He came to America with four cents in his pocket, a packet of poems he had written himself, a drawing of a flying machine he had copied from a book in the library at Graz, a letter of introduction from Charles Batchelor to Thomas Edison, and the small leather Aperture notebook in the inside pocket of his coat.
He had, in the lining of his coat, a silver thaler he did not count as money because it was not going to be spent. It was going to be buried, if he lived long enough, in the foundation of a laboratory. He did not yet know where.
The steamship was the SS Saturnia, Hamburg-American line. He had come steerage from Le Havre. He had spent the last eight days of the voyage in a hammock slung above a sick Moravian who had, at intervals of perhaps two hours, vomited quietly over the side of his own hammock and onto the floor of the cabin below. Tesla had held his breath for eight days. He had read and re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — a new volume, sent to him by Batchelor as a parting gift, which Batchelor had not known was the second novel by the man whose first novel had brought Tesla back from the dead. He did not tell Batchelor. He had simply accepted the book. He had held it against his chest for eight nights while the Moravian vomited, and on the morning of the ninth day, when the ship came up the Narrows into New York Harbor through a thin June fog and the Statue of Liberty — not yet in place; only her copper head, displayed the year before at the Philadelphia Exhibition, had been returned to France for reassembly — was absent from the skyline she was going to occupy two years later, Tesla had put Huck Finn into his valise and had walked up onto the deck with his coat collar turned.
The harbor smelled of coal smoke and fish and the particular wet-rope smell of ships. The skyline was smaller than he had expected. It had seemed to him, across the Atlantic, that New York would be a city of mountains. It was not. It was a city of towers, certainly — spires, domes, a tall white obelisk of a building on the southern tip of the island that he later learned was the Trinity Church — but beside the tall things were many low things, warehouses, wharves, taverns, chandleries, and above everything a grey veil of smoke that did not, in any wind, quite dissipate. He stood at the rail. He counted the ships in the harbor. There were forty-one of them visible, tall and short, steam and sail. Forty-one was a prime number. He did not like prime numbers on the day of an arrival. He counted again, including a small tug he had not seen the first time, which brought the number to forty-two. Forty-two was six times seven, which was three times fourteen, which was acceptable.
When he was cleared through the dock inspector at Castle Garden the inspector — a bored Irishman with a pomaded mustache and a tin of snuff — had read Batchelor's letter with the air of a man reading the label on a bottle he does not intend to buy, and had asked Tesla his purpose.
"I intend," Tesla said, and heard his own accent in the air of the shed for the first time in this country, and rather liked it, "to perfect the transmission of force."
"Transmission of force," said the inspector. He looked at Tesla for perhaps two seconds. Then he looked down at the letter. Then he stamped it. "Welcome to the United States, Mr. Tesla. Next."
He stepped out of the shed into the morning. A gull landed on a bollard ten feet from him and tilted its head at him and did not move. He looked at the gull. He felt — and this was not a feeling he had expected at the moment of arrival; he had expected something more operatic — he felt at home. Not in the harbor, not in the city, not in the country, none of which he knew. He felt at home in a way that had to do with the grey of the light and the smell of the wet rope and the gull that had landed and not flown. He felt as though the door, wherever it was in this country, had turned toward him.
He asked a porter for the address of the Edison Machine Works.
The porter said, "Goerck Street, mister. Down the East Side. Two-bit cab'll take you. You hiring?"
"I have been hired."
"Edison's, eh?"
"Edison's."
The porter spat into the gutter, not maliciously, and told him to take the Third Avenue cars north to Fourteenth Street and then walk east. Tesla thanked him. He did not take a cab. A cab was twenty-five cents. He had four. He walked.
It took him the better part of the morning. He walked uptown along the Bowery and then east through streets whose names he did not know and whose languages he half did — German on one block, Yiddish on the next, Italian two blocks after — and by noon he was at the iron gate of the Edison Machine Works on Goerck Street, and he was shown in, and he was given a wooden stool beside a drafting bench in the corner of a shop floor so loud that he could not, for the first ten minutes of his employment, hear what was said to him.
The shop was the inside of an iron lung. Belts overhead. Forges along the far wall. Six hundred men. Soot, wet on the floors, black on the ceiling beams. The smell of hot oil and hot metal and the sweat of men who had not gone home in two days.
A manager in a soft collar came to him in the middle of the afternoon and introduced himself as Mr. Samuel Insull.
"You're the Paris man. The Batchelor man."
"I am Tesla."
"Do what you're given, Tesla."
He did what he was given.
That evening, at eleven, a runner came for him at his drafting bench. The runner was a boy of fourteen with a snub nose. "Mr. Insull says come at once. There's a steamship."
He came.
The steamship was the SS Oregon, of the Cunard line, the fastest transatlantic passenger steamer then in service. She was due to sail for Liverpool the following morning and both of her electric lighting dynamos had burned out in the course of the previous voyage. The Edison Machine Works had installed those dynamos eighteen months before. The Edison Machine Works had, therefore, a contractual obligation to repair them within twelve hours, and it was now approximately ten.
The dynamos were in the hold. They could not be removed — the superstructure of the ship had been built around them. Whatever was done had to be done in the hold, in the dark, at night, with the ship's coal bunkers on one side of the bulkhead and the crew's berths on the other.
Edison — so Insull's runner reported, breathless, on the walk to the pier — was furious. Edison had sent three men to the Oregon already. None had gotten anywhere. The sailing would be missed. The sailing being missed was going to cost the Machine Works three thousand dollars in penalty and, worse, the Cunard contract.
"Can you do it?" said Insull, at the gangway of the Oregon in the gaslight.
Tesla, who had not eaten since breakfast, said: "I will need a ladder, a set of files, a coil of insulated wire, an amperemeter, a lamp, and coffee."
"Coffee?"
"Coffee."
He did it in one night.
He went into the hold at a quarter to twelve. The ship's engineer, a Scot named Harrold, brought him down the companionway by lantern and showed him the two dead dynamos and left him there with three sailors to fetch and carry. He worked by lantern. The dynamos were — as he had suspected from the way Insull had described the failure — both afflicted with the same issue: the commutator brushes had been improperly dressed at installation, and eighteen months of arc had burned a groove in each of the commutator rings that prevented contact at the low-voltage crossover. It was not a difficult problem. It was, however, a problem that no man could address who had not been taught to mend dynamos by hand in the coffeehouses of Prague at three in the morning, with a candle and a set of files pilfered from the university workshop.
He was taught. He mended.
By five in the morning both dynamos were spinning. The ship's engineer threw the main switch, and one hundred and twenty lamps — fore to aft, stem to stern, up the grand staircase, along the promenade deck — came on at once, yellow as sunrise, and the sailors on the gangway cheered, and Harrold shook Tesla's hand with both of his and said, in the Scots English Tesla would not entirely parse for another four years, "Laddie, I dinnae ken what ye are, but we're sailing."
Tesla came up on deck at six.
The deck of the Oregon at six was the color of dry bone. The sky over Brooklyn was the color of an oyster shell. The tide was running out. A gull was on the rail. Tesla stood with the gull for a moment, and then he walked down the gangway and up the pier and out through the dock gate and turned north on Tenth Avenue to begin the long walk to Goerck Street.
He had not gone three blocks when he stopped.
He stopped because on the opposite pavement, in the early light, walking south, with two men beside him — one of them Charles Batchelor, in a brown frock coat, his mustache catching the morning — was a man he had never seen before whose face he knew as he knew the face on a coin.
The man was short, broad-shouldered, stout around the waist. He wore a grey suit that did not fit him. His hair had begun to grey at the temples. He had a stub of cigar in his teeth. One of his ears was cocked in that distinctive way a man's ear is cocked who has been told, a decade before, that he is deaf in it and has ceased entirely to trust it.
Edison.
Batchelor saw Tesla first. Batchelor stopped, tapped Edison on the arm, and pointed. Edison paused mid-stride.
"Here," said Edison, loud enough for the whole of Tenth Avenue to hear, "is our Parisian running around in the night."
The three of them crossed the avenue toward him. Tesla waited on the pavement. He felt, as he waited, the Aperture notebook in its inside pocket against his chest, and he thought: This is the man I have crossed an ocean to meet. This is the man I have studied. This is the man whose money I need. This is the man who will, one day, become small.
He held out his hand.
Edison did not take it. Edison did not shake hands. Edison nodded.
"Mr. Edison," Tesla said.
"Mr. Tesla. Batchelor's made noise about you."
"He is very kind."
"He is not. He is a hard Yorkshireman who makes noise about no one. Where are you coming from."
"The Oregon."
Edison stopped chewing his cigar.
Batchelor, beside him, smiled.
"The dynamos," said Edison.
"Both are running. She will sail on time."
Edison looked at Tesla for what was, perhaps, the first long look of the rest of both their lives. It was not a warm look. It was not unfriendly, either. It was the look of an auctioneer sizing a horse: What is in you. How much of it. For how long.
Then Edison took the cigar from his mouth and said, "Batchelor."
"Tom."
"This is a damned good man."
Batchelor said, "I know, Tom."
Edison put the cigar back in his mouth. He walked past Tesla, without taking his hand. He said, over his shoulder, "Come to Goerck at ten. We'll find something for you."
That was the whole of it.
Tesla watched him go. Batchelor lingered a moment, touched his hat to Tesla, said quietly, "Well done, Nikola," and followed. The third man — whom Tesla later learned was a bookkeeper named Jamieson, of no consequence — went after Batchelor.
Tesla stood alone on Tenth Avenue in the white June morning with his coat collar turned up and four cents in his pocket, and he thought, I will have to be careful with him. He will not understand. He is a shopkeeper.
And he thought, I have crossed the ocean. I am here. The door, here, is mine.
He walked to Goerck Street. He arrived at the gate at ten. Insull gave him a bench of his own in the dynamo shop. By the following week he had a cot in a boarding house on Fourth Street and a weekly wage of eighteen dollars and, for the first time in a year, a hot dinner on Sundays.
He began, almost at once, to build the coil.
