“So Edison just blurts it out?” said Agnes. “He makes a big show to the press of saying ‘That’s it, the game is over, I’ve solved the electric lamp.’ And then…?”
“And then,” said Paul, “the others give up! The great Thomas Edison just invented the indoor electric lamp. It’s cut-and-dried. So they start working on other designs. But there was such a lag between the time that Edison announced his discovery and his patent application a year later, and then another year’s lag before products were starting to sell in the marketplace. Westinghouse thought there might be space for another company to get involved. So did Hibbard; so did Swan. But no one ever stopped to think: What evidence was there that Edison actually invented a working bulb?”
“There must have been demonstrations.”
“Brief ones. A minute at a time…two…That’s how they’re described in all of the articles. A journalist, or an investor, would be led in to see the bulb for a minute. Two at the most, and then ushered straight out. Supposedly this was so that no one could view Edison’s design long enough to steal it. But what if the demonstrations were so brief for a different reason?”
“That reason being that the bulbs didn’t really work?”
“Stability was the entire issue. No one could build a bulb that didn’t explode within minutes and set fire to whatever was nearby….What if Edison’s early bulbs, the ones he described on his first patent application, were still exploding?”
“But no one else knew, because they were only seeing it for two minutes at a time.”
“Edison had two more years to perfect the thing while everyone else was kicking themselves because they couldn’t figure out how he did it.”
Paul and Agnes stared at each other for a charged few seconds. She was as tense as Paul. “If I can prove that Edison lied on his patent,” he said, “then I don’t need to prove that Westinghouse’s lamps don’t infringe. The case I’m currently waging, the argument I’ve been making—it would be a moot point. Because instead, we could invalidate Edison’s patent. Blow the wicked thing out of the water, from tip to stern.”
“And then?”
“Then the Edison General Electric Company and the Westinghouse Electric Company are free to produce and sell two different products, and the public can decide which they prefer. No more lawsuits, no more threats. We will be in the situation that Edison has been dreading since first he learned that Westinghouse would challenge him: a fair fight.”
Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at ten-thirty at night with a new idea, or because they’ve realized something that shoots a hole in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.
—STEVE JOBS
PAUL HAD TROUBLE sleeping after his late-night epiphany with Agnes. He had walked all the way to East Fiftieth Street alternately hatching his plan of attack and thinking about his unexpected good fortune in having her as a confidante. He reminded himself, not for the first time, that she was his client, not his friend. She would certainly not be anything more. The idea of the brightest star of the New York stage taking up with her attorney was absurd. And yet Paul couldn’t help but think about all the invitations she must have passed up in recent weeks to sit with him at Tesla’s bedside. She had affection for Tesla, that Paul could see plainly. Was it possible that she had some for him as well?
The next day, Paul began to assemble the materials he would need in order to prove that Edison had perjured himself on his patent application. He quickly became engulfed by both their volume and their variety.
First there were the materials surrounding Patent No. 223,898 itself. The application was a mere three pages. The first page consisted entirely of an ink drawing of the lamp design, with annotations along the borders naming its various components. The second two were a brief handwritten summary of what the lamp did and how it functioned, signed at the bottom by Edison. The whole of the thing was fewer than one thousand words. To think of what legal warfare those few words had birthed. Helen of Troy as a spare pen sketch on two paper sheets.
The documents that surrounded the application were substantially lengthier, however. These included clarifications that Edison had made to the patent office in the years following his claim, as well as correspondence between Edison and the patent office as to the eventual granting of the patent. All of these were dutifully signed and verified. In a race for historical preeminence, the date on which one could prove a man made a claim was at least as important as the claim a man might make.
Then, of course, there were the materials concerning the other relevant patents. There had been dozens of previous patents granted by either the American or European governments for items titled “Incandescent Lamp.” Edison had thus far successfully argued that each of these patents was quite distinct from his own, and that he owed none of their inventors a debt. Paul had been working to fully understand their differences, in the hopes of arguing that any might encroach upon Edison’s claims.
Then came the interviews, articles, and pamphlets published about Edison’s miraculous “invention.” If the goal was to prove that no breakthrough had in fact occurred when Edison claimed that it had, Paul would need to collate and organize every claim made by Edison and his associates in the years both leading up to and following the patent. Could Paul show that Edison had contradicted himself somewhere? Could Paul find a statement from one of Edison’s engineers that contradicted his boss? Had one of the reporters who’d witnessed a demonstration of the bulb in the winter of ’78 noticed a detail, without realizing it, that might do the same?
The body of materials that would need to be combed over in search of evidence was daunting. Paul brought mounds of paper into his firm’s offices and stared at them as an experienced climber might regard the distant cliffs of Everest. What man could accomplish the trek alone?
Carter and Hughes already had a legal strategy they favored—a defensive one, arguing that Edison’s patent was well and good but that Westinghouse’s lamps simply did not infringe on it. Their rivalry with him was such that he strongly doubted he’d be able to convince them to take a more offensive path. He could talk to Westinghouse about the difficulty. But how could Westinghouse help? His men were engineers. Paul was in need of attorneys.
Paul’s thoughts turned to the marvel that was Edison’s laboratory. He could not help but admire the achievements of Edison’s organization. Even Reginald Fessenden had described its ingenuity with reverence. Edison’s laboratory had in fact produced more wonders in the span of a decade than any other such place in the course of human history. From the duplex telegraph to the phonograph to the carbon microphone to a hundred other lesser marvels, Edison’s achievements were extraordinary.