“That’s fifty thousand dollars.” His dinner companion glanced down at the check. “Do you know what the best revenge is, Mr. Tesla?”
Paul motioned for the waiter to bring two glasses of champagne and settled back into his armchair.
“Success.”
Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson….He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal.
—STEVE JOBS
TESLA FORGOT TO take the money.
That’s what bothered Paul most as he stirred fitfully beneath the sheets in his two-room apartment on East Fiftieth Street. Tesla had left the money on the table. The servers had delivered his overcoat and Tesla had made it halfway through the front door before Paul saw the promissory note on the table. Sitting there under a knife, the slightest stain of red wine grazing its top edge.
Paul had run to return it. He’d been thanked halfheartedly.
Tesla had come to New York with five cents in his pocket, and now, four years later, he’d absentmindedly left a check for fifty thousand dollars on a restaurant table.
Paul had come to New York with a bit more than a nickel, though not much more. He could recite the precise contents of his account at First National to the penny. He had earned each of those pennies, and he was proud of them. Granted, people never spoke of such things. This was difficult for him, sometimes, with his friends. He made a good living, and he wanted to shout to his closest allies, Look at what I’ve accomplished! But the word “dollar” itself seemed rude.
Paul did not understand people who did not like money. What motivated their dreams? What comprised their desires? Could happiness be “purchased,” as they say? Well, of course not. But it was not as if it were free either.
It seemed to Paul that the people who did not care about money came in one of two varieties. The first were the blithely wealthy. Born to privilege, they had been so rich for so long that the question of money had honestly never occurred to them. They might be aware of their good luck, but the concept was purely theoretical. They knew in the abstract that they had things that others didn’t, but—or perhaps because of this—they seemed always to be conjuring up purely hypothetical desires that remained abstractly unfulfilled. They imagined other people far richer, and took great care to delineate their differences from such genuine excess. If only one could make the trip to Europe every year, they might say, like the So-and-So’s. That sort of thing. Then they weighted themselves with their humdrum family dramas, with the tragic intrigue of wastrel brothers and unmarried sisters. The daily slights and indignities of familial melodrama allowed them the freedom to imagine themselves burdened. Such people could afford to choose for themselves what to be miserable about.
The second variety was, ironically, the unknowing poor. They hadn’t a dime, they’d never had a dime, they weren’t likely to have a dime, and while they liked the notion of dimes in principle, they had no idea quite how much pleasure a dime could purchase. They were not happily poor—that would be a condescending caricature. Being poor did not make anyone happy. It was only that some people managed to be both.
Paul’s father was closer to this second type. He wasn’t after money. He wasn’t after a station, an appointment, a jeweled career. He was after justice, and he’d tell you about it plain as day. He wanted to build a more just world because the God he worshipped had taught him to love laboring for it. Sometimes Paul envied the simplicity of his father’s perspective. To seek only the light of the Lord’s grace was a far simpler thing, or so Paul thought, than his own demands. Paul wished that he might share his father’s beliefs. And yet try as he might, the God of Erastus Cravath could not be forced by act of mental will into his son’s heart.
Tesla’s relationship with money was spookier. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t care for money. He’d accepted Paul’s offer. Yet money was clearly not the thing that he wanted. Which suggested the question that kept Paul up that night, as the spring air grew warm enough that he’d flung the heavy sheets from his bed:
What did Nikola Tesla want?
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
—THOMAS EDISON
LEMUEL SERRELL, TESLA’S attorney, made it quite clear he shared little of his client’s ambivalence toward money—he wanted an additional forty thousand dollars to make a deal. Just for a start.
Serrell’s office looked as if it had been there for a hundred years, rather longer than the fifteen it had actually occupied the space. Serrell was a legend, if such a thing existed, in the relatively recent class of patent attorneys. His father had likely been America’s very first patent lawyer, establishing his own firm immediately following the Patent Act of 1836. The act had created for the first time in the history of the world a “patent office” of a government. No longer would any patent applied for be granted, with the merits to be weighed if and only if a lawsuit was later filed. The office was staffed with scientific experts to evaluate every application. Serrell’s father had cleverly realized that if there were government experts managing the half-legal, half-scientific realm of the patent, there would necessarily be a market for private experts as well. Scientists were not known for their legal expertise; nor, for that matter, were lawyers known for their scientific fluency. The elder Serrell, and then his son, had developed invaluable experience in both.
The younger Serrell had cut his teeth on Edison’s own early patent work. Boasting a keen eye for talent, Serrell had signed up the twenty-three-year-old Edison and composed all of the prodigy’s early telegraph and telephone patents. Not long after, Edison had decamped for Grosvenor Lowrey’s more prestigious firm.
The summer sun warmed the black-dyed maple of Serrell’s desk. Serrell and Paul took seats directly across from each other in high-backed leather chairs. Serrell removed his jacket in a sign of familiarity. Despite the heat, Paul kept his on.
“I spent two years working on the A/C patents with Nikola,” said Serrell in a genial tone. “They were sent back at first with a demand for more specificity, if you can believe it. But of course, dear Nikola wouldn’t give up, so we refined both his device and the language of the claim. You’ll see they’re quite airtight.”
“That’s why my client would like to purchase them.”
“Yes, yes,” said Serrell. “Purchase…”
Serrell turned in his chair to gaze out the window. This was not Paul’s first negotiation, and he knew the move well. He’d guessed, when he’d received Serrell’s note, that as the more experienced attorney, he would elect to play the bully in negotiations, all bluster and ballast. An Edisonian strategy. But Serrell had adopted the role of the thoughtful moderate. A kind of disinterested third party who wanted only for Tesla and Westinghouse to reach a fair arrangement. So much the better for Paul’s afternoon, he reasoned, though he would certainly appreciate it if Serrell would get on with things.
“So you’re Westinghouse’s young prodigy,” said Serrell as the light from the grand window framed his bearded face. “Such responsibility on such young shoulders. You know he approached me about your position, before he offered it to you.”
Paul could not afford to show his surprise. To allow that Serrell knew more than he on the subject of Paul’s own client would be a disaster.
“Well, of course,” lied Paul coolly. “I assumed he’d discussed the job with many men in town. You know George. He never likes to make a decision without examining all the possible choices.”
“Have you ever asked him about it?”
“About what?”
“About why he chose you.”