Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah Read Online Free PDF Page A

rules of hygiene’, but enquired what the great man’s diet consisted of. ‘You mean to make me so all-fired smart?’ said Edison. Tesla nodded.
    Edison replied, perhaps in jest, that he ate a daily regimen of Welsh Rarebit as ‘it’s the only breakfast guaranteed to renew one’s mental faculties after the long vigils of toil’. Tesla began to do the same despite a protesting stomach. But his admiration was undiminished. Tesla wrote in his autobiography:
    I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much. I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, spent my best years in libraries reading all sorts of stuff that fell into my hands, from Newton’s Principia to the novels of Paul de Kock, and felt that most of my life had been squandered.
    The admiration was mutual. According to Tesla, Edison told him: ‘I have had many hard-working assistants, but you take the cake.’
    However, Tesla still took the time to enjoy a good meal – the table d’hôte at a restaurant in Greenwich Village with a bottle of red wine – and play billiards, a game he had mastered as a student. According to Edison’s personal secretary Alfred O. Tate: ‘He played a beautiful game. He was not a high scorer but his cushion shots displayed a skill equal to that of a professional exponent of this art.’
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    Avoiding the AC Subject
    Tesla set about redesigning Edison’s dynamos, replacing their long magnets with more efficient short cores, claiming that they gave three times the output for the same amount of iron. He kept quiet about his AC motor though, perhaps recalling the indifference of Edison’s men in Paris. Once, though, he was tempted to bring up the subject with Edison himself.
    â€˜It was on Coney Island,’ he said, ‘and just about as I was going to explain it to him, someone came and shook hands with Edison. That evening, when I came home, I had a fever and my resolve rose up again not to speak freely about it to other people.’ Otherwise Tesla and Edison got on well enough. Tesla told the tale of visiting Edison’s office at 65 Fifth Avenue, when the great man was playing a game guessing weights.
    â€˜Edison felt me all over and said: “Tesla weighs 152 pounds to the ounce” – and he guessed it exactly,’ Tesla recalled. He asked how Edison could guess his weight so accurately and was told: ‘He was employed for a long time in a Chicago slaughter house where he weighed thousands of hogs every day.’
    Tesla would occasionally dine with Edison, Batchelor and others of the company’s top brass in a restaurant across the road from the showroom at 65 Fifth Avenue where they would swap stories and tell jokes. Afterwards they would go to a billiard room where Tesla would impress them with his bank shots and his vision of the future.
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    Arc Lighting
    Companies that had grown up making arc lights were now moving into incandescent lighting , robbing Edison of valuable contracts. He struck back by going into arc lighting which was more suitable for street lighting or illuminating large spaces. He filed an arc-lamp patent in June 1884 and left Tesla to work out the details. Tesla completed the job, but his system was shelved when Edison made a deal with a dedicated arc-lighting company and, by then, larger incandescent bulbs suitable for lighting larger spaces had been developed. Tesla felt cheated.
    â€˜The manager had promised me $50,000,’ he wrote, ‘but when I demanded payment, he merely laughed, saying “You are still a Parisian! When you become a fully-fledged American, you will appreciate an American joke.”’
    As it was, Tesla could not even get his salary of $18 a week increased to a modest $25. This was a painful shock and he resigned. Later in life, Tesla re-assessed his opinion of Edison. When the Wizard of