“If you’ve come here for advice, my friend, then you’re welcome to the very best advice I have: Get out while you still can.”
This was not what Paul had come to hear. Bell might be old and comfortable with retirement, but he was not.
“The Westinghouse Electric Company is soon to declare bankruptcy,” confessed Paul. “Edison is going to win the light-bulb suits. You can’t be saying that in my position you’d just as well let him.”
“No,” said Bell. “I’m saying that in your position, I’d have let Edison win a long time ago.”
Bell stood, stretching his legs with a stroll to the tall windows. He gazed out at the maple trees for a moment before he spoke again. “What is it that you think you’re fighting for?”
“We’re fighting for the future of this nation,” said Paul.
“You’re not,” said Bell softly. “You’re fighting for money. Or honor, which is worse.”
“What are you fighting for?” asked Agnes. “You haven’t let Edison steal your patent.”
Bell turned to Agnes.
“What do you think, Miss Huntington? Why do I go to Washington each fall?”
She seemed to find something in his eyes. Something silent and tender passed between them at a pitch that Paul could not hear.
Agnes smiled. “You do it for her. For Mabel.”
“And my girls,” said Bell. “But I control no company. I file for no other patents. Defending the royalty I have is enough trouble for one life. You want to make a fortune, Mr. Cravath? You already have. You’re George Westinghouse’s attorney, not even thirty. And you’ve a woman by your side, who let me add is as lovely and charming and smart as any man of your generation might hope to marry. It doesn’t seem so bad.”
Paul reddened in the face. He thought about correcting Bell, but to his surprise saw Agnes quickly motion him to be still.
“In my laboratory here,” said Bell, “I can work on any problem I choose. I can tinker all day on any device that strikes my fancy. I am free of the terrors of public opinion that so torture Thomas Edison. I am free of the dull pains of manufacturing that so weigh down George Westinghouse. That is winning. To sit in the dark and create things. That’s how we all started. Yet somehow we all forgot that when we allowed our days to become consumed by bickering over which of us first ran which current through which wire. Who cares?”
He turned to Paul as he continued. “The future you’re fighting for, it belongs to the moneymen. Not the inventors. Leave the former to their well-appointed hell. And tell the latter to join me here, where only genius matters, and only wonder thrives.”
Alexander Graham Bell was, in this speech, as decent a man as Paul had met in years.
“You are one of the smartest men in the world, Mr. Bell. Don’t tell me you think I’m going to stop.”
Bell gave a laugh. “No, Mr. Cravath,” he said. “I don’t.” He gazed again at the thick maple trees stretching for miles outside his window. He seemed lost in a series of thoughts that Paul was sure he would never understand.
“You really hate him, don’t you?” asked Bell.
“You don’t?”
“I pity him….You will not understand why I am doing this today, and you will not understand why I am doing this tomorrow. But when you do…well, just please remember that I warned you. I’m going to tell you what you want to know. I’m going to tell you how to defeat Thomas Edison. And I think you’re going to be successful. But please remember this. I’m not going to do it for you; I’m going to do it for him.”
We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
—THOMAS EDISON
“I DIDN’T BEAT EDISON,” continued Bell. “The silly fool beat himself. I was just clever enough to let him do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The most dangerous enemy that Thomas Edison will ever face is Thomas Edison. And even after all this time, he still hasn’t learned his lesson.”
“You’re being terribly cryptic.”
“Have you ever picked up one of those papers—The Wall Street Journal?”
“Yes,” answered Paul.
“Rubbish things, but a friend was here last week, brought a stack along. All the information you need to know to beat Edison is in one of those.”
“Edison’s stock price? It’s at an all-time high. I don’t understand how that helps us.”
“Edison’s stock is valued highly,” said Agnes, “because everyone believes that he’s going to defeat Westinghouse.”
“Go on,” said Bell.
“And that is the primary source of its value,” suggested Agnes.
Bell smiled. “Honestly,” he said to Paul, “your fiancée has a much better head for business than you do.”
Paul did his best to ignore this comment. “You’re suggesting that we spread rumors? To depress the value of his stock?”
“You’ve no need to lie. The truth is damning enough.”
“And the truth is…?”
“All right,” said Bell. “You asked how I beat him. It was exceptionally simple. I invented the damned thing before he did. I was quick. He was late. That’s the thing that kills him, even to this day. It wasn’t that I was a better inventor than he was. It was that he was so obsessed with solving a different problem that he didn’t even notice the answer to the telephone problem was lying right at his feet. He was consumed with telegraphs; he’d been working on them for a decade, even then. He’d done some early work on the telephone but felt it was a distraction. Why would he waste time on some silly talking box when his telegraph lines were getting finer and finer? He actually had the idea for the ’phone at the same time as I did, you know. It’s not a secret. And this is what will haunt that poor man until his dying day—he had the idea at the same time, but I patented it. And the law is the law. Do you know, I think that’s why he’s been so rough with Westinghouse? He must have vowed never to make such a mistake again.”
“I already showed that he lied on his patent application for the incandescent lamp,” said Paul. “It did no good.”
“No,” said Agnes. “That’s not the point that Mr. Bell is trying to make.”
“Correct,” said Bell.
“He’s saying,” said Agnes, “that Edison is an obsessive. Like someone else I know. And this is Edison’s weakness. He becomes so fixated on one line of attack that he becomes completely oblivious to another one.”
“Clever girl,” said Bell.
“A reverse salient?” asked Agnes. Bell laughed approvingly.
“What?” Paul was confused.
“Sometimes an army will intentionally create a reverse salient in its forward line,” she said. “A point of such obvious weakness that its enemy cannot help but take advantage. Do you know much about military history?”
“How do you know much about military history?” asked Paul.
“I was once friendly with a general. In London. Anyhow. What is the obvious weakness of Westinghouse’s? What is his reverse salient that has so consumed Edison?”
Paul struggled not to let his thoughts stray to this general in Agnes’s past.
“I would think,” said Bell, “that Mr. Cravath would know the singular obsession of Thomas Edison better than just about anyone else in the world.”
“The lawsuit!” exclaimed Agnes. “Paul, you’ve been saying for months that this lawsuit is costing Westinghouse a fortune.”
“Yes…”
“Do you think it’s costing Edison any less?”
As Paul finally understood the point that Bell and Agnes had been making, he began to smile.
“Edison is so focused on winning the patent war,” he said, “that he’s forgotten that he also needs to win the corporate war. The Edison General Electric Company…it’s not actually profitable. He’s running the thing into the red to beat Westinghouse. Undercutting his prices so severely that he’s barely eking out a profit. Throwing a fortune away on legal fees, a fortune that I cannot imagine that his attorneys have so graciously deferred.”
“You’re deferring your legal fees?” said Bell. “Remind me to hire you the next time Edison sues me.”