[My] first impression [was that of a man with] tremendous potential energy of [which]…only part had taken kinetic form. But even to a superficial observer, the latent force was manifest. A powerful frame, well proportioned, with every joint in working order, an eye as clear as crystal, a quick and springy step—he presented a rare example of health and strength. Like a lion in a forest, he breathed deep and with delight the smoky air of his factories.
NIKOLA TESLA ON GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE1
Although George Westinghouse had made his fortune with the invention of air brakes for trains, he was not just a railroad man. He was a descendant of the aristocratic Russian von Wistinghousen family; his father was also an inventor, with six fundamental patents of farming machinery. With his brother Henry (who later became his partner), George early on was introduced to such devices as the battery and the sparking leyden jar (a glass jar lined with foil and used for storing an electric charge). Having been a cavalry boy and, later, a navy engineer during the Civil War, George Westinghouse had experience and vision; he knew that the future was in electricity.
In late July 1888, Tesla took a train to Pittsburgh to meet with George Westinghouse and finalize the sale of his patents. It may have been the middle of summer, but oddly, the inventor welcomed the intense heat. He looked forward to the meeting.
Considerable in stature, with a walrus-sized mustache, Chester A. Arthur sideburns, and a remarkable wife of equal proportion who wore a bustle that jutted three feet to the rear, Westinghouse greeted the lanky inventor. A garrulous man, George Westinghouse subsumed those around him with his geniality and unbounded confidence. He took Tesla to his home and then on a tour of the plant. With nearly four hundred employees, Westinghouse’s electric company was mainly producing “alternators, transformers and accessories for equipping central stations for supplying incandescent lighting.”2 Barrel-chested and physically expansive, Westinghouse counterbalanced in appearance the spindle-legged foreigner, who walked as “straight as an arrow, [with his] head erect…but with a preoccupied air as if new combinations were crystallizing in his brain.”3
Tesla said:
Though past forty then, [Westinghouse] still had the enthusiasm of youth. Always smiling, affable and polite, he stood in marked contrast to the rough and ready men I met. Not one word which would have been objectionable, not a gesture which might have offended—one could imagine him as moving in the atmosphere of a court, so perfect was his bearing in manner and speech. And yet no fiercer adversary than Westinghouse could have been found when he was aroused. An athlete in ordinary life, he was transformed into a giant when confronted with difficulties which seemed unsurmountable. He enjoyed the struggle and never lost confidence. When others would give up in despair he triumphed.4
Known for his foresight and courage, Westinghouse had already quadrupled the sales of his electric company, from $800,000 in 1887 to over $3 million in 1888, even though he was in the midst of expensive legal and propaganda battles with Edison.5 Extraordinary in his ability to generate enthusiasm in his workers and a decisive man of action, he immediately gained the respect of those he met, particularly Nikola Tesla.
Westinghouse offered Tesla $5,000 in cash for a sixty-day option, $10,000 at the end of the option if they elected to purchase the patents, three notes of $20,000 at six-month intervals, $2.50 per watt in royalties, and two hundred shares of stock in the Westinghouse Company. Minimum payment on the royalties was calculated at “$5,000 for the first year, $10,000 for the second year, and $15,000 for each succeeding year thereafter during the life of the patents.”6 Westinghouse also agreed to pay for any legal expenses in litigation on priority issues, but a clause for lowering payments was added should any suits be lost. Calculated out, for fifteen years, this figure, minus the stock, came to $75,000 in initial outlays and $180,000 in royalty payments, or approximately $255,000.7
Tesla owned four-ninths of his company, the balance shared by Peck and Brown, presumably three-ninths to the former partner and two ninths to the latter.8 Concerning total amounts paid out by Westinghouse, Tesla also referred to European patents, especially in England and Germany.9 Thus, it is hard to determine exactly how much Tesla received for his forty patents. Westinghouse was not only getting a simple induction motor but also a variety of synchronous and load-dependent motors as well as armatures, turbines, regulators, and dynamos. Tesla may have sold additional inventions later on in separate agreements; the value of his stock holding is also unclear.
A decade later, Tesla wrote to another financier, John Jacob Astor, that “Mr. Westinghouse agreed to pay for my rotating field patents about $500,000, and, despite…hard times, he has lived up to every cent of his obligation.”10 Since Tesla was trying to raise money from Astor, he may have exaggerated the sum. Two years earlier, Electrical Review noted that the Westinghouse annual report listed the purchase of the patents at $216,000,11 which is a figure that corresponds roughly to the Byllesby memorandum above, minus a few years’ worth of royalty payments. If this was the case, then Tesla probably received for himself about half that figure, or $100,000, the entire amount paid in installments during the years 1888-97.12
During the negotiations, Tesla agreed to move to Pittsburgh to help develop his motor. It is quite possible that he received no salary for his stay there, for he had a peculiar “principle, ever since I devoted myself to scientific laboratory research, never to accept fees or compensations for professional services.”13 Tesla had been paid for his patents and was receiving royalties (or payments against royalties), so there was an income. Further evidence that no additional daily or weekly compensation was received is implied in a signed agreement by George Westinghouse, dated July 27, 1889, substantiating that Tesla worked in Pittsburgh for one year and that during that time he was paid with “one hundred and fifty (150) shares of Capital Stock.” In return, Tesla promised to assign any patents to the Westinghouse Company which were directly related to the development of his induction motor patents. Other compensation was received from Westinghouse, however, for other contributions. For instance, when Tesla discovered that Bessemer steel created a vastly superior transformer than ones made out of soft iron, Tesla was paid approximately $10,000 for the idea.14
Tesla gave up his garden apartment in New York and moved into one of several hotels in Pittsburgh, including the Metropolitan, the Duquesne, and the Anderson.15 Hotel living would become a lifestyle which he never departed from.
His talk, just two months old, had already catapulted him to fame. “About the middle of August 1888 in the Westinghouse testing room at Pittsburgh,” Charles Scott, his assistant to be, remembered: “I had just come with the company and was assistant to E. Spooner who was running the dynamos testing room at night. He called me and said, ‘There comes Tesla.’
“I had heard of Tesla,” Scott continued, having “read [Tesla’s] paper on the polyphase induction motor which my former college professor had pronounced as a complete solution of the motor problem. And now I was to see Tesla himself.”
Fair-haired, with round, rimless glasses, Scott had only learned “that there was such a thing as alternating current” the summer before, in 1887. “I had…graduated from college two years earlier, and I wondered why I had not heard of such things from my professors.” His only introduction was an Electrical World article by William Stanley, which was “a fascinating…key to many mysteries.”16 Now, a year later, he was to meet Nikola Tesla, the man who so elegantly solved all the puzzles proposed by Stanley. “There he came, marching down the aisle with head and shoulders erect and with a twinkle in his eye. It was a great moment for me.”17
Scott, who later became an engineering professor at Yale University, was “Tesla’s wireman…in preparing and making tests. It was a splendid opportunity for a beginner, this coming in contact with a man of such eminence, rich in ideas, kindly and friendly in disposition. Tesla’s fertile imagination often constructed air castles which seemed prodigious. But, I doubt whether ever his extravagant expectations for the toy motor of those days measured up to actual realization…for the polyphase system which it inaugurated…exceed[ed] the wildest dreams of the early day[s].”18
Scott was not only Tesla’s assistant, as time went on and against the opinion of many colleagues, he became a champion of Tesla’s cause, a bearer of the truth, that is, that Tesla was the inventor of the induction motor. Another staunch supporter was Swiss immigrant Albert Schmid, coauthor of two AC patents with Tesla. Even though Westinghouse himself was also an ally, there was a bevy of other workers who tried seriously to strip Tesla of the crown. Major adversaries of the early period included Oliver Shallenberger, inventor of the AC meter, and his helpmate Lewis B. Stillwell, inventor of the Stillwell booster, which operated somewhat like the Tesla coil. At a later period, the key antagonist was Andrew W. Robertson, Westinghouse’s chief executive officer.
Yet another opponent was William Stanley, the first American to have ever successfully instituted an AC system in the country. Stanley had split off from the Westinghouse Corporation (circa 1892-93) in order to sell his own polyphase motors, which were clear patent infringements on the Tesla system. This position was supported by the courts a few years later, and Stanley was forced to purchase the Tesla motors from Westinghouse.19
To fathom the depth of hostility that existed within the Westinghouse camp against Tesla, one need only read Lewis B. Stillwell’s chapter on the history of alternating current, written forty years after the fact in a text entitled George Westinghouse Commemoration. Edited by Charles Scott, the book was widely distributed by the corporation and reissued in 1985. In the introduction to Stillwell’s chapter it is recounted
how Westinghouse brought the Gaulard-Gibbs system to America, how it was modified, and then given practical demonstrations by Stanley…and what has happened since.
In 1888 came Shallenberger’s brilliant invention of the induction meter. In the same year Nikola Tesla was granted his United States patents covering the polyphase motor and system. Westinghouse promptly secured the American rights. Tesla came to Pittsburgh to develop his motor. He made vain attempts to adapt it to the existing single phase, 133-cycle circuits…The obvious advantages [emphasis added] of direct connection of engines and generators called for a lower frequency…Two were selected as standard, namely 60 cycles for general use and 30 cycles for conversion into direct current.20
If we analyze the structure of this Stillwell quote, we note that although the topic sentence refers to Shallenberger, the entire paragraph is about Tesla. The word brilliant is used to describe an accidental discovery that a spring reacted to alternating currents21 when no adjective is used to describe the inventor of an entire power system!
Tesla refers to the same situation in his autobiography: “My system was based on the use of low frequency currents and the Westinghouse experts had adopted 133 cycles with the object of securing advantages in transformation [because their Gaulard-Gibbs system operated at that frequency]. They did not want to depart from the standard form of apparatus and my efforts had to be concentrated upon adapting the motor to their conditions.”22
With 120 power plants set up at 133 cycles per second, one can understand the predicament Tesla was placed in. Since Shallenberger’s meter was compatible with the prevailing 133-cycle single circuit, it appeared logical that Tesla’s polyphase motor could be made compatible as well.
In December 1888, Edison’s propaganda battle against Westinghouse peaked when Edison began to allow H. P. Brown (who was not an Edison employee) to come to his Menlo Park laboratory in order to electrocute various animals with AC. A few months earlier, Brown had experimented in electrocuting animals at the School of Mines, a division of Columbia University, in New York City. Brown, an electrical engineer who lived on Fifty-fourth Street, had become upset over the many accidental deaths of his colleagues. He had collected a list of over eighty casualties, and although many of the men died because of DC, Brown decided that AC was the real culprit. Within two years, Brown began to manufacture electric chairs for various prisons which he sold for $1,600. He also planned to get paid to be the executioner. During the summer of 1888 the New York Times reported that he “tortured and electrocuted a dog…First try[ing] continuous currents at a force of 300 volts…when the shock came the dog yelped…At 700 volts he broke his muzzle and nearly freed himself. He was tied again. At 1,000 his body contorted in pain…‘We will have less trouble when we try alternating current,’ Mr. Brown said. It was proposed that he put the dog out of its misery at once. This was done on an alternating current of 300 volts killing the beast.”23
A number of cities had adopted electrocution to rid the streets of unwanted canines, but the state of New York went a step further and set up a commission in 1886 “to report…on the most humane method of capital punishment.”24 Under the auspices of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, Brown arose as chief spokesman.
William Kemmler, a hooligan who had axed his mistress to death, became the test case for the use of electricity as a means of capital punishment.
Ostensibly, because the Westinghouse motors could produce the more deadly frequency, Brown surreptitiously purchased some working models in order to continue his gruesome experiments. Naturally, Westinghouse was upset over the devastating publicity. He and Tesla faced the possibility that the new AC polyphase system might never succeed in competition with existing AC and DC technologies, as both former systems required much lower voltages.
As Brown prepared to experiment with larger animals in order to assure the commission that electricity could kill criminals in a “humane” way, the Kemmler trial proceeded to question various electrical experts on the use of the Westinghouse currents for the electric chair.
Edison saw the controversy as a slick way to capitalize on the campaign against Westinghouse and the new Tesla technology. “Edison’s scheme for electrical execution of criminals is the best so far presented. He proposes to manacle the wrists, with chain connections, place…the culprit’s hands in a jar of water diluted with caustic potash and connected therein…to a thousand volts of alternating current…place the black cap on the condemned, and at a proper time close the circuit. The shock passes through both arms, the heart and the base of the brain, and death is instantaneous and painless.”25
Able to fuel his vendetta, Edison provided access to his famous laboratory for Brown to “Westinghouse” twenty-four dogs, which he purchased from the local children at twenty-five cents apiece. Edison also “Westinghoused” two calves and a horse!26
Perturbed, George Westinghouse wrote a letter of appeal to the New York Times which stated that AC was no more dangerous than DC, since people have been shocked and injured by DC as well.27 Westinghouse assured the public of the safety of his system; so Brown, also in the Times, challenged Westinghouse a few days later “to meet me in the presence of the competent electrical experts and take through his body the alternating current while I take through mine a continuous current. The A.C. must have not less than 300 alternations per second.”28
On July 23, 1889, Edison was questioned under oath by Kemmler’s attorney, W. Bourke Cockran, an Irish immigrant schooled in France, in his second term in the House of Representatives. Having gained a reputation locally for fighting Tammany Hall, Cockran had also achieved national recognition as the “Boy Orator” for taking on William Jennings Bryan’s presidential opponent, William McKinley in well-covered debates. Now he set his sights on tackling the Wizard of Menlo Park.29
QUESTION: Has Harold P. Brown any connection with yourself or the Edison Company?
EDISON: Not that I know of…
QUESTION: What would happen in case Kemmler should be kept on the chair several minutes with the current working on him?…Would he be carbonized?
EDISON: No. He would be mummyized…
QUESTION: This is your belief, not from knowledge?
EDISON: From belief. I never killed anybody…
“Finally, Mr. Cockran alluded to the rivalry between the Edison and the Westinghouse Companies and asked Mr. Edison if he loved Mr. Westinghouse as a brother. There was more than usual stillness, followed by Edison’s answer: ‘I think Mr. Westinghouse is a very able man.’…Mr. Cockran gave the ‘wizard’ a light from his cigar stump he had been chewing and dismissed him.”30
It would be another full year before the actual execution took place, but public opinion continued to run against the dangerous Westinghouse current. Although Edison did not author the electric-chair ideas, he did everything he could to help the cause, providing his staff, especially the ingenious A. E. Kennelly, later a professor at Harvard, to aid Brown; in addition, he lent his name.
Outcries began to appear in various periodicals concerning the “electrical executioners.” For example, the following editorial was published in a number of the papers and journals: “It is hard to conceive of a more horrible experiment than that which will be made on Kemmler…In a secret place, he will be compelled to go through a process of mental and moral, if not also, bodily torture and nobody can tell how long it will last.”31
This ominous passage actually was not severe enough, for the execution of Kemmler became a nightmare. The job was completely bungled when, after electrocution, “to the horror of all present, the chest began to heave, foam issued from the mouth, and the man gave every evidence of reviving.”32
The execution was likened to the work of barbarians and torturers and to scenes “worthy of the darkest chambers of the Inquisition of the 16th Century.” One eyewitness who was completely disgusted was Dr. Jenkins, who told the New York Times, “I would rather see ten hangings than one such execution as this.” Top electricians were also interviewed.
“I do not care to talk about it,” Westinghouse said. “It was a brutal affair. They could have done better with an axe.”
Even Edison was affected. “I have merely glanced over an account of Kemmler’s death,” he said, “and it is not pleasant reading…One mistake in my opinion was in leaving everything to the doctors…In the first place the hair on Kemmler’s head was non-conductive. Then the top of the head I do not believe a good place to give a shock…The better way is to place the hands in ajar of water…and to let the current be turned on there…I think when the next man is placed in the chair to suffer the death penalty that death will be accomplished instantly and without the scenes at Auburn today.”33
Although Westinghouse tried to distance himself from the nefarious deeds, his company still suffered greater damage than Edison’s from a publicity standpoint because it was AC that was used to electrocute Kemmler. Mass hysteria threatened to overpower the attempt to institute the new Tesla AC invention, let alone the prevailing Gaulard-Gibbs AC system.
Tesla realized that eventually the company would have to come around to the lower frequencies if they wanted to use his creation, but to his shock, “in 1890, the induction motor work was abandoned.”34
Westinghouse let it be known that his hands were tied, that his backers would not continue throwing tens of thousands of dollars away on futile research. They had given Tesla a fair chance to alter his equipment to satisfy the needs of the company. It seemed folly to destroy all prevailing equipment to satisfy the untried requirements of this new technology. Furthermore, they were against the idea of paying royalties should the motor eventually prove profitable. Enough was enough.
In a quandary, Tesla negotiated with Westinghouse a compromise solution. He would abandon the royalty clause of the contract if Westinghouse promised to commit his workers once again to the invention.
Westinghouse was in a corner. He knew that he had to curtail all work on the motor at this time to satisfy the tide of hostility that was rising against Tesla. He also realized that the invention was too important, and he believed that eventually a solution would be found. No one knows for sure exactly what happened, but it appears that Westinghouse made a tacit commitment to Tesla that he would get the company to resume work on the motor if Tesla removed the $2.50-per-watt royalty clause in the contract. If the motor came on the market and the polyphase system was adopted, the yearly figures cited above, as payments against royalties (worth approximately $255,000), would be honored instead.
Tesla was aware of the historical importance of his invention. He realized that it would alter the world beneficially in measurable ways. His motor, for instance, would provide an inexpensive replacement for potentially hundreds of thousands of hours of manual labor. At the same time, his creation would carve his name deep into the history books, alongside such heroes as Archimedes and Faraday. Moreover, he knew that his system was the most efficient, that it was fundamental, and that, if adopted, it would prevail. He also wanted very much to resume his preferred path of pioneer inventor.
Tesla was not counting out debits and credits on a balance sheet; rather, he viewed his partnership with Westinghouse in a more flexible way. He was also negotiating in good faith and assumed that if he lightened the potential financial burden, the company would somehow reciprocate. By offering goodwill, he was hoping to reap what he had sown. Speaking of Westinghouse many years later, Tesla said: “George Westinghouse was, in my opinion, the only man on the globe who could take my alternating current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power. He was a pioneer of imposing stature and one of the world’s noblemen.”35
This, however, was a public statement; his private feelings were more complex. It is clear from reading through decades of letters to the corporation that Tesla maintained a close relationship with Westinghouse. Yet often there were undercurrents of resentment due mainly to lack of appreciation by the Westinghouse concern of Tesla’s sacrifice and continuing contribution to the company. Tesla was also upset because the full scope of his patents became simplified and implications arose to suggest that he merely invented an induction motor and not an entire power system.
Finally, after nearly two years of inactivity, the Westinghouse people resumed their efforts to make the Tesla motor practicable. In 1891, Benjamin Lamme, a portly, easygoing, but studious youngster, began to reexamine Tesla’s patents and Tesla and Scott’s experimental motors. After conversing with Tesla in New York and talking over the matter with Scott, Lamme approached his overseers with a plan to resume work on the motor.
Lamme realized that Tesla had “exhausted all the possibilities” of trying to adapt his motor to the higher frequencies and that he was forced to “return to [the] low frequencies…insist[ing] on the superiority of his polyphase system.”36 This idea, as stated above, was rejected—most likely by Shallenberger and Stillwell. Lamme, as the junior engineer, had to proceed carefully. With Scott’s aid, he “finally obtained permission” to take up the work on his own, although there is little doubt that a number of officials opposed the idea. “By this time, the 60-cycle system was coming in quite rapidly,” Lamme said, so he suggested this frequency to the staff. Shallenberger “lost his temper and talked some plain-language to me.” No doubt he said that there would be no possible way that they would utilize the lower frequencies. “This looked pretty serious to me, who as a mere boy in the test room, had got into a row with a chief technical authority of the company. I explained my situation to Mr. Schmid who simply laughed about it…However, somewhat to my surprise, Mr. Shallenberger always took my part, thereafter…This, of course, gave me a larger idea of the man himself; and I have always looked back with the greatest pleasure to my acquaintanceship with such a man.”
What happened, most likely, is that Schmid, along with Scott, went behind the scenes and explained to Shallenberger that here was their opportunity to finally make use of the motor without giving any more credit to Tesla. They would simply let it be known that a new and brilliant engineer working at the company had “discovered” the efficiencies of lower frequencies, and so the credit would go to Lamme. No wonder Schmid laughed about it. With a way out, Shallenberger reversed himself and patted Lamme on the back, Lamme somewhat naively concluding that he built “the first induction motor…which bears any close example to the modern type…I [also]…designed the great generators for Niagara which were without precedent. They were marvels of engineering achievement.”37 Having rediscovered what Tesla had suggested all along, Lamme often made it seem as though he were the originator of the idea.
Uneducated readers, left with incomplete source materials, of which there are many, were forced to conclude that when it comes to the AC polyphase system, it was “that versatile genius B. G. Lamme, [who was the]…pillar of the Westinghouse company” who made it possible.38 But people who read Scott carefully knew the truth: “Strenuous efforts to adapt the Tesla motor to [the prevailing] circuit were in vain. The little motor insisted in getting what it wanted, and the mountain came to Mohamet.”39