He worked, in his official capacity, on the installation of DC power stations in the first- and second-class hotels of Manhattan. It was simple, tedious work. He was promoted to supervising engineer of the street-lamp division within six weeks. Insull doubled his wage to twenty-five dollars a week. Edison, when they passed each other on the shop floor, would nod, or grunt, or say nothing.
Tesla did his regular hours from ten-thirty in the morning until five in the afternoon. He ate at the bench, from a tin pail a landlady on Fourth Street packed for him. He left at five to walk the length of Manhattan — up Broadway, west on Twenty-Third, down the Hudson — to return by eleven to Goerck Street and enter the shop by the side door, where the night watchman had orders to let him in, and to spend the hours between eleven and four in the morning on his own coil.
The night watchman was a Hungarian named Henrik Szabó. He was fifty-two. He had come to America in 1867, at the end of the Civil War, and had worked since as a hod-carrier, a horse-car driver, a chairmaker, a night watchman at two warehouses and now the Machine Works. He had a wife, Ilona, who kept a boarding house in the Bloomingdale district. He had three grown sons and a daughter still at home who was twelve. The daughter, whose name was Erzsi, had a harelip that the family could not afford to have corrected. Henrik was saving.
He was saving one dollar and eighty cents a week. At that rate, the surgery — which had been quoted to him at forty dollars by a doctor on East Fourteenth Street — was four months away.
Tesla had not asked these things. Henrik had told him. Henrik told him, over a small enameled cup of coffee at one in the morning, during the ten minutes each night when Tesla permitted himself to not be working. Henrik had a wife, sons, a daughter with a harelip, a worry about the surgeon on Fourteenth Street who might or might not be honest. Henrik had a fondness for bean soup that his wife made in winter with ham hocks and paprika, and a love of a particular Hungarian poet — Sándor Petőfi — whose verses Henrik could still recite, though he had not lived in Hungary in twenty years, with the precision of a man who had once, in his teens, been a schoolmaster.
Tesla had listened to all of this over three weeks of one-in-the-morning coffees. He had liked Henrik. He had, in fact, liked Henrik very much. Henrik was the first person Tesla had spoken to in America, apart from landladies and shop managers, who had asked him a second question.
On the fourth of November, 1884, at eleven minutes past one in the morning, Tesla set down his small tin cup on the corner of the coil he had been winding since August, and he looked at Henrik Szabó across the bench, and he said:
"Henrik. I have a favor."
Henrik, who was sitting on an empty crate with his coat on his lap, said, "Yes, Mr. Tesla."
"I have finished a small experiment."
"The spinning thing?"
"The spinning thing is another experiment. This is not the spinning thing. This is — a test of grounding."
"Grounding."
"I need to know whether a particular path through the floor conducts as I have calculated. I have placed a brass plate, there" — he pointed to the place on the shop floor where, for four nights running, he had been fitting a small brass plate into a cutaway in the boards — "and I need, when I throw this switch, for a man to be standing on the plate. For a moment. Only one moment. To complete the path."
Henrik looked at the plate. It was six inches square, polished, set flush.
"Is it dangerous."
"It is not dangerous," Tesla said, and the words came out of his mouth and hung in the air of the shop and did not, because he had spoken them, become true.
Henrik considered. Henrik had, in the course of his fifty-two years, stood on many things at the direction of many men, and had been, on the whole, un-killed by it. He trusted Tesla. He was fond of Tesla. Tesla brought him, on cold nights, a small flask of Slivovitz he had bought from a Jewish merchant on Orchard Street, which Henrik shared, three swallows to Tesla's one. Tesla had, the previous week, given him seven dollars because he had asked Henrik the figure for Erzsi's surgery and Henrik had told him, and Tesla had put the seven dollars on the bench and said, A small advance. Pay me from your winter wage. Henrik had accepted because refusing would have offended a man who had been gracious.
Henrik trusted Tesla. Henrik rose.
He stepped onto the brass plate.
Tesla looked at him.
He had prepared for this moment for twenty-three years. He had prepared for it without knowing, in most of those years, that he was preparing. He had prepared for it in the attic on rue des Francs-Bourgeois and he had prepared for it in the boarding house on Fourth Street. He had, over the summer of 1884, wound a coil of asymmetric geometry, and he had fitted a brass plate into a cutaway, and he had run a copper wire down through the floor into the soil beneath Goerck Street, and he had connected the coil to a dynamo of his own construction that ran on a battery of Leclanché cells he had built up over three nights in October, and he had, in the two weeks prior, calibrated the yield of the apparatus against a succession of objects on the plate — a lump of iron, a bowl of water, a sheaf of paper, a dead pigeon he had bought for ten cents from a boy on Houston Street.
The iron had gone.
The water had gone. The bowl had remained.
The paper had gone.
The pigeon — this was important; this was the first living thing he had put on the plate — had gone.
All of them: gone. Not burned, not scattered, not vaporized in any of the ordinary senses. Gone as Dane had gone. Gone into the cold place behind the door.
He had calculated the yield necessary for a man. He had calculated it three times. He had the dial set. He had Henrik on the plate.
Henrik said, softly, in Hungarian — which Tesla had not said he understood, and which Henrik believed he did not — "Erzsi, édes lányom, csak egy pillanat." Erzsi, sweet daughter, just a moment. It was a small prayer. It was the prayer of a father, standing alone at the grocer's counter, preparing to ask for something he could not afford.
Tesla, who had enough Hungarian to understand, looked at Henrik Szabó.
He did not throw the switch.
He did not throw the switch.
He stood with his hand on the knife switch and he looked at Henrik Szabó and he did not throw it.
It was perhaps eleven seconds. It was perhaps twenty. It was, in any event, long enough that Henrik, on the plate, began to shift his weight, and to say, "Mr. Tesla, is something — "
"Henrik," Tesla said.
"Yes."
"Step off the plate."
Henrik stepped off.
"Henrik. I have made an error in my calculation. The — the test will not be safe tonight. I will have to recalibrate. Please. Sit down."
Henrik sat down.
Tesla drew the knife switch up. He disconnected the battery with hands that were not quite steady. He crossed to where Henrik sat, and he reached into his coat, and he took out his purse, and he counted into his palm thirty-three dollars in coins and small bills, and he placed the money on the bench beside Henrik's crate.
"Erzsi," he said, "should have her surgery this month. Not in the spring. Take this. It is not a loan. You are not to mention it. You are not to mention — any of what has happened tonight. You will not speak of the plate. You will not speak of me standing here with my hand on the switch. You will not speak of it to Ilona, you will not speak of it to your sons, you will not speak of it to Erzsi. Do you understand me."
Henrik, whose English was not always equal to what was said to him, understood perfectly.
"Mr. Tesla," he said, "I will not."
"Swear it."
"On my daughter."
"Good."
Tesla stood. He looked at the bench. At the coil. At the brass plate, which was still set flush in the floor, and which he would, over the course of the next two nights, lift and carry in pieces out of the shop and down to the East River and throw, piece by piece, off the Grand Street pier. He would break up the coil with a hammer. He would put the broken pieces into a sack and he would carry the sack, after his shift on the twelfth of November, across the Brooklyn Bridge — which had opened in May of the previous year, and which he had never crossed — and he would drop the sack into the water from the midpoint of the span at four in the morning, and he would walk back to Manhattan, and he would, on the first of December, write in his diary across two pages the five words: Good by to the Edison Machine Works.
None of which he had, yet, decided.
What he had decided was smaller than any of that.
He had decided, standing in the shop with his hand on the knife switch and a Hungarian night watchman on a brass plate six inches square praying softly to his harelipped daughter, that he was not going to open the door in the Edison Machine Works in New York in 1884 with the body of Henrik Szabó.
He had not decided anything else.
He had not decided, for instance, that he was never going to open the door at all.
He had, in particular, not decided the Hoff family in their ranch house outside Colorado Springs in July of 1899.
But he had decided, on the fourth of November, 1884, not Henrik.
And that, he understood on the long walk back to Fourth Street in the grey hour before dawn with the broken pieces of coil rattling in the burlap sack over his shoulder, was not nothing.
That was not nothing at all.