The Last Days of Night

Inside the office, Paul discovers a back room filled with other people’s inventions: a table for dissection, rather than creation. Brown’s real office is next to this room, where Paul finds stacks and stacks of correspondence. “This would be where Brown conducted his real business: manipulating the public” (193). Paul finds letters to and from editors, city commissioners, citizens, journalists, and mayors.

At the bottom of the pile, he finds what he’s looking for: a letter from Edison. At first glance, however, it doesn’t give him the satisfaction he seeks. 

Aboard Westinghouse’s private railcar, Paul explains the conspiracy he’s uncovered from reading the correspondences between Brown and Edison. Brown has secretly petitioned the New York legislature to consider a new invention for execution of death-row inmates: “the electrical chair.”

Convicts would be strapped to a wooden chair with metal constraints attached to the lower back and forehead. An electric generator would be attached to the constraints and turning it on would electrify the convict to death “instantly” (195).

Brown has specified the use of alternating current manufactured by Westinghouse Electric Company in this petition. Edison and Brown are trying to associate A/C current inseparably with death. Ironically, alternating current wouldn’t work in this capacity, as Westinghouse points out.

Paul plans to appeal. Edison has publicly denounced the death penalty and campaigned against it. Paul’s response is from the same vein: to argue before the legislature that the electrical chair is cruel and unusual punishment. Rather than arguing the scientific truth (that direct current would be a more effective killer), Paul will appeal to the humanitarians in the senators. If they lose this appeal, they will be powerless to compete with Edison.

Paul stays for dinner and an overnight at Westinghouse’s, at Marguerite’s insistence. Among the 11 dinner guests is a polished young iron heiress, Stephanie, whom Marguerite is trying to set up with Paul.

Although she is intelligent and polite, Paul doesn’t notice her and has no idea that he’s been set up. He tells Marguerite that he has his eye on someone, admitting the fact to himself for the first time. Although Paul doesn’t reveal that it’s Agnes. Encouraged, Marguerite expresses the hope that Paul is more forthcoming with his admiration to “the young lady in question” (197).

The chapter begins with the press calling the legal battles between Westinghouse and Edison, “the war of the currents” (312). Paul is bogged down in paperwork for the individual suits in addition to the main Edison v. Westinghouse suit, and the anti-electric chair argument before the New York State Legislature.

Paul’s initial bitterness about his partners coming onto his case has shifted to gratitude. His secret Columbia assistants are working hard to render those 312 suits moot through proving Edison lied on his lightbulb patent application.

Paul has been traveling to Albany to meet with NY senators, treating them to steaks and cultivating a friendliness that will hopefully help his appeal.

In the meantime, Edison is selling his D/C units to Detroit, Boston, and Chicago, while Westinghouse is selling his A/C units to small towns in Colorado and California.

Tesla’s memory is steadily returning. He feels inspired, writing in his notebooks constantly. Paul doesn’t know if a new lightbulb design will come from Tesla’s scribbling.

The Huntingtons’ suit is going well; Foster hasn’t reached out to them since Agnes’s interview. Since he feels he’s in Fannie’s good graces again, Paul decides to formally request a walk date with Agnes. He wants to distinguish himself from the ruffians with whom Agnes attends parties. Fannie replies that Henry La Barre Jayne, a member of “American royalty” (200), is courting Agnes. Jayne is among a long line of successful shipping heirs who now own much of Philadelphia and parts of Manhattan.

Although Agnes doesn’t know if she’ll marry Jayne (Paul impolitely asks), Fannie stresses that Agnes has many admirers and suitors. Paul feels foolish, stressing that he wants to remain their attorney for a long time. Agnes arrives just as Paul is departing, inviting him in for a nightcap, but he declines and abruptly leaves.

Paul feels embarrassed and naive. He knows things won’t be the same between him and Agnes, unable to picture himself sitting at Tesla’s bedside with her again. He turns his focus back to work. The next morning, Paul checks in with his Columbia law student assistants. He envies their youth and mistakes their names. They reveal that they’ve caught Edison’s lie; in an early interview, the filament Edison claimed to be using in the original lightbulb was platinum. When he filed the patent two years later, the filament was made of cotton. The lightbulbs coming out of his factory, however, have bamboo filaments.

This reveals that Edison was “just making things up. He didn’t actually get the bulb working with bamboo till after the patent was granted” (203).

The moment Paul’s been waiting for has finally come. His assistants try to hide their excitement, but Paul doesn’t, smiling and saying: “I think it’s time we took the deposition of Mr. Thomas Edison” (204).

At his deposition, Paul notes the change in Edison’s appearance over the past year. He is grayer, heavier, and more disheveled. But this appearance of haphazardness is intentional. Edison’s wit is sharp and cunning. He mockingly asks Paul to introduce himself. Also present at the deposition are Edison’s lawyer, Lowrey, and the court transcriber.

Paul begins by asking what Edison’s first invention was and in what year it occurred. Edison repeats a story he’s told the press many times: what lead to the invention of the automatic repeater in 1865. Working as a butcher boy, Edison sold candy on the rails, getting friendly with Western Union men at the stations. He’d overhear the train engineers complaining about certain mechanical functions. He’d then set out to solve their problems. Edison says, “I tinkered. I asked a lot of questions. Some the men could answer, some they could not. If not, then I was required to develop my own answers” (207). 

Edison crafts his own mythology with this simple blueprint of invention. Paul challenges the simplicity of his stories, riling Edison up. The inventor insists again that he simply identifies the gap in technology and plugs that gap, “[w]ith these hands right here” (207).

Paul pulls Edison’s self-crafted history from him. He went from a teenage vagabond riding the rails to a 30-year-old millionaire who’d made it to New York by sheer skill and a simple approach, according to him. Edison claims he invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell: that Bell simply got to the patent office first. When Paul brings up Sawyer and Man’s patent on incandescent light, Edison seems indifferent, saying their device was incomplete: “It didn’t work. Their patent was quite broad. It was a suggestion of the thing, not the thing itself” (209). Paul agrees, craftily observing that Sawyer and Man didn’t specify a type of filament.

Paul attempts to trap Edison by detailing the types of filaments in each incarnation of Edison’s bulb. Platinum, cotton, bamboo…Edison heatedly claims that all three are a part of his final product’s filament. Edison lectures once more on the systematic process of invention within his lab. Edison proudly sets his army of engineers to a task, defining the scope of their inquiry and their methods. His methodical approach is in stark contrast to Tesla’s flash of inspiration.

The chapter ends with Edison’s praising of his own god-like influence on the general public. He derides Westinghouse’s “idle details,” and Paul’s knit-picking argument focusing on filament fiber:

I invented the goddamn lightbulb. I gestated it in the minds of the public. You whine to me about filaments. Platinum, cotton, bamboo? There were ten thousand more. My patent covers all of them (211).

Edison ends his speech with a self-righteous “you’re welcome” for all he’s done for the world.

Edison’s argument is extremely effective. To no one’s surprise, the New York federal court rules against the Westinghouse Electric Company in the big lightbulb suit. The judge concludes that Edison didn’t patent a perfect lightbulb; he’d patented a field of light bulbs.

Even though the patent is for a device that doesn’t work as intended, Westinghouse’s superior bulbs still infringe on it:

Paul’s strategy had been to narrow the scope of Edison’s patent to a nonexistent, nonfunctioning device; in response, Edison had succeeded in broadening the scope of his patent to include practically anything that lit up (212).

Paul’s partners had done most of the arguing in court. He knew he couldn’t blame them for losing the suit, but Paul childishly wishes he could. He plans to appeal the verdict, taking the suit as high as he can.

In addition to this failure, Paul’s fight against the electrical chair is also going poorly. The people’s elected representatives have approved it for use. Paul will now have to argue that the state law is invalid on constitutional grounds, deeming death by electrocution cruel and unusual punishment.

The Huntingtons summon Paul. He has barely visited them since embarrassing himself by attempting to court Agnes. Fannie thanks him for his work against Foster, then says Tesla will have to leave their residence. Despite Agnes’s blank facade, Paul can tell this is Fannie’s idea, not Agnes’s.

The reason for Tesla’s departure, Fannie asserts, is a dinner they will be hosting for the Jayne family. Paul muses that Agnes must be impressing the powerful and higher-class Jaynes. They will be vetting Fannie at this dinner. Agnes apologizes to Paul for how things have worked out, asking where he will take Tesla. Paul thinks of a place where Edison has no influence. He assures Agnes he has a place in mind.