“Wonder?” asked Paul, not quite following along.
“Our age of invention,” explained Edison. “These days of handcrafted miracles…they won’t last much longer. Does that ever worry any of you? Light bulbs. Electricity. It seems likely that ours will be the last generation to ever gaze, wide-eyed, at something truly novel. That our kind will be the last to ever stare in disbelief at a man-made thing that could not possibly exist. We made wonders, boys. I only wonder how many of them are left to make.”
“The study of science,” said Tesla, “it is not ever to end.”
Edison nodded. “That’s true. But it won’t be like this. It will be more…technical. Inside the magic box, not outside it. A light bulb is intuitive; an X-ray is practically alchemy. The machines are becoming so infernally complicated that barely a soul can even conceptualize how they work. And moreover, they won’t need to in order to use the things. From here we can only build incrementally. Improvements. Not revolutions. No new colors, only new hues. Do you remember the first time you saw a light bulb at work?”
“I practically fainted,” said Westinghouse. “I didn’t think it was possible. That was barely fifteen years ago.”
“Exactly,” said Edison. “And when was the last time you saw anything that made you feel that way?”
“I always saw it,” said Tesla. The men turned to him. “The electrical bulbs. I have seen them always.” He tapped his fingertips twice against the side of his head. “Here.”
Westinghouse and Edison both laughed.
“We know,” said Westinghouse. “And we’re grateful for it.”
Edison asked, “Have you met that young fellow—what’s his name…Ford?”
“I gave him his first job,” said Westinghouse.
“I must have given him his second,” said Edison. “He’s probably younger than Mr. Cravath here. It’s depressing. I like Henry Ford, I honestly do. But he’s not…well, he’s just cut of a newer cloth, that’s all. So damned professional. Everything done to perfection. His career planned out from the start. He knows exactly where he’s going: what sort of company he wants to start, how to run it, what they’ll work on. Can you imagine? In our day all you had was a few stray strips of wire and—if you were really lucky—enough pennies for a stamp to mail a sketch to the patent office. Ford has a goddamned business plan.”
“A professional inventor,” said Westinghouse.
“A professional scientist,” said Edison. “Darwin never made a cent off what he did. Neither did Newton. Hooke. The whole of the Royal Society lot—they simply found things out. Invented things because they could. Not because there was money in it. We got wealthy doing what they did for fun.”
“And now a whole generation is setting out to grow rich from their idle fiddling.”
“And so there will be little fiddling that remains purely idle.”
The irony in Edison’s speech made Paul smile, but he kept his amusement to himself. This newfangled marriage of business and science that would birth technology was precisely what Edison himself had created. It was his greatest invention. And, like all progeny, it was now going to leave its maker behind.
Paul watched the three inventors fall into silence as they stared out at the churning falls.
The current war already felt like an exotic and arcane quarrel. Like a strange dream whose plot had faded in the morning light. Their machinations would soon be forgotten. But the world it had led to, the one in which he now lived, was permanent.
Who had invented the light bulb? That was the question that had started the whole story off.
It was all of them. Only together could they have birthed the system that was now the bone and sinew of these United States. No one man could have done it. In order to produce such a wonder, Paul realized, the world required men like each of them. Visionaries like Tesla. Craftsmen like Westinghouse. Salesmen like Edison.
And what of Paul? Perhaps the world needed men like him too. Mere mortals to clean up the messes of giants. Clever men to witness and record the affairs of brilliant ones. Perhaps if Tesla had invented the light bulb, and Westinghouse had too, and so had Edison, well then, Paul had a claim to it himself. Maybe Paul was more of an inventor than he’d thought.
He smiled very briefly at the notion.
The men said their goodbyes. One by one, the inventors drained their glasses as they drifted back from the misty precipice.
Paul was the last of them to leave. He watched as the sun began to set across the water. The river glowed the day’s last rainbow of golden yellow and shimmering orange. He turned away, descending the stairwell into the darkening shadow of a country that was just becoming America.
AS A WORK of historical fiction, this novel is intended as a dramatization of history, not a recording of it. Nothing you’ve read here should be understood as verifiable fact. However, the bulk of the events depicted in this book did happen and every major character did exist. Much of the dialogue comes either from the historical personages’ own mouths or from the tips of their prodigious pens. Yet many of these events have been reordered and characters appear in places they may not have. I’ve frequently invented situations that very well could have happened but were certainly not documented. This book is a Gordian knot of verifiable truth, educated supposition, dramatic rendering, and total guesswork. What I’d like to do in this note is to help untangle it for you.
Additional material, including a chronology of actual events, can be found on my website: mrgrahammoore.com.
Almost all of the events that historians generally describe as forming the “current war” took place between 1888 and 1896. I have compressed the narrative into only two years, from 1888 to 1890. As you’ll see, even though most of the major scenes depicted did occur in one way or another, I’ve fudged their chronology. What was often simultaneous in real life becomes sequential in this book. I’ve frequently taken multiple events or multiple historical characters and amalgamated them. This is to help the reader’s tracking of the many story lines and to give narrative shape to the messily discrete events of history.
Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, by Jill Jonnes, is for my money the most delightful nonfiction account of the current war. It contains brilliantly sketched portraits of Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla, as well as thoughtful insights into their rivalries and antipathies.
When I first discovered that a twenty-six-year-old attorney, only eighteen months out of law school, was at the center of the current war before going on to found one of America’s most preeminent law firms, I immediately wanted to learn everything I could about him. I was shocked to find that there is no proper biography of Paul Cravath. It was this absence of scholarly history that inspired me to write this book, and it was the paucity of material available that dictated it should be a novel.