“Sooner or later Edison’s shareholders will notice their lack of profit,” said Paul, “and they will not be pleased.”
“The question you need to ask yourself,” said Bell, “is: Who is the largest shareholder in EGE? Besides Edison himself?”
Paul and Agnes both knew the answer.
“Sixty percent,” she said very quietly. “It’s hard to get much larger than that.”
Paul remained silent as he put the pieces together.
“I get the impression that a plan is forming,” suggested Bell. The old man couldn’t help but tease his youthful guests.
Paul stood suddenly. “I know how we’re going to win,” he said.
“You look…amused,” she said.
“Well, it is rather funny,” he replied. “It turns out that, quite fortuitously, you might be the only person in the whole world who can help me do it.”
Contrary to popular myth, technology does not result from a series of searches for the “one best solution” to a problem….Instead…practitioners of technology [confront] insolvable issues, [make] mistakes, and [cause] controversies and failures. [They] create new problems as they solve old ones.
—THOMAS HUGHES, AMERICAN GENESIS
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
—STEVE JOBS
IT COULD BE fairly said that the New Year’s ball at the Metropolitan Opera House was the second-most exclusive party in the world. Credit would need to be given to the first, Mrs. Jacob Astor’s summer gala. That preeminent party was limited to four hundred guests, who crammed into the Astors’ Newport estate for one sweaty, well-sauced evening each July. Mrs. Astor composed the list of attendees herself and, in a colorful flourish, would stamp by hand each invitation as it went out. New York society would spend their Junes nervously checking their mail tables for the telltale stamp upon the incoming envelopes. The names and qualifications of the guests were duly reported in The Times and The World. Harper’s typically documented the event with a page-wide pencil sketch of city glamour at its most impossibly dense.
New Year’s at the Met was more than twice as populous, which made the party necessarily half as glamorous. The guest list topped one thousand, and included more than the usual stock of stiff gentry. Also invited were crude politicians, European dancers in for the season, and young women of such beauty that one would never know they possessed only a simple West Side mansion and a generous uncle along Union Square. For one night, artists and railroad tycoons and English dukes all mingled effervescently. The notables of New York bounced against one another like the fizzy bubbles in the champagne flutes. Not coincidentally, Mrs. Astor was also a principal organizer of this second-place gala. This was due less to her personal investment in the Met and more to her simple dictate that no party of any great significance should take place in Manhattan without her involvement. Her monopoly on the New York social scene was more thorough than her husband’s was on American coal.
But while the Met’s yearly party lagged behind Mrs. Astor’s ball in exclusivity, it more than made up for this shortcoming by the ingenuity of its fashions. Whereas the July party stood as a symbol of black-on-white formality, New Year’s was a rainbow atop a bright pile of gold. The men were of course white-tied and black-tailed in the appropriate manner, but the women were permitted—encouraged—to show what could be done with a yard of silk and a carefully stitched bit of muslin. Diamonds were hung across every limb a woman could bare.
Paul knew all of this merely from newspapers and magazines. He was left to imagine the scene inside the party, however, as he stood shivering in the alley behind Thirty-ninth Street at quarter to eleven in the evening. There was little more than an hour left of 1889; he could hear the party from the street. Paul was very cold.
He’d been waiting in the alley for almost an hour, during which time Agnes was the only thing standing between himself and hypothermia. She was also the only thing standing between the Westinghouse Electric Company and bankruptcy. Paul needed to get into that party. He would wait for her as long as it took, whether or not his toes blackened from frost.
With a sudden screech, the metal door swung open and Agnes appeared in the orange light. She effortlessly wore a dress of shocking yellow, elegant and tasteful yet more delicately stitched than it might at first appear.
“Lord, it’s freezing out here,” she said. “Hurry up and get in.”
She yanked the door shut behind them and led Paul through the winding maze of corridors. He hadn’t been back to the Met in a year, since Tesla’s arrival in Agnes’s dressing room. He still hadn’t ever been to a performance.
“Is he here?” asked Paul when it no longer pained him to move his lips.
“Yes,” replied Agnes. “But there’s a problem. He has a friend with him.”
“Who?”
“Thomas Edison.”
Paul stopped. “Damn it.”
“I know.”
“Was Edison on the guest list?”
“Who knows? If I had been able to get a copy, I’d have had a shot at getting your name on it. Clearly we’ve had to make do with other means. My guess is that Thomas Edison was permitted to use the front door.”
This was going to make Paul’s plan for the evening considerably more difficult. “Are they together?”
“Not every moment. Edison has a lot of admirers. He has rounds to make, handshakes and tall tales. You’ll have to find a minute when they’re separated to make your move.”
There was no chance of turning back.
Paul followed Agnes toward the glittering ball in search of his target.
All the seats had been removed from the auditorium, allowing the thousand guests to spread freely across the floor of the great domed room. Strings of electric lights hung from the balconies, stretching toward the stage in blinking spiderwebs. From the stage, a forty-person orchestra played a spirited waltz. The dancers swayed forward and back, the waves of motion splashing against the solid rocks of conversation that dotted the floor.
Paul was a small trawler sailing into the rough seas of this crowd. Stepping slowly into the gala, he was practically knocked off his feet by a drunken couple who spun wildly through their dance.
“Careful,” counseled Agnes. “We can’t have you making a scene.”
Paul watched Agnes glide across the floor. She was a bird in flight over the choppy ocean. But Agnes was no gull, he thought as she smiled, putting up bulwarks against the curious glances being cast in her direction. She was a hawk.
“Over there,” said Paul, turning his head away.
Only fifty feet away was Thomas Edison, chatting amiably with acquaintances. He looked strangely younger in his tuxedo, the white bow tie askew below his chin. He was the only member of his circle without a drink in his hand.
“Do you know how to waltz?” asked Agnes.
“What?”
She took his right hand with her left and held it at the level of her waist before grasping his left hand with her right. Then she spun.
It took Paul a few moments to realize that she was leading him onto the dance floor in a three-count twirl. He tried to remember the last time he’d danced a waltz. Her perfume washed over him and for a moment it was as if he were back with her at his parents’ house on a warm Tennessee night.
“Steady,” whispered Agnes. “Just follow me.”
They spun across the dance floor, orbiting the other dancers. The room was a constellation of the very latest fashions. At first he clomped against the glazed wood floor. But as she tugged at his hands she gave shape to his movements.
“Slow,” she whispered. “Quick-quick, slow. There it is, yes.”