Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (9 page)

On May 15, 1888, Tesla appeared before the AIEE to read his landmark paper “A New Alternating Current Motor.” He had already filed for fourteen of the forty fundamental patents on the AC system, but he was still reluctant to fully announce his work. Realizing that the invention was worth at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars, Tesla and company sought investors through the advice of their new patent attorneys, Parker W. Page, Leonard E. Curtis, and Gen. Samuel Duncan, the last a leader of the firm and respected member of the New York Bar Association.
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By the time of the lecture, Tesla, Peck, and Brown had already been negotiating with prospective buyers, such as Mr. Butterworth, a gas manufacturer from San Francisco, and, through General Duncan, George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh,
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but nothing as yet was settled.

Westinghouse was already utilizing an alternating current system developed by the “erratic” French inventor Lucien Gaulard and the “sporty” entrepreneur John Dixon Gibbs of England.
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In 1885 his manager of the electrical division, Guido Pantaleoni, had returned to Turin, Italy, to attend the funeral of his father. By coincidence, through his engineering professor Galileo Ferraris, whom Westinghouse himself had met while visiting Italy in 1882, Pantaleoni was introduced to Lucian Gaulard, who had installed his AC apparatus between Tivoli and Rome. Gaulard and Gibbs had already made headlines two years earlier when they first exhibited their invention at the Royal Aquarium in London; but in Turin the system won a gold medal and a prize of £400 awarded by the Italian government. Westinghouse purchased the American patent rights in late November after receiving a cable request from Pantaleoni.

The Gaulard-Gibbs system, although improved by the Hungarian ZBD system, still had serious problems. For Westinghouse, this was further complicated by the fact that Edison owned the option on the ZBD; and it was probably to block competitors that Edison purchased the system to begin with.
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In the same year, in America, after creating the Westinghouse
Electric Company, Westinghouse placed William Stanley in charge of the Gaulard-Gibbs modifications. Simultaneously, he brought to America Reginald Belfield, the engineer who had helped install the Gaulard-Gibbs system at the Inventions Exhibition in London two years earlier. Stanley, a frail, thin-faced temperamental “little man”
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with piercing eyes, aquiline nose, wispy mustache, and Alfalfa hairdo, was a native of Brooklyn who had worked for Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun. Although it was Westinghouse’s idea to place Stanley in charge of the Gaulard-Gibbs apparatus, Stanley would later maintain that Westinghouse never fully understood the system until he got it in working order.
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This appears unlikely, for it was a private joke among the upper echelon of the Westinghouse Company that Stanley had a penchant for claiming new discoveries when they became such to him. In any case, Westinghouse hedged his bets by establishing numerous DC central stations as well while research on AC was in progress.
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“Nervous and agile,”
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Stanley was a hypersensitive individual who never really got along with Westinghouse. Due to ill health, and on the advice of the general manager, Col. Henry Byllesby, who proposed that success might be more forthcoming if Stanley separated himself from the pressures of the company, the inventor returned to his childhood summer retreat in the Berkshires in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to work on the Gaulard-Gibbs system in private, taking Reginald Belfield with him. Stanley converted the Gaulard-Gibbs arrangement to parallel circuitry and independent control of separate fixtures and at the same time created a transformer which stepped up the AC from 500 volts to 3,000 when delivered along a transmission line and stepped them back down to original levels when entering households. This invention, although very similar to the ZBD configuration, was nevertheless patentable. It enabled AC to be sent three-quarters of a mile, or approximately one-quarter of a mile farther than the lower voltages of the prevailing DC systems.
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On April 6, 1886, George Westinghouse, along with Col. Henry Byllesby, traveled up to New Hampshire to witness the landmark apparatus for themselves. Prior to coming to Westinghouse, Byllesby had been employed at the Edison Machine Works as a mechanical engineer and was one of the designers of the Pearl Street station.
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“From that time on,” Byllesby said, “we progressed with amazing speed.”
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By the time of Tesla’s lecture, Westinghouse noted that his company had “sold more central station[s]…on the alternating current system than all of the other electric companies in the country put together on the direct current system,”
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but few engineers understood the principles involved.

In fierce competition with Westinghouse and a third player, Elihu Thomson of Thomson-Houston Electric Company, Thomas Edison had received a report on his own alternating current ZBD system. His engineers
in Berlin indicated that the use of such high voltages was exceedingly dangerous.
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Thomson, who himself had lectured at the AIEE a year before on the topic of AC, supported Edison’s contention that AC was too risky.
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Thus, at the time Tesla spoke, the battle of the currents had already begun, but the makeup of the contenders was complex. In 1886, fully two years before Tesla’s high-voltage AC system became manifest, Edison had written to his manager, “Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically. It will never be free from danger.”
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Tesla’s lecture began with a brief description of the “existing diversity of opinion regarding the relative merits of the alternate and continuous current systems. Great importance,” Tesla continued, “is attached to the question whether alternate currents can be successfully utilized in the operation of motors.” He followed this preamble with a lucid description of the problems of the prevailing technology and his elegant solution, explained in words, diagrams, and simple mathematical calculations. The lecture was so thorough that many engineers, after studying the work, felt that they had known it all along:

I have the pleasure of bringing to your notice a novel system of electric distribution and transmission of power by means of alternate currents…which I am confident will at once establish the superior adaptability…and will show that many results heretofore unattainable can be reached by their use…

In our dynamo machines, it is well known, we generate alternate currents which we direct by means of a commutator, a complicated device, and the source of most of the troubles experienced…Now, the currents so directed cannot be utilised in the motor, but they must be reconverted into their original state…In reality, therefore, all machines are alternate-current machines, the current appearing continuous only in the external circuit during their transit from generator to motor.
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Since Tesla’s lecture was dealing with fundamentals, it was easily understood, even though his invention was so revolutionary.

By demonstration in Tesla’s laboratory after the lecture, the inventor showed that his synchronous motors could almost instantaneously be reversed. He also described, in precise mathematical calculations, how to determine the number of poles and speed of each motor, how to construct single-phase, two-phase, and three-phase motors, and how his system could be interlinked with DC apparatus. The lecture made use of entirely new principles.
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Now electricity could be transported hundreds of miles from a single
distribution point, and not just for lighting streets or dwellings but for running appliances in households and industrial machinery in factories.

At the end of the talk, T. C. Martin called upon Professor William Anthony to present his independent tests of the Tesla motors. He had designed dynamos himself, which he had displayed a decade earlier at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Tugging nervously at his scraggly beard, Anthony confirmed that the Tesla motors he had taken back to Cornell had an efficiency comparable to the best DC apparatus. “A little over 60%,” he said, for the larger models. Moreover, the reversal of direction that the machines could achieve took place “so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell when the change took place.”
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Boiling inside at having been anticipated by a newcomer, the persnickety professor Elihu Thomson stepped forward. Wanting to reestablish that his work in AC predated Tesla’s, Thomson pointed out how their inventions differed: “I have been very much interested in the description given by Mr. Tesla of his new and admirable little motor,” he managed with a pert smile. “I have, as probably you may be aware, worked in somewhat similar directions, and towards the attainment of similar ends. The trials which I have made have been by the use of a single alternating current circuit—not a double alternating circuit—a single circuit supplying a motor constructed to utilize the alternation and produce rotation.”
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Unbeknown to Thomson, his words at that moment would come back to haunt him, because he had identified precisely the difference between the two creations. Whereas Thomson’s single AC circuit had to still make use of a commutator and thus was highly inefficient, Tesla’s system utilized two or more circuits out of phase with each other and constructed in such a way as to make the commutator obsolete. Tesla, of course, recognized the importance of Thomson’s words and reiterated the point to establish clearly that his invention, just presented, was not analogous to Thomson’s prior work:

“Gentlemen,” Tesla began, “I wish to say that the testimony of such a man as Professor Thomson flatters me very much.” Pausing with a smile and a bow of recognition, Tesla timed his coup de grâce with understated finesse. “I had a motor identically the same as that of Professor Thomson, but I was anticipated by him…That peculiar motor represents the disadvantage that a pair of brushes [i.e., a commutator] must be employed.”
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In this brief riposte Tesla claimed the high ground, and created an enemy who would fight him on this and other priority issues (e.g., the Tesla coil) for the rest of their lives.

Now Westinghouse had to move fast. He realized the value of the Tesla patent applications, having had nearly a month to look them over, along with the report from Professor Anthony.
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A week after the lecture,
on May 21, he sent Col. Henry Byllesby to Tesla’s laboratory. Byllesby met with fellow engineer Alfred Brown on Cortland Street, where he was introduced to Charles Peck, the lawyer and major financial backer of the Tesla Electric Company. Together with a fourth man, Mr. Humbard, they went over to Liberty Street to meet the inventor and see the machines in operation.

“Mr. Tesla struck me as being a straight-forward, enthusiastic, sort of a party,” Byllesby wrote to Westinghouse, “but his description was not of a nature which I was enabled, entirely, to comprehend. However, I saw several points which I think are of interest. In the first place, as near as I can get at it, the underlying principle of this motor is the principle which Mr. Shallenberger is at work on at the present moment. The motors, as far as I could judge…are a success. They start from rest, and the reversion of the direction of rotation is suddenly accomplished without any shortcircuiting…In order to avoid giving the impression that the matter was one which excited my curiosity, I made my visit short.”
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Back at Cortland Street, Brown and Peck informed Byllesby that he had to make a decision “by ten o’clock, Friday of this week,” as the company was also negotiating with a Mr. Butterworth from San Francisco. They claimed that Professor Anthony had joined this California syndicate and was backing up Butterworth’s offer of $250,000 in short-term notes and a royalty of $2.50 per watt of horsepower. “I told them the terms were monstrous,” Byllesby said, “but they replied that they could not possibly hold the matter over longer than the date mentioned. I told them I thought there was no possibility of our considering the matter seriously, but that I would let them know before Friday.”

Byllesby suggested that Westinghouse come to New York himself or send Shallenberger and another representative, but Westinghouse, who was familiar with the San Francisco syndicate, told Byllesby instead to stall them and try to secure more favorable terms.
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During the six-week interim, Westinghouse conferred with his specialists, Oliver Shallenberger and William Stanley, and his lawyer E. M. Kerr. Just three weeks prior to Tesla’s lecture, Shallenberger had discovered “by chance” that a loose spring spun in “a shifting magnetic field. Directly he said to his assistant Stillwell who was also present…, ‘There’s a meter in that and perhaps a motor.’ Within two weeks he designed and built a most successful alternating current meter of the induction type” which became standard for the field; and, like Tesla’s creation, his apparatus utilized a rotating magnetic field.
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Shallenberger, however, did not yet really understand the principles involved, nor had he had time to apply for a patent.

Stanley, on the other hand, claimed that there was nothing new in Tesla’s creation. He pointed out that in September 1883 he had put the
idea down in a notebook that an induction coil could be excited by AC. “I have built an AC system on basically the same principle which allows electromotive force to be transmitted from power stations to homes for the purpose of illuminating them,” he told Westinghouse.
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But the fact of the matter was, Stanley’s system still used a commutator. His ego had gotten in the way of his ability to reason objectively that his scheme was not analogous to Tesla’s.

Kerr reminded Westinghouse that unless he had a competing patent of sufficient strength, he would be powerless. Westinghouse was aware that Professor Ferraris of Turin, Italy, had published a paper on the rotating magnetic field one or two months prior to Tesla’s lecture. Ferraris had also constructed discs that rotated in AC fields in university presentations as early as 1885. Tesla willingly admitted that “Professor Ferraris not only came independently to the same theoretical results, but in a manner identical almost to the smallest detail,”
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but Ferraris wrongly concluded that “an apparatus founded upon this principle cannot be of any commercial importance as a motor.”
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Nevertheless, Kerr realized the legal importance of Ferraris’s work. He suggested to Westinghouse that they purchase the U.S. patent options, so Pantaleoni was sent to Italy. He paid 5,000 francs, or about $1,000, for the rights.
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But time was running out; the Tesla people would not wait forever. Westinghouse wrote Kerr: