And suddenly the light went out. One tap of Thomas Edison’s finger, and the torch on the Statue of Liberty five miles away went dark.
“Power can be such an uncertain thing. Gas was so predictable. You take a heap of coal. You heat it, filter it, pressurize it, strike a match, and voilà—a flame that will light a room. Electricity is trickier. So many different kinds of bulbs—different filaments, casings, generators, vacuums. One malfunction and we’re all thrown back into darkness. And yet the old system of power is becoming obsolete. A new one rises to take its place. Once it becomes stable—once it is perfected and ubiquitous—there won’t be a going back. Do you know, the police tell me that all manner of horrid violence decreases in public places when my lights go up? Blessed with my brightness, men’s working days are no longer bound by the setting sun. Factories double their production. Midnight and noon lose their distinction. The nighttime of our ancestors is ending. Electric light is our future. 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.
“The question that should concern you,” he said as he reclined in his chair, “is not how far I’m willing to go to win. The question is how far you’ll go before you lose.”
A good attorney could not scare easily. A great attorney could not scare at all. But as he stared at the brilliance of the distant Statue of Liberty, at the dark devices on Edison’s desk, at the 312 lawsuits that he had to win, at the pale face of a man who could do with one finger what generations of Newtons and Hookes and Franklins could not even conceive, Paul was scared. Because in that moment Paul saw what real power was.
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.
“If you think you can stop me,” Edison said softly, “go ahead and try. But you’ll have to do it in the dark.”
It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.
—JAMES WATSON, CO-DISCOVERER OF DNA
A YEAR EARLIER, PAUL had been an eager young prodigy with one of the most coveted positions in New York law and not a single client to his name.
In the spring of ’86, weeks before his graduation from Columbia Law School, Paul had been personally recruited by the venerable Walter Carter. Paul accepted a clerkship at Carter, Hornblower & Byrne, to apprentice with Mr. Carter himself. If there existed a law student in the city who was not after such a position, Paul hadn’t met him.
Which is why it felt like the whole world was collapsing when, only months later, the firm began to dissolve. Suddenly Carter and Byrne wouldn’t even speak to each other. Paul never learned the substance of their disagreement; at that point it didn’t matter. The two split off into different firms, and Paul needed to pick a side.
Byrne took Hornblower, as well as the majority of the clients and virtually all of the prestige. If Paul followed Byrne, he’d be a clerk at arguably the best-known firm in the city.
Carter’s new firm, by contrast, was to be a two-person operation. Three, if Paul joined. Carter had partnered with an untested attorney named Charles Hughes, actually even younger than Paul but also engaged to marry Carter’s daughter. Their family firm would have no clerks. It would boast no significant clients. It would trade only on Carter’s name, which had been recently sullied by the rift with Byrne.
And yet, because his new firm was so small, Carter was able to offer Paul something that Byrne could not: partnership. To be sure, the split Carter suggested was far from generous—60/24/16, with Paul in the minority share. And yet…at no other firm in the world would Paul have his name on the door.
Did Paul want to be Byrne’s clerk? Or Carter’s partner?
The firm of Carter, Hughes & Cravath opened its doors on January 1, 1888.
—
Of paramount importance in those early days was the matter of attracting clients. Carter mined his decades of business connections. Hughes had been helpfully engaged in some minor but long-standing litigation for the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg Railroad. But Paul had nothing more to work with than a handful of school chums and a decent sales pitch. By the close of the sixth week, having failed to bring in a single dollar to the practice, Paul felt his confidence give way to disappointment. Every hour that he spent alone at that desk, in the quiet of his uselessness, revealed him to be a fraud.
His former schoolmates turned out to be neither helpful nor sympathetic. “Oh, that’s so very Paul,” they would say as he met them at their clubs for Scotch. “It must be terribly hard to get everything you want.”
In point of fact it was. But how could he illuminate the pressures and uncertainties of a position for which they would all gladly stab one another in the back? They wanted what he had. To tell someone jealous of his success that that very success was not what he might hope it to be, and was instead just another series of ever-more-demanding pressures and concerns, would be to sully his dreams. To dismiss his ambitions with what he would take, mistakenly, to be false modesty.
Paul had always wanted to be a prodigy. But what no one ever told him was that prodigies don’t feel like prodigies; they feel old. They feel like has-beens just at the moment that they’re said to be blossoming. When they are praised for their precociousness or their youthful ingenuity, they will shrug it off, because in their hearts they know themselves to be ancient and decaying. It is only later, after years of achievement have freed them of insecurity, that they will be informed that they are no longer prodigies but rather merely brilliant successes. And they will cringe. Because they know themselves, only then in the waning of their prodigiousness, to be true prodigies.
Paul had wished sometimes, very privately, to be a clerk again.
And then, quite out of the blue, he’d been invited to a dinner at the estate of George Westinghouse.
It turned out that years before, Paul’s distant uncle Caleb had taken a job at a Westinghouse subsidiary in Ohio. When Caleb had overheard a senior member of the company’s staff despairing about their uncreative legal representation, he’d made a suggestion. Caleb had a nephew in New York. A brilliant young man, Caleb had explained. An absolute wunderkind who just partnered with the esteemed Walter Carter at the astounding age of twenty-six. Mr. Westinghouse should share a meal with him. The kid might have an idea or two.
When Caleb first sent word through Paul’s father that he’d recommended his nephew to the Westinghouse Electric Company, Paul felt faintly embarrassed. He was mortifyingly unqualified for such a position. He could just imagine the polite dismissal with which Westinghouse must have greeted the mention of his name.