It was something called a resonant transformer, Tesla explained after he shut it off. A coil that produced a rapidly alternating current of very high voltage and very low amperage. Quite safe, despite the spectacle. And though spectacle was the most obvious use for the device, its inner workings might be applied to telegraph machines, radio transmitters, medical devices…and possibly even the “wireless telephone” that Tesla was designing. Tesla confided all of this to Paul as the two men walked around the laboratory. Paul understood little of what Tesla showed him, and less still of what Tesla attempted to explain. Edison and a few others had been working on improvements to Alexander Bell’s initial “telephone” device. Tesla was attempting to make the devices work without the aid of any wires at all. One didn’t have to be much of a scientist to know that this was absurd. Even if by some miracle Tesla managed to make them function, who in the world would have any use for them?
Among the many differences between this lab and Westinghouse’s, two things most struck Paul. The first was an absence of even the smallest particle of dust. The second was an absence of even the barest trace of another human being. This was Tesla’s own private world, and he would keep it free from the impurities and irritations that marred his experiences outside it. He was alone, finally, with his wonders.
There was something Tesla called a Crookes tube on a table toward the back. It looked rather like an electric lamp, though about double the size. It was an eighteen-inch tube of glass, from which most of the air had been removed. One wire was connected to the base, while another poked into the sealed tube about three-quarters of the way toward the head. The device rested carefully on its side, above a glass base. Tesla turned a knob on the base, and instantly a ray of energy shot from one of the wire ends to the other. The ray was a sparkling blue, and yet the wide far end of the tube glowed a ghastly green. It gave the impression of a witch’s bubbling cauldron.
“Cathode rays,” explained Tesla. “Firing particles of a negative charge from one lead to the other.”
“What does it do?” asked Paul as he admired the pulsing colors.
Tesla looked at Paul curiously. “That is what it is doing. Tell me it is not a beautiful thing.”
“You should share these devices with the world. Tell people what you’re working on. Tell someone.”
“Am I not telling you, Mr. Paul Cravath?”
“You are. But I’m no scientist.”
“Perhaps that is the very reason I can be telling you,” said Tesla with a smile. “You could not steal my ideas even if you wanted to.”
“I suppose that counts as trust in our business,” said Paul.
Tesla laughed his high-pitched bark.
“I want to talk to you about rejoining Westinghouse,” ventured Paul.
“I had imagined that you would do so,” said Tesla coyly. “But for this conversation I do not share your enthusiasms.”
As Paul prepared to begin his argument, he found himself suddenly interrupted.
The sound of a commotion from the building’s central staircase caught both men’s attention. Boots were clomping against the steps outside. The footsteps sounded as if they were coming from at least a dozen people, and the commotion seemed only to be growing. Paul instinctively moved to the door to see what was going on.
As Paul pulled open the steel door, he saw that the central staircase, all five stories of old wood, was awash with flame.
A scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a reinterpretation of…stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable.
—THOMAS KUHN, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS
PAUL’S DISBELIEF MOMENTARILY immobilized him. This felt like a horrific hallucination, a deathly trompe l’oeil that had been hung before his eyes.
Men working on the floor above sprinted down the steps. Chunks of burning wood fell from beside them. Paul watched as one man placed his foot upon a board only to find it instantly give way. His companion grabbed him before he fell, steadying them both as they raced toward the ground floor. Before Paul could grab ahold of Tesla and join the fleeing workmen, a flaming plank crashed against the doorjamb, blocking his path.
Paul slammed the metal door shut, sealing out the fire. He stepped back, bumping into Tesla.
“The fire is already on the landing,” said Paul. “We’ve no chance that way.”
Tesla merely stared at Paul.
“There’s a fire,” said Tesla. The fact was apparently only beginning to penetrate his brain.
“Do the windows open?” Paul ran to the windows along the far wall of the room. He jerked open a curtain, tearing the fabric from its rods.
Outside, smoke from the floor above spread into the sky.
Tesla stood stock-still. The room was getting hot, the fire above and below turning Tesla’s laboratory into a block-wide oven.
“We have to get the windows open,” Paul insisted. But neither Paul’s words nor his hurry seemed to imprint themselves on Tesla in any way.
Paul grabbed a device from one of the tables and flung it at the window. Whatever the thing was, its long glass tube shattered on contact as its thick metal base crashed through the windowpane. Shards of glass flew in every direction, both out into the night and back toward Paul.
“Mr. Tesla,” said Paul, “come this way! We’ll have a better chance climbing out the windows than navigating the staircase.” He turned to see the inventor still standing near the door. The men made eye contact for a brief moment. For the slightest of seconds, Paul could see the blank emptiness in Tesla’s expression. He wasn’t afraid. It was, rather, as if he weren’t even there at all.
Then the ceiling caved in.
As technological systems expand, reverse salients develop. Reverse salients are components in the system that have fallen behind or are out of phase with the others.
—THOMAS HUGHES, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.
—BILL GATES
FOR WEEKS, PAUL Cravath drifted in and out of consciousness. His waking moments were as hazy as his dreams. Only the colors differentiated the two states of mind. One was a bright white sheen, more searing than an incandescent lamp. The other was dark. Black thoughts, red and brimstone. As the days dragged along and his hourly doses of morphine were halved and then quartered, Paul began to differentiate better between waking and sleeping. With a resigned dread, he realized that his black visions of fire were in fact just dreams, and that the real world, the one he woke to, was clean and shining and full of much greater horrors.
The top floor of Bellevue Hospital was easily the whitest place Paul had ever been. The bedsheets were bleached and crisped daily until they were painful to the touch. The coats and tall shirt collars of the doctors who flitted in and out of his private room were as white as the linens. As white as the narrow walls. As white as the fresh gauze wrapped daily around Paul’s tender belly.
Tesla was gone. Vanished. Paul could not remember exactly which of his visitors first broke the news to him. Had it been George Westinghouse, whose worried face Paul had seen more than once by his bedside? Had it been Carter? Or Hughes and his wife, who’d left white roses by Paul’s bedside early in his stay?
The factory space had been largely unoccupied at such a late hour, and the workmen Paul had seen on the staircase had made it out safely. Paul had apparently fallen amid the burning wood and been dragged to safety by an unknown Samaritan who had deposited him into a horse-drawn ambulance. Had the stranger seen Tesla as well? There was no way to know. If Tesla had not died in the building’s collapse, then how could he have fled the scene? The likeliest explanation was that his corpse had been incinerated by the fire. Or crushed by the collapse of the building. And yet no corpses had been found in the rubble.