Nine years later, Nikola Tesla was twenty-five years old and walking with his friend Anthony Szigeti along the gravel path of a park in a city that was not his.
The city was Budapest. He had come to Budapest eight months before, on the advice of a cousin, to take a position at the Central Telegraph Office. The position had, in the event, dissolved before he had arrived — the office had not been built yet; the office, in fact, was going to take another three years to be built — and Tesla, who had arrived in the city with his suitcase and his last fifteen gulden and no Hungarian, had found himself walking down the Andrássy út asking doorman after doorman, in German, whether anyone in the building knew an engineer.
By the end of the week he had found one: a man named Ferenc Puskás, who was building the first telephone exchange in Europe that was not in Boston. Puskás had hired him at once. Tesla had been doing, for six months, the work of drawing wiring schemes. He had been very good at it. He had, within three months, been promoted to chief electrician. He had also, in the same six months, been going mad.
The madness had not been dramatic. It had not been the madness of Graz, the madness of 1878 when he had lost his Military Frontier scholarship after four semesters and had gambled away his father's savings and had walked out of the city at night on foot with a silver thaler sewn into the lining of his coat. That had been a madness of excess. The madness in Budapest was a madness of arrest. He had been stuck. For four years he had been stuck on the same problem, and the problem — which was the problem of how to make a motor that would run on alternating current — had been following him from city to city like a dog he could not feed and could not drive off.
The problem was this:
Every motor in the world, in February of 1882, ran on direct current. Direct current ran in one direction, from a battery or a dynamo's commutator, along a wire, through the motor's armature, and back. The motor turned because a set of mechanical brushes — a commutator — reversed the current's path inside the motor itself, producing the magnetic alternation that made the motor go around. Commutators were troublesome. Commutators sparked. Commutators wore out. Commutators limited the voltage one could run through the motor, because at high voltages they sprayed fire like a Catherine wheel.
Alternating current — which could travel at high voltage along a wire over long distances, and could then be stepped down by a transformer at its destination — could not, in February 1882, be made to run a motor. Every engineer in Europe agreed on this. Every engineer in Europe was wrong. Tesla knew they were wrong. He had known it since Graz, where his professor, a Bavarian named Poeschl, had demonstrated to the class a new DC motor from Paris and had said, in Poeschl's absolutely satisfied way, This, gentlemen, is as far as we will go. Alternating current is a dead end. You may put it from your minds.
Tesla had said, from the back of the lecture hall, with the mild confidence of a nineteen-year-old whose hand had shot up before his judgment had caught up with it, "Professor, I think that is not correct."
Poeschl had looked at him across twenty rows of desks.
"Tesla," Poeschl had said, "you are the best student I have. You are also impertinent. Why do you say it is not correct."
Tesla had said, "Because it is not. There is a way to make the alternation itself do the work of the commutator. There is no need for a commutator. There is a way. I do not yet see it. But there is a way."
Poeschl had smiled — and it was not, Tesla understood at twenty-five, a cruel smile; it was a tired smile — and had said, "Tesla. You are going to be a great inventor. But you will not invent this thing. No one will. It is like a perpetual motion machine. It is a paradox."
The class had laughed. Poeschl had gone on with the lecture. And Tesla — the best student I have — had put his head down onto the desk, and had not taken it up again until the bell.
That was 1875. It was now 1882. In the seven years between, not a day had passed on which he had not thought about the thing Poeschl had said could not exist. He had thought about it in the bank of the Maribor Drava, where he had dug for a summer. He had thought about it in the coffeehouse in Prague where he had read Schopenhauer and Descartes. He had thought about it in the offices of Continental Edison in Paris — where, Batchelor having not yet noticed him, he had spent nights drawing diagrams on the backs of contracts. He had thought about it in Budapest, on his single bed in his single room above a laundress, at four o'clock in the morning, when the gas lamps outside his window had become the two poles of an armature and every cab horse on the Erzsébet körút had become a rotor.
He was going mad from it.
Szigeti, his friend, who was also an engineer at the telephone exchange and who was also a Serb and who was, unlike Tesla, a man who could enjoy a meal, had noticed. Szigeti had insisted, that afternoon, on a walk. It was February. It had been a hard winter. The Városliget was raw, grey, almost empty. Two boys were skating on the frozen pond. An old man was feeding pigeons from a pocket of seed. The sky over the city was the color of the underside of a tin plate.
Szigeti walked with his hands behind his back.
"Nikola," he said, "you are going to walk yourself to death."
"I am not."
"You are. Look at you. You have not eaten in two days."
"I have."
"What did you eat."
"I had — I had tea."
"Tea is not food."
"Tea, and a biscuit."
"Biscuit is not food."
Tesla waved this off. "Anthony, I have almost got it."
"You have almost got it. You have almost had it for seven years. Seven years, Nikola. You are a boy who has been promised a horse for seven years by a father who does not have a horse to give."
Tesla stopped on the path.
Szigeti, three steps ahead, turned.
"Anthony," said Tesla. "Recite with me."
Szigeti sighed. He knew what was coming. They had done it before, many times, in many parks in many cities. It was Tesla's particular therapy, the only one that ever settled him. He required that Szigeti, who had German by education but who did not love the language the way Tesla loved it, recite Goethe's Faust with him from memory, in alternating lines, until Tesla's mind had gone back into its proper orbit.
"Which passage," said Szigeti.
"The sunset."
Szigeti, whose coat was not warm enough, sighed again and nodded.
Tesla began:
Sieh, wie im Abendsonnestrahl
Szigeti:
Die grünumgebnen Hütten schimmern!
Tesla:
Sie rückt und weicht, der Tag ist überlebt.
Szigeti:
Dort eilt sie hin und fördert neues Leben.
They walked. The path curved. The pigeons at the old man's feet startled and rose. Tesla watched them rise. A wheel of grey wings, lifting as one.
Tesla recited, his voice lifting with the birds:
O daß kein Flügel mich vom Boden hebt,
Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben!
Oh, that no wing can lift me from the ground, after her and always after to strive.
And I would see beneath me, in eternal evening rays, the quiet world at my feet, every height in flame, every valley still, the silver brook to golden rivers flow.
He stopped walking.
He stopped reciting.
It was not because Szigeti, who was supposed to take the next line, had failed to take it. Szigeti had not failed. Szigeti was taking it, doggedly, behind him. Tesla did not hear him. Tesla had stopped walking because in the sunset light of four o'clock on a February afternoon in Budapest, in a park that was not his, in a country that was not his, in a life that had — for seven years — been waiting for a thing which Professor Poeschl of Graz had told him was a paradox —
— he saw the motor.
He saw it whole.
He saw it the way a man who has been staring at a face through a rain-streaked window sees the face when the rain suddenly stops. It was all at once and it was all of it. There were two poles. There were four poles. There were any number of poles. The current entered them in phases — two phases, or three, or more — and the magnetic fields of the poles rose and fell and rotated, not in matter, but in the air inside the armature, and the armature fell into step with the rotating field, and the armature turned, and there was no commutator. There was no commutator, because there was nothing in the motor that needed commutating. The alternation of the current, which was a problem to DC engineers, was the solution. The alternation was itself the commutator. The alternation was a commutator that lived in the field and did not wear out.
He saw it, complete, perfect, and simple.
He bent down in the path, in the gravel, and he picked up a stick.
He drew the motor in the gravel. He drew the four poles. He drew the phases — two, he chose, because two was simpler for illustration. He drew the rotor. He drew the rotating field with arrows and, where the arrows caught up with each other in overlap, small X marks.
Szigeti had stopped reciting. Szigeti stood behind him on the path.
Szigeti, who was not a great engineer but who was a good one, looked at what Tesla had drawn.
"Nikola," Szigeti said.
Tesla was breathing like a man who had run.
"Nikola. You have it."
"I have it."
"You have it."
"I have it, Anthony."
Szigeti, who was a demonstrative man, and who was also a cold man in a thin coat in a February park, did what Szigeti did at the great moments of their friendship. He punched Tesla in the shoulder. Not hard. A friend's punch. A punch of recognition.
Tesla did not feel it.
He was looking at the drawing in the gravel.
And it was here — in this moment, in this park, in this sunset, in his twenty-sixth year — that Nikola Tesla had the second of the two recognitions that would form the remainder of his life. The first had been at five, in the field behind the parsonage, when he had understood that a door existed. The second was now.
The motor in the gravel was the door.
Not a door like the one he had seen in the field. A smaller door. A door the size of an armature. A door made not of air but of rotating magnetic field. A door that did not open into the cold place where Dane had gone. A door that opened only a little, and only to the forces that flowed inside metal — a door small enough and specific enough that it could be leaned against, domesticated, set to work turning a spindle.
But it was a door. He saw it with absolute clarity. Every motor he had ever studied — every motor ever built — had been a door. Some doors opened a little and some opened more. His was not the first motor. His was only the first motor that knew it was a door, and therefore the first motor that could be opened — scaled up, opened wider — to the point at which a door could be a door again, full size, and a mare and her rider could go through.
The gravel drawing blurred. He blinked. He saw, for an instant, Dane's face in it — five years old, laughing, mid-canter — and he reached down and scrubbed the drawing out with the edge of his boot.
"Nikola," said Szigeti, suddenly alarmed. "What are you doing. You had it."
"I have it," said Tesla. "I have it here." He touched his forehead. "Anthony. I do not need the drawing."
"You will forget."
"I will not forget. I will never forget. Anthony."
Szigeti looked at his friend.
Tesla was standing in the gravel with his boot on the place where the drawing had been, and he was smiling.
It was a smile Szigeti had not seen before. It was not the gaunt, slight, private smile Tesla had when a problem yielded. It was a larger smile. It reached his eyes. It was a smile almost of relief. It was the smile of a man who, after seven years of walking in a circle, has been shown the center of the circle and has understood that the circle is a smaller thing than he thought.
"Anthony," Tesla said, "I am going to America."
"You are going to America."
"I am going to America. Because there is a man there. There is a man in America named Edison. And Edison is — he is wrong, Anthony, he is almost entirely wrong, but he has money, and he has light, and he has factories, and I will need all three."
"Nikola, you have never been to America."
"Exactly."
Szigeti laughed. He could not help it.
They walked back along the path, arm in arm, reciting. It was Szigeti's turn for the next line of the Faust, and Szigeti took it:
Ein schöner Traum, indessen sie entweicht.
A lovely dream, meanwhile, she slips away.
And Tesla, laughing now, took the line:
Ach! zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht
Kein körperlicher Flügel sich gesellen.
Alas, to the wings of the spirit, no bodily wing will easily be joined.
The pigeons, over the pond, turned in the grey sky and did not come down.