment of divine inspiration. It is not the hand of God reaching down to press the pointed finger. It’s work. It’s drudgery. It is trying ten thousand different shapes of bulb. Then trying ten thousand different air fillings. Then, yes, ten thousand different filaments. It is realizing that those are the three components that matter and then trying ten thousand times ten thousand times ten thousand combinations until one of them works. And then selling it to a public who never thought such a thing was possible. It is this last part that you are really accusing me of. And of that, I will confess. I am guilty as sin. Yes, Mr. Cravath, I sold the light bulb. Americans did not have them. Then they did. Then they bought them by the trainload, and is there any part of you that doubts you owe all of that to me? Is there any part of you that believes that without me Americans would have electrical light inside their homes? Of course not. You want the light but you don’t want to know how I made it. You privilege the effect, but you’re horrified that someone had actually to cause it. I invented the goddamned light bulb. I gestated it in the minds of the public. 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, I will say only one last thing.”
