The basic biographical information about Paul Cravath and his family contained in the novel is true. My descriptions of Paul and his life come from the few sources we have: The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors 1819–1948 (Robert Swaine, privately printed), a New Yorker profile of him from when he became chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera in 1932 (“Public Man,” The New Yorker, January 2, 1932), an entry in The National Cyclop?dia of American Biography (Volume 11, 1902), his and Agnes’s wedding announcement (“Marriage of Agnes Huntington,” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1892), the Oberlin student newspaper, and of course his court filings.
My depiction of Thomas Edison is largely based on The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World, by Randall Stross. It’s a wonderful and highly engaging biography of Edison, and it supplied a lot of Edison’s personality and biography in this book. Edison’s voice is drawn from his letters and journals, which are kept at Rutgers University. Edison wrote in his diary most every day of his life, and through it one gets a fascinating glimpse of his inner thoughts. The majority of the Edison Papers at Rutgers are online, as of this writing.
There is no definitive biography of George Westinghouse, but that’s a book that I would very much love to read one day.
All personal and biographical description of Nikola Tesla contained here is accurate. Margaret Cheney’s Tesla: Man Out of Time was an extremely helpful resource, as was Tesla’s own autobiography, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. It’s as singular a reading experience as you’d expect.
Many historical accounts of Nikola Tesla mention his impenetrable accent and the difficulties faced by those struggling to decipher his speech. In real life, however, his grammar was impeccable, if elaborate. It was only his thick accent that made him so hard for Americans to understand. This left me with a problem: How to convey Tesla’s accent on the page? I could transliterate his Serbian accent, but that seemed inelegant to read. (“Meeesterr Crahvahth…”)
But as I read through Tesla’s autobiography, a solution presented itself. Tesla wrote in long, winding, grammatically adventurous sentences. His English was fluent, but it was almost archaic, even for the 1880s. Every sentence reads as if it’s about to fall in on itself from the grammatical circumlocutions and unexpected word choices. What I’ve done here is to use his writing style as a model for his speaking style, while upending the grammar so he’s even harder to understand. This makes his sentences as confusing to read as they would be to hear.
When it comes to Agnes Huntington, the historical record is shockingly blank. All information that we have about her comes from an article about her career and marriage in The Illustrated American (December 3, 1892); her entry in The Dramatic Peerage from 1892; her entry in Woman’s Who’s Who of America (1914–1915); an interview she gave about her legal troubles with W. H. Foster (“Agnes Huntington’s Story,” The New York Times, December 14, 1886); her entry in Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science and Education (Volume 49, 1892); a review of her performance in Paul Jones (“Paul Jones in New-York,” The New York Times, September 21, 1890); the 1870 U.S. Census of Kalamazoo; gossip reports of her engagement to Henry Jayne (Town Topics, November 3, 1892; “Did He Jilt ‘Paul Jones,’?” The Washington Post, October 30, 1892; “Denied by Miss Huntington,” The New York Times, October 30, 1892).
From those sources, I can confidently assert the following: Agnes Huntington was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but never found renown (or even mention!) in society until her first appearance singing in London. She made a name for herself in Europe, accompanied always by her mother, who seemed oddly silent about their family background. As far as I can tell, even though Agnes and Fannie have the last name Huntington, they were not related to the famous Huntington family, either its California branch or its East Coast one. Agnes had some sort of murky legal squabble with the manager of the Boston Ideals. She had many gentleman admirers of very high status on both sides of the pond. She was engaged to Henry Jayne for a time, but he broke it off in 1892. She later married Paul Cravath, an up-and-coming New York lawyer who at that point in their lives would have been of considerably lower social status.
Everything else about Agnes’s story in this novel is imagined (the stolen dress, the borrowed name, etc.). The manner in which she meets Paul—hiring him as her attorney—is also imagined, though the case for which she hires him is real. (In reality her lawyer was named Abram Dittenhoefer.) In compressing the timeline of events, however, I’ve moved this legal case from 1886 to 1888. In real life it would have been resolved before Paul became Westinghouse’s attorney.
It is my belief—though I can’t prove it—that the historical Agnes Huntington was hiding something about her past. Something tells me her real story is even more fantastic than the one I’ve created for her in these pages.
Chapter 1: The opening scene of the burning workman is based on two real public immolations: one on May 11, 1888 (“A Wireman’s Recklessness,” The New York Times, May 12, 1888) and another on October 11, 1889 (“Met Death in the Wires,” The New York Times, October 12, 1889). Paul was likely not present for either of these, but as the first took place mere blocks from his office, placing him on the scene seemed reasonable enough.
Chapter 7: Reginald Fessenden did work for Edison before he went to work for Westinghouse, with a stop at Purdue in between, though the timeline has been simplified here. Fessenden was not actually Edison’s mole within the Westinghouse operation. The real mole was of lower status—a humble draftsman, arrested in 1893.
Chapters 15–16: Tesla did go to work for Westinghouse outside Pittsburgh in 1888, in exchange for a license on his alternating-current patents. The fundamental shift in strategy on Westinghouse’s side in going from a “house by house” electrical system to a “network” electrical system is discussed in Thomas P. Hughes’s fascinating Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. However, in reality this shift was not as sudden as I’ve rendered it. Westinghouse had been interested in A/C technology for a few years before Tesla’s demonstration—which is real, though Westinghouse was not present for it. Westinghouse acquired a portfolio of A/C patents to develop as early as 1886; he just hadn’t gotten the technology to work yet.
Chapter 21: The crisis concerning royalty structures that confronted Westinghouse and his attorneys following Tesla’s sudden departure is real, though the timeline has been compressed and we don’t know whether the negotiating error was Paul’s.
Chapter 25: Both the mysterious fire in Tesla’s laboratory as well as Tesla’s ensuing mental breakdown and amnesia did occur. They just took place at different times, and in a different order, than the sequence presented here.
In 1892, Tesla’s long hours of work in his lab, on the concept of “wireless telephones,” sent him into a mental breakdown. He passed out and woke with no memories of his life at all, save scattered images of his infancy. He spent months in bed, struggling to regain his memories. It was some time before he was finally able to invent again.
This episode recalled other moments of mental illness in Tesla’s life. According to his autobiography, he experienced frequent hallucinations, both visual and auditory. He wrote: “[These hallucinations] usually occurred when I found myself in a dangerous or distressing situation, or when I was greatly exhilarated. In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame.” These visions, however, gave him insight into the machines he began to design. Thomas Hughes and others have explored whether Tesla might have been diagnosed with schizophrenia were he alive today; to my mind, it seems likely that he would have been. Tesla figuratively saw the world in ways that no one else did in part because Tesla literally saw the world in ways that no one else did.