“Even up to seven hundred volts,” Brown explained, ignoring his audience’s pleas for mercy, “this direct current is quite simply incapable of doing lasting damage to the animal.
“But,” he then added, “let us see how alternating current compares.” His assistant replaced the D/C generator with a different one, bigger and newer. Brown described it as an alternating-current device, identical to the variety produced by Mr. Westinghouse.
“We return to a humble three hundred volts,” he said as he flicked a switch on the new machine and alternating current poured through the dog. It took only seconds of thrashing and an unholy screech before it slumped to the floor of its cage, dead. “Terrible thing,” said Brown as he shook his head ruefully. The crowd was too shocked to move. “I am sorry for having to show you such terrors. But if you have concerns, I suggest bringing them up with Mr. Westinghouse. He is the one attempting to string this current up to every thoroughfare in the country. If this is what it does to a dog, imagine what it might do to a child!”
—
Despite a note of official protest from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Brown performed a nearly identical demonstration the following day. A Newfoundland work dog was electrocuted by A/C for a full eight seconds before it died. The next night it was an Irish setter, with identical results.
The following weeks brought a pattern of newspaper coverage of these demonstrations that was almost comical in its predictability and its absurdity. Paul had assumed that the controversy surrounding such grotesqueries would be to his advantage. Surely no one could take seriously the scientific claims of a man who had literally taken to burning animals alive?
Paul found himself in the wrong. Every report went like this: First there was a throat-clearing denunciation from the newspaper editorial board about the moral abomination of animal killing. But then, a breath later, the same paper would reluctantly suggest that if Brown had perhaps gone too far to make his point, that did not invalidate his message. And based on the horrors witnessed, his message was both sound and vitally important.
“While Brown might find a wider audience for his arguments if they were not posed in such an unchristian manner,” declared The Philadelphia Inquirer, “there can be no denying the dangers he so successfully elucidated by the frying of a Labrador.” The controversy itself begat more ink, which in turn brought more attention to Brown’s cause. It seemed that in the circus of public opinion, no act was too extreme. Brown’s villainy had been successfully painted as Westinghouse’s.
—
“Mr. Paul Cravath,” said Tesla as Paul entered his upstairs bedroom two weeks later. “You are looking more pale even than I.”
Paul had to smile. Tesla had rarely greeted him by name since the accident. “I’m not getting as much sleep as I might.”
Tesla didn’t respond. Instead, he turned to the window and stared at the shapes being formed by the ice outside the glass. Geometric paintings in slow-moving frost. Paul spent another twenty minutes trying to re-engage him in conversation, but it was no use. This brief flash of lucidity was all that Paul would get that night.
Yet it indicated improvement. Agnes had even heard Tesla refer to Edison the day before. Names were coming back to him, events too. Paul hoped that soon he might recall how he had survived the fire. And, much more important, that he might regain the creative capacity to invent an original, non-infringing lamp. While production of their A/C generators was going as planned, Westinghouse and Fessenden had reported little progress on development of a new light bulb. It would take, suggested Fessenden, a particular genius to conjure up such a device. Tesla’s recovery could not come too soon; Paul could only hope that it would come eventually.
Paul joined Agnes in a late-night glass of port. This had recently become a ritual on his midnight visits, one that he spent all day looking forward to. As a result of his position, not to mention his workload, he was left with few real friends. He had, he realized, only one person with whom he could be fully honest. How lucky, and how fantastic, that it was her.
“Any progress on your friend Harold Brown?” asked Agnes as she sipped from her tiny glass. She’d kept her black silk gloves on, despite their having sat in her drawing room. She was a curious mix, Paul noted, of proprieties adopted and abandoned.
He wondered what it would be like to put down his glass and kiss her. Instead, he talked about his case.
“We haven’t found a connection yet to Edison. We can’t even find any record they’ve ever been in the same place at the same time. It’s as if Edison is Dr. Jekyll, and Brown Mr. Hyde.”
“I’ve never read that one.”
“Neither have I,” admitted Paul. “One odd thing my associates did find, though: patent applications, in Brown’s name. All rejected.”
“Rejected?”
“He submitted his own design of a light bulb, four or five years ago. A few of his own generators. My boys unearthed two dozen of the things.”
Agnes considered this, tapping her gloved fingers against her delicate glass. “He’s a failed inventor?”
“It appears that way. I asked one of Westinghouse’s engineers to look over the rejected applications. He told me they’re trash—poorly thought-out mimicry, far from the real thing. The patent office is famously instructed to err on the side of granting too many patents rather than too few, on the logic that it’s cleaner for the courts to invalidate them in hindsight than to attempt applying them after the fact. But Brown’s ideas were too middling even for them. He wanted to be Thomas Edison, but he couldn’t cut it. So instead…”
“He gets to pretend to be Edison for the press.” Agnes appeared thoughtful, as if allowing the port to percolate through her mind. “The Sun ran a profile on him.”
“So did the Boston Herald. A few others.”
“They make mention of his laboratory, in Manhattan.”
“On Wall Street no less,” said Paul. “He’s dressing the part. The stained work pants, the scuffed boots, the Manhattan laboratory.”
“Except what does a pretend inventor do in his real lab?”
Paul realized that he didn’t have an answer.
Picasso had a saying—“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
—STEVE JOBS, MISATTRIBUTING A QUOTE TO PABLO PICASSO
THE CORNER OF Wall Street and William Street was quiet at one in the morning. Four days after his conversation with Agnes, Paul stood there under a great pedestal arc lamp, the lone figure beneath the artificial moonlight. The hours between sunset and sunrise felt different under a mechanical brightness. The area beneath the arcing lamp was the color palette of the Italian Renaissance, while the city beyond it fell into a murky swirl of French Impressionism.
Beneath the brightest public lights that money could buy, Paul contemplated the dirty business on which he reluctantly found himself. Harold Brown’s laboratory was on the third floor of 45 Wall Street. The building stood before Paul just at the edge of the illuminated circle that surrounded him.
“You Cravath?” came a voice from behind. Paul turned to find a slim, clean-shaven man approaching. The man was short, dressed in simple work clothes and a warm hat. His hands rested comfortably in the pockets of his coat.
“I think I have a pretty good idea of who you are.”
The man shrugged before gesturing to 45 Wall Street. “If your aim is to have a long career in burglary, I suggest starting a little smaller.”
“I appreciate the advice,” said Paul. “But I’d prefer my career to be as short as possible.”
“Suit yourself.”