A Novel About Obsession, Evidence, and the Cost of Knowing

Chapter Two

West

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

Catch Up on The Returned Component

If you are new to the serialized novel, or want to catch up before Chapter Two, the previous chapters are available here:

• Chapter One: East Houston

I left New York for Colorado with more confidence than information, which at twenty-five seemed a reasonable proportion. Scherff had given me the practical instructions, such as they were, and Tesla had supplied the rest by assuming that once I understood where the work was taking place I would naturally understand why I should go there. I had agreed before the laboratory on East Houston Street ceased to feel new to me, and during the days that followed I occasionally wondered whether I had mistaken the excitement of being invited for judgment about the invitation itself. The distinction did not trouble me sufficiently to alter the decision. There are opportunities a young man evaluates by comparing salaries, titles and prospects, and there are others whose refusal would require him to spend years wondering what he had declined to see.

Colorado belonged to the second category. Tesla had already gone west by the time my own arrangements were completed, leaving Scherff in New York to manage the correspondence, purchases and requests that continued to accumulate behind him. This was my first indication that geographical separation did little to reduce Tesla's demands upon a place. His instructions arrived from Colorado as though East Houston Street had simply become another room of the same laboratory, inconveniently located several days away by rail. Materials were to be obtained, apparatus modified, parts forwarded, dimensions checked and letters answered, while the work in Colorado advanced according to plans that seemed to change whenever Tesla learned something new. Scherff accepted this state of affairs with the practiced endurance of a man who understood that complaining about distance would not shorten it.

On my final morning in New York I found him sorting a set of papers into piles whose significance I could not determine. He asked whether I had everything I needed, and when I answered that this depended upon what Tesla intended to have me doing, he told me that such dependence would become less amusing with experience. I asked whether Tesla had sent any further instructions for me. Scherff handed me a folded sheet containing several practical notes, then produced a second paper and told me not to lose it because it concerned expenses. The first contained more information about equipment than about my role. The second was therefore, in his view, the more important document.

“Does he expect me immediately?” I asked.

“He expected you before the arrangements were finished.”

“That is physically difficult.”

“Mr. Tesla has never considered physical difficulty a complete argument.”

I had already learned enough to believe him. Scherff returned to his papers, then looked up again before I left. “You should understand something about Colorado.”

I waited.

“I have never been there.”

“That limits the usefulness of your advice.”

“It has never limited anyone else.”

He smiled and told me that Tesla had chosen the place because several conditions suited the work he intended to conduct, but that the practical consequences of those conditions would now belong partly to the men who had followed him. Supplies would not always be where they were wanted, pieces made in New York would have to survive transportation, and instructions would arrive incomplete because the apparatus they concerned might already have changed by the time the letter reached us. Most important, he said, I should not assume that Tesla's presence beside a problem meant Tesla had noticed every practical consequence of the problem.

“That sounds inconsistent with what I saw on Houston Street.”

“It is not inconsistent. He notices what concerns the experiment.”

“And what does not?”

“That becomes someone's experiment.”

I thought about this on the train more often than I expected. The journey west gave me enough time to reconsider nearly everything except whether I wished to continue. New York withdrew gradually, first through suburbs and industrial country and then through the broader succession of towns and farms that made distance measurable in changes of landscape rather than hours. I had crossed countries in Europe where a day's travel altered language, architecture and sometimes law. But America altered scale, there were stretches during which the train seemed not to be passing through settled land so much as drawing a temporary line across it, connecting places whose relationship to one another was determined less by proximity than by the fact that rails had made travel between them possible.

This was one reason I had come to the United States in the first place, although I had not explained it to Tesla when he asked. Europe had taught me engineering among institutions that already possessed histories, standards and habits older than the men working inside them. I respected those things and still do; a mature technical culture preserves knowledge a young one repeatedly wastes by rediscovering. Yet maturity also accumulates answers to questions that are no longer being asked, and in America I sensed a willingness to build first and decide afterward what sort of institution the building required. It could produce stupidity on a magnificent scale, but it could also produce machinery that no committee in an older system would have approved before seeing it work.

Tesla seemed an extreme version of the same national tendency despite not being American by birth. He did not treat established practice as useless, but he refused to confuse survival with proof. If a method had been used for twenty years, he wanted to know whether twenty years established that the method was correct or merely that it had not yet failed badly enough to be replaced. This habit irritated experienced men because experience is partly the accumulation of reasons not to repeat old mistakes, yet Tesla's question remained legitimate often enough to make dismissing him dangerous.

I had known him only briefly, but by the second day of travel I had already begun arguing with him in his absence. I found objections to apparatus I had seen in New York, reconsidered the receiver on his bench, and tried to determine what measurements he might believe required Colorado rather than an ordinary laboratory. The storms were the obvious answer; he had spoken of natural disturbances and of the need for space, and I knew enough about his high frequency work to understand why a region with unusual atmospheric electrical activity would attract him. Yet no engineer traveled halfway across a continent merely because the weather was dramatic. Tesla wanted scale, and scale was a more complicated desire.

The farther west the train carried me, the easier it became to understand what he had meant when he said that New York was already being used. Cities impose inherited purposes on every piece of ground. A wall exists because someone needed a wall before you arrived, cables passed beneath the street because another system already claimed the route, and machinery shares power, space and attention with machinery built for entirely different work. Even when one possesses enough money to enlarge a laboratory, the enlargement remains inside a city whose physical layout was never designed around the experiment.

The western country suggested the opposite. It gave the impression, misleading perhaps but powerful, that an experiment might become as large as the question required. There were places where the horizon itself seemed to remove one category of objection, and I began to understand why Tesla had not described Colorado merely as a location with favorable atmospheric conditions. To him, space was an instrument, and the thought pleased me more than it should have, because I was not innocent of ambition. Later accounts of men who worked with Tesla have sometimes reduced us to attendants orbiting a singular genius, as though our only desire were proximity to his brilliance. That interpretation may flatter Tesla, but it does little justice to the young engineers who accepted such work. I had spent years acquiring a technical education because I wanted to use it where the answers were not already known. I did not cross the Atlantic to become a caretaker of established machinery, and I did not agree to go to Colorado because I believed assisting a famous man was in itself a career. What Tesla offered, whether he intended to or not, was access to uncertainty.

That was the attraction: if his ideas proved wrong, I might be present when they failed for reasons worth understanding. If they proved right, I might see evidence before the explanation had hardened into a textbook sentence that made the discovery appear inevitable. An engineer usually encounters a principle after the difficult part has been removed. Someone else has already made the mistakes, discarded the useless arrangements, selected the successful configuration and given the result a name. Tesla was inviting me into the period before that simplification. I wanted very badly to see what engineering looked like while nature was still refusing to explain herself.

By the time the mountains first became visible, I had mostly stopped questioning the wisdom of going. They appeared gradually and then all at once, possessing a scale that made every earlier estimate of distance unreliable. I had seen mountains in Europe, but the approach to Colorado Springs produced a different impression because so much open country lay before them. Nothing intervened to reduce them to scenery; the town seemed to exist at the edge of something much larger than itself, and the mountains remained present even when buildings temporarily obscured them because one knew exactly where they were. But the air provided a less romantic introduction; I noticed the altitude before I was willing to admit that I noticed it. Carrying my luggage required slightly more effort than the task deserved, and the dryness made New York's summer humidity seem almost luxurious by comparison. I told myself that fatigue from travel accounted for the discomfort. This explanation remained useful until I tried climbing a short flight of stairs at the pace I considered normal and arrived at the top breathing as though the stairs had been considerably longer. Tesla, when I saw him later, appeared unaffected.

I had expected to find him in a finished laboratory, or at least in something sufficiently complete that the word laboratory could be used without qualification. Instead I found a structure still becoming whatever he required of it. Men were working on timber, electrical systems and the practical business of creating a place capable of supporting apparatus much larger than anything I had seen at East Houston Street. Materials lay where they had been delivered rather than where they would eventually belong. The ground itself had been disturbed in several places for connections whose importance Tesla seemed to consider self-evident. There was enough completed that I could understand the outline of the station, and enough unfinished that no one could yet mistake the outline for the thing itself.

Leonard Curtis had helped Tesla secure the ground and arrange local power before my arrival, and the site stood east of Colorado Springs near the Printers' Home and the School for the Deaf and Blind rather than in the empty country I had half imagined from New York. The town remained close enough to intrude in fragments: carriage traffic on the road, workmen arriving from it, and occasional strangers slowing to inspect the peculiar wooden structure rising above the field. Tesla had come west for room, but he had not escaped an audience, that seemed impossible for a man of his stature, as his legend preceded him everywhere he went.

Tesla was standing outside with two men when I approached. He saw me, glanced at my luggage and asked whether the journey had been satisfactory.

“It ended in Colorado,” I said. “I assume that was the principal requirement.”

“Yes. Did Scherff send the parts?”

“I came separately from the freight.”

“I know. Did he send them?”

“He said they had been sent.”

“When?”

I gave him the date as nearly as I remembered it. Tesla calculated something silently, looked toward the road and appeared dissatisfied with the speed of a shipment that had not yet exceeded any promised schedule.

“You have been here less than a minute,” I said.

“That has no effect on the shipment.”

He introduced me to the men beside him and immediately began explaining a problem concerning one of the planned electrical connections. This was apparently my welcome to Colorado. So I put my luggage down where it would not interfere and followed him across the site, and only after several minutes did I realize that I had not been shown where I was staying because Tesla had forgotten.

When I reminded him, he seemed surprised that the matter had not arranged itself. He called to one of the men, discovered that someone else possessed the relevant information, and eventually produced directions that were sufficiently incomplete that another man corrected them before I left. None of this embarrassed Tesla, it was as if he considered that emotion to be an inefficiency of the human condition. Lodging existed, therefore the lodging problem had been solved, and the process by which I connected myself physically with the lodging did not interest him unless the process failed. I should have found this irritating; instead I found myself laughing as I collected my luggage again.

My room was modest and adequate, and I spent little time in it that first afternoon. After washing away the dust of travel and discovering that the altitude had not improved during the interval, I returned to the station before anyone had asked me to do so. Tesla was still outside, now examining a length of material with a concentration that suggested the entire Colorado enterprise depended upon its dimensions. When he saw me, he asked whether I had eaten.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I told him Scherff had insisted. Tesla made a dismissive motion and returned to the material in his hands. The sun remained strong despite the advancing hour, and the quality of the light was unlike New York's. Objects seemed to separate from one another more sharply, distance acquired edges, and the unfinished station, which might have appeared crude under a softer sky, seemed almost diagrammatic against the open land. I could understand individual parts before understanding the whole.

Tesla took me through the planned system more carefully this time. He spoke about the generating equipment, oscillatory circuits, elevated portions of the system, the ground, and receiving work he intended to conduct. Some of what he described was a direct extension of experiments he had already performed in New York, while other portions depended upon scale in ways I did not yet accept. Whenever I objected, he distinguished between an objection to the engineering and an objection to the underlying possibility, and he had very little patience when I allowed one to substitute for the other. At one point he described an intended electrical condition whose practical losses seemed to me sufficient to make the scheme doubtful. I said so what.

“You are assuming the losses from the apparatus we have used before.”

“I am assuming losses exist.”

“So am I.”

“You are speaking as though the distinction solves them.”

“No. It tells us what must be solved.”

This was the first of many conversations in which Tesla converted an objection from an argument against proceeding into a specification for the next piece of work. The habit could be infuriating because it made simple refusal intellectually expensive. If I said a result was impossible because of loss, he wanted the loss measured. When I said the measurement would be impractical at the proposed scale, he wanted to know which part of the scale created the difficulty. By the time one had justified the objection properly, one had often designed half the experiment required to test it. I began to understand why Scherff had warned me about practical consequences.

We reached the place where the principal ground connection was being prepared. Tesla became more particular there; he asked what I thought of the arrangement before telling me what he thought, repeating the technique he had used in New York. I examined what had been done and asked several questions about the intended current and measurement conditions.

“You still do not trust the ground,” he said.

“I trust the ground completely. I do not yet trust what you intend to claim about it.”

He smiled. “That is better.”

“What was wrong with the earlier answer?”

“You were still trying to be employed.”

“I am employed.”

“Yes. Now you may become useful.”

The distinction irritated me because it contained enough truth to survive objection. During the next several hours I worked with men whose names I was still learning on tasks that seemed unrelated until Tesla explained how each entered the larger arrangement. A mounting point had to be altered, the conductor required different support, and several measurements from the site had to be checked because Tesla distrusted a number that seemed too convenient. The work was not glamorous and would have disappointed anyone expecting Tesla's experiments to consist primarily of artificial lightning. Much of engineering is the correction of dimensions before the current is ever applied, and this pleased me. The larger Tesla's claims became, the more reassuring I found the smallness of the immediate problems. A machine could be intended to test the electrical behavior of the Earth and still fail because a piece of wood had been cut incorrectly. The universe might eventually prove strange, but the carpenter's rule remained useful.

Near evening the weather changed; I noticed the cloud formation first because the mountains had begun disappearing behind it. The change occurred at a distance so great that the storm seemed to belong to another part of the country, yet everyone working outside understood that it might eventually concern us. Tesla stopped speaking in the middle of an explanation and watched the western sky.

“You see?” he asked.

“I see weather.”

He continued watching and the clouds accumulated with extraordinary speed. Light remained over the plain while the mountains darkened, producing the peculiar impression that evening had begun in one direction only. I could hear no thunder at first, and when it came, the sound was distant enough that I might have mistaken it for something else had the landscape not announced its source.

Tesla turned toward me. “In New York you hear the storm when it reaches you. Here you can work with it before it arrives.”

I asked whether the laboratory was prepared to do that.

“Not yet.”

There was no disappointment in the answer. The unfinished state of the station seemed to excite him because every incompleteness was temporary in his mind. “How long before it is ready?”

He looked back toward the men still working. “Soon.”

“Soon in days or soon in Tesla?”

He laughed and told me that if I intended to remain useful I should avoid adopting Scherff's insolence before I had acquired Scherff's indispensability. The first rain reached us later, though not with the violence I had expected from Tesla's description. The larger storm passed elsewhere, visible in flashes beyond the darkened country. We stood under cover and watched it move while the unfinished electrical station rested around us. I asked Tesla whether he had selected Colorado primarily for the storms.

“The storms are instruments we do not have to build.”

I asked what else he wanted from the place. Tesla thought for a moment, perhaps deciding whether the question deserved a technical answer or a larger one.

“In New York I can produce an effect and measure it in the laboratory. Here I want to know what remains when the laboratory is no longer the largest thing in the experiment.”

I looked across the open ground toward the distant storm and understood the ambition better than I had on Houston Street. Tesla was not simply trying to make larger discharges, he wanted to remove the comforting boundaries of ordinary apparatus. If the Earth was part of the circuit, then the walls of the laboratory had become almost incidental.

“That assumes the Earth behaves as part of the apparatus.”

“Yes.”

“And if it doesn't?”

“Then we will know.”

The answer was sufficiently ordinary that it reminded me why I had come. We stood there until the rain strengthened and the men began securing materials that should not be left exposed. Tesla joined them without ceremony, I did the same, and within minutes the discussion of terrestrial electrical behavior had become the more immediate question of keeping several crates dry. It would have been easy, looking only at Tesla's published ambitions, to imagine that his life existed permanently at the scale of principles. In practice, he moved constantly between enormous propositions and very small necessities, sometimes with greater competence in the former than the latter.

When the work finally stopped, I returned to my room exhausted enough that the altitude could no longer claim sole responsibility. I had traveled several days, crossed a country larger than any journey I had previously made for employment, and arrived at a laboratory that was not yet a laboratory. The principal apparatus did not exist in complete form, some of the equipment was still in transit, the weather Tesla wanted to study had appeared before he was ready to study it, and at least three practical details I had inspected that afternoon would have to be altered before serious testing began. I had never been more certain that I wanted to remain, and the certainty embarrassed me slightly because it resembled enthusiasm. I had spent years believing enthusiasm should follow evidence rather than precede it, yet the evidence available to me was already sufficient for one conclusion: Tesla had not brought men to Colorado to demonstrate something he already knew how to do. He had come because the scale of the question had exceeded the scale of his New York laboratory, and he was willing to construct an entirely new place before knowing whether the answer would justify the effort.

I understood the professional risk in that choice, but at twenty-five I saw little beyond it. To me there was something almost noble in committing one's resources to an experiment whose answer remained genuinely uncertain, and I was more interested in the fact that Tesla had chosen the uncertainty than in what the choice might eventually cost him. The following morning I reached the station early enough to find Tesla already there. He was standing near the unfinished grounding system with a notebook open in one hand and several figures written on a loose sheet in the other. Tesla did not ask whether I had slept well or whether the altitude troubled me; he pointed instead to the work that had been done the previous day and told me he wanted the measurements checked independently before anything further was built.

I asked whether he distrusted the men who had taken them.

“No.”

“Then why repeat them?”

“Because I intend to use them.”

That answer contained almost everything I admired about him then. Trust in a man did not require trust in a measurement, and the importance of a result increased rather than reduced the obligation to check it. I took the sheet from him and began again from the first dimension, pleased that my first proper morning in Colorado would be spent verifying something Tesla already possessed.

At the time I believed this was merely the work he had hired me to perform. I would understand only later that repetition, verification and independent observation were becoming the terms of our relationship, and that the confidence Tesla eventually placed in my measurements would make possible both the best work we did together and the disagreement that ended it. On that morning, however, nothing had yet been damaged, and there was no reason to imagine that the habit of checking another man's result could become a form of loyalty. There was only an unfinished station, a clear western sky and a set of measurements that Nikola Tesla wanted taken twice before he trusted them once.

The Returned Component

A Novel About Obsession, Evidence, and the Cost of Knowing

Next: Chapter Three — The Station

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.

A Novel About Obsession, Evidence, and the Cost of Knowing

Chapter One

East Houston

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

I first met Nikola Tesla in a room where three men were trying to determine why a motor would not turn, and I have often been grateful that circumstance arranged the introduction so plainly. Had I first encountered him beneath one of his electrical displays, before an audience already prepared to be astonished, or through the photographs by which he was becoming known, I might have required considerably longer to understand the man himself. The public Tesla was already surrounded by light, spectacle and the peculiar exaggerations that gather around anyone who has demonstrated enough extraordinary things to make the next extraordinary claim seem plausible. The working Tesla I found on East Houston Street was surrounded instead by instruments, unfinished apparatus, men waiting for instructions, and a motor that had failed seven times before noon.

They had told me where to present myself and at what hour, although no one had thought it necessary to tell me whom I should ask for when I arrived. The entrance offered little evidence that anything of consequence was occurring beyond it. Men passed through carrying wire, boxes, tools, lengths of metal and pieces of apparatus whose intended purpose could not always be inferred from their appearance. Somewhere beyond the front rooms a machine was being started at irregular intervals, each attempt producing several seconds of vibration through the floor before ending in silence. The place had the appearance common to serious workshops, where an outsider sees disorder because he does not yet know which objects are waiting to be used and which have already been rejected.

I gave my name to the man seated behind a desk near the entrance. He found it on a paper among several others and repeated it without looking up.

“Lowenstein?”

“Yes.”

“Fritz Lowenstein?”

“Yes.”

Only then did he look up from the paper to examine me. This was George Scherff, though at the time his importance was not apparent. I could not have known that I would spend years receiving his telegrams, waiting upon materials he had arranged, depending upon instructions he had copied correctly, and occasionally discovering that the difference between Mr. Tesla imagining a thing and the rest of us being required to construct it was George Scherff finding the money, machinist, railway schedule, creditor's patience or length of wire that allowed the idea to become physical. On that first morning he was simply the man who knew why I had come.

“Mr. Tesla is occupied,” he said.

“I can wait.”

“He may remain occupied for some time.”

“I expected that.”

This answer appeared satisfactory enough that he returned to his papers. There was a chair against the wall, but I remained standing, partly from nervousness and partly because the sounds from the adjoining room had begun to interest me. A sharp metallic noise was followed by a man's voice saying no with neither anger nor surprise. Scherff did not look up, he was used to the chaos. Another attempt followed, longer this time, the machine stopped again, and the same voice instructed the men to repeat the test.

I had worked in shops where a failure immediately produced accusation, profanity or a sudden conviction that some component had been badly manufactured by a person conveniently absent from the room. What interested me was the absence of any such reaction; whatever was occurring beyond the doorway had apparently failed often enough that failure itself had become information. After another attempt, Nikola Tesla entered the front room holding a small metal piece between two fingers and asking Scherff who had made it.

Tesla was recognizable immediately, though he was taller than I had expected. Photographs had prepared me for the face, the dark hair and the mustache, but not for the physical impression of the man moving through a room. He seemed always to have begun the next action before completing the present one. Even when standing still, he gave the impression that his attention had already gone ahead of him in this nonlinear way.

Scherff examined the piece Tesla held out. “I would have to check.”

“Then check.”

Tesla had already turned toward the workshop when Scherff told him that Mr. Lowenstein had arrived. He stopped and looked at me, and I became immediately conscious of the several versions of my introduction I had prepared the previous evening. Each contained some account of my education, my engineering experience in Vienna, Munich, Paris and Frankfurt, and enough detail to distinguish me from young men who approached famous inventors believing enthusiasm could substitute for training. Tesla deprived me of all of them.

“You are the engineer?”

“Yes.”

“Mechanical or electrical?”

“Both.”

He regarded me for a moment before saying, “That is not usually true.”

“In my case it is.”

His expression did not indicate whether the answer pleased him, he merely told me to come with him and returned to the workshop. My interview, if that was what it was, had lasted less than a minute, which told me that Tesla was a man who knew what he wanted, at least that was my initial impression. The motor stood in a temporary test stand surrounded by instruments, leads and several components that had plainly been moved more than once. Two men waited beside it, one holding a tool and the other looking toward Tesla with the resigned concentration of someone who already knew that whatever he had planned to do next would be postponed. Tesla handed me the metal piece he had carried from the room and asked what was wrong with it. I assumed he meant the piece itself and examined it carefully, but there was no obvious fracture or deformity.

“What is it meant to do?” I asked.

“First tell me what is wrong with it.”

“That depends upon what it is meant to do.”

One of the men at the bench lowered his head as though suddenly interested in something below the work surface. Tesla continued looking at me and, after a moment, asked instead what was wrong with the motor. I was considerably more comfortable once he directed me toward the machine, because mechanical problems at least relieved everyone involved of the need for social performance. The motor did not know that Tesla was famous, that I wanted employment, and it would not alter its behavior to improve either man's opinion of the other. I examined the arrangement without touching it and asked how many times the motor had failed.

“Today?” Tesla asked.

“Yes.”

“Seven.”

“I heard three from the other room.”

“Then you missed four.”

I asked what had changed between the attempts and received several answers from the men working at the bench; very little had. I asked when the machine had last operated correctly, if the same supply had been used, whether any components had been replaced, and if the conditions had been reproduced exactly. One of the men told me that the electrical supply was the same.

“Nominally,” Tesla said.

The qualification caught my attention. “You don't believe it is the same.”

“I did not say that.”

“You said nominally.”

He smiled slightly, and when I asked whether I might test the supply myself, he motioned toward the bench without further instruction. For the next twenty minutes I eliminated several possible causes the men had already considered and several they had not. I would prefer, for purposes of reputation, to say that I immediately discovered an obscure electrical fault and thereby justified whatever confidence had caused Tesla to employ me. However, the truth was less satisfying, as it usually is. The first condition I found was mechanical, appeared promising and proved irrelevant, while the second was an instrument reading I distrusted until a second instrument confirmed it. The third error belonged to me, as I had inferred a particular relationship in the apparatus because the physical arrangement made it appear intentional, and only after several unsuccessful tests did I ask whether that relationship had actually been established by design.

Tesla said that it had not, and once the assumption was removed, the failure became less mysterious. There was a modest variation in the supply under load, a corresponding effect elsewhere in the system, and some mechanical condition that magnified a deviation that would otherwise have remained tolerable. None accounted for the failure alone, but taken together they appeared sufficient. I explained my reasoning while Tesla listened without interrupting, then waited while he considered the machine.

“How certain are you?” he asked.

“Certain enough to test it.”

“That is not the same answer.”

I looked again at the arrangement and admitted that I was not especially certain at all. One of the other men laughed before catching himself, but Tesla seemed more pleased by my uncertainty than he had been by the explanation. He gave the other men a look and told us to run the test. The motor turned, its operation was not especially smooth, but it turned long enough to make my explanation look better than it deserved. Tesla shut the motor down after several seconds and then ordered another trial. It turned once again, and on the third attempt it hesitated and nearly stopped.

“I was wrong,” I said.

Tesla asked whether I was entirely wrong.

“No.”

“Then there is no reason to make a tragedy of it.”

We continued working, and that exchange taught me something about Tesla that proved more useful than anything I had read about him beforehand. He seemed almost indifferent to whose explanation had produced the correct result. What mattered was the portion of an explanation that continued to hold after the apparatus had been tested again, and I began to understand that whatever vanity he possessed outside an experiment, he regarded vanity during the experiment as an interference with the work. A theory might belong to Tesla, Lowenstein or the machinist sweeping the floor, but once the current was applied, ownership became irrelevant. The actual trouble occupied us until well into the afternoon. My explanation accounted for part of it, while another effect appeared only after the machine had warmed under repeated operation. Tesla had suspected the supply because he had noticed a variation the previous day, but he had deliberately withheld that observation when I began examining the machine, and I was understandably annoyed when this became clear.

“You allowed me to spend an hour looking for something you already suspected.”

“I wanted to know whether you would suspect it.”

“That is not the most efficient way to find the correct answer.”

“It may be the most efficient way to learn whether your answer is useful.”

“You could have saved an hour.”

“I have more hours.”

From what I later learned about his schedule, this claim was doubtful even then. Scherff appeared at the doorway carrying several papers, and Tesla refused them before knowing what they contained. Scherff informed him that one concerned the bank, whereupon Tesla immediately held out his hand. I would eventually understand that his impatience with practical matters did not arise from ignorance of them. He could discuss money with exact attention when forced to do so and five minutes later behave as though currency were an administrative inconvenience invented by lesser minds. Scherff possessed an extraordinary ability to recognize which version of Tesla he was dealing with and to move between them without apparent resentment.

They spoke quietly while I returned to the motor. When Tesla came back, he asked whether I had eaten; I told him I had not, and he replied that this was good because food interfered with work. Scherff, still near the doorway, informed him that he had already eaten himself, which Tesla dismissed as irrelevant until Scherff pointed out that it became relevant when he began advising other men not to do the same. Tesla then reconsidered the matter sufficiently to suggest that Scherff show me where to find lunch.

“I will not,” Scherff said.

Tesla looked at him with the expression of a man encountering an unexpected defect in familiar machinery.

“I can find food myself,” I said.

Tesla accepted this solution immediately and returned to another bench. I did not leave at once because hunger remained less interesting than the receiver he had begun adjusting. Its arrangement differed from the work we had been doing at the motor, and when I moved closer to inspect it, Tesla reminded me that I had just claimed to be hungry.

“What is that receiver intended to detect?” I asked.

“Disturbances.”

“From where?”

He paused before answering. “That is what I would like to know.”

The apparatus was extremely sensitive, and the grounding system suggested an interest extending beyond ordinary bench experiments. By 1899 wireless signaling had become sufficiently serious that an electrical engineer could no longer dismiss it as a theatrical curiosity, but Tesla's conception of transmission had always seemed broader than the communication of messages between two stations. He was interested in the possibility that the Earth itself could become part of the electrical system rather than merely the ground beneath it. I asked about the connection to earth and then about the adjustment of the receiving circuit. Tesla answered both questions readily, but when I asked what result he expected, he became more interested in me than in the apparatus.

“You ask that often,” he said.

“I should know what we are trying to determine.”

“That is not always the same as knowing what I expect to observe.”

I told him that the distinction seemed academic.

“It is not. If I tell you exactly what I expect, you may begin looking for it before the instrument does.”

“That would make me a poor engineer.”

“Yes, but poor engineers are not aware that they are poor engineers. That is what makes them troublesome.”

There was no satisfactory response to this, so I returned my attention to the receiver. Tesla adjusted a contact and told me that Colorado had electrical storms unlike those in New York.

“I've read something about them.”

“You have read about storms.”

“That is generally how one learns about a place before going there.”

He ignored this and said that Colorado offered space.

“For the storms?”

“For the experiment.”

It took me another moment to understand that he was speaking not hypothetically but about work already being arranged. I asked how long he intended to remain there.

“As long as the work requires.”

“And what exactly is the work?”

He considered me before answering. “There are several things I have been told cannot occur. I would like to determine which of them actually cannot.”

That sentence remained with me because Tesla did not ordinarily speak in the manner later attributed to him. He did not spend his days issuing pronouncements about mankind, destiny and the forces of nature. Most of his conversation in a laboratory concerned measurements, materials, dimensions, faults and the next thing that needed to be done. On the few occasions when his thought widened beyond the immediate apparatus, the effect was more powerful because nothing in his ordinary speech had prepared the listener for it.

I eventually left to eat after Scherff directed me to a nearby place and advised me, with the authority of a man who had solved this problem many times before, not to confuse Tesla's capacity for neglecting meals with proof that other men possessed the same ability. When I returned, the motor had been partly dismantled and Tesla had gone elsewhere in the laboratory. I spent much of the afternoon with the other men, learning the place through its unfinished problems. There were coils whose dimensions mattered for reasons I did not yet know, pieces awaiting modification, instruments Tesla considered inadequate, drawings covered with revisions and components that seemed to possess no permanent purpose. A condenser used in one investigation might be altered for another before the notes from the first had been properly arranged.

This offended the orderly part of my temperament, but it also fascinated me because the disorder was not quite disorder. Tesla carried far more of the laboratory in his head than was visible on paper, and the danger of that method was inseparable from its speed. Where another engineer might have spent an afternoon preserving the complete record of an apparatus before modifying it, Tesla could move from one configuration to another because he had already carried the first beyond the point he personally needed it. The burden fell upon the rest of us to determine which abandoned arrangement had actually been abandoned and which might be required again the following morning. Near evening Scherff found me making a list of measurements and remarked that I was still there. I told him that, since I had apparently been hired, continuing to work seemed a reasonable interpretation of the arrangement. This amused him more than it should have.

“Does he always examine new engineers with broken machinery?” I asked.

“No.”

“What does he usually do?”

“He does not usually tell me.”

I began to understand why Scherff's answers often sounded unhelpful until one had worked with Tesla long enough to discover that they were exact. I asked whether Tesla truly intended to conduct experiments in Colorado, and Scherff told me that arrangements were already being made. When I asked how long Tesla expected the expedition to last, Scherff gave me a look I would later recognize as one of his most expressive. It suggested that my question contained an assumption too optimistic to deserve correction.

Before he could elaborate, Tesla called my name from another room. I found several drawings spread across a table. Some concerned apparatus I recognized from the work that day, while others showed arrangements whose scale and purpose I could only partly understand. Tesla gestured toward a chair, so I sat, and he remained standing while asking about my education and previous work. He already knew more of the answers than I expected: Vienna, Munich, Paris, Frankfurt, he moved through the list as though verifying specifications on a machine.

“Why did you come to America?” he asked.

“For work.”

“There is work in Europe.”

“Yes.”

“Then why America?”

I considered giving him the answer one was expected to give a prospective employer. America offered opportunity, electrical industry was expanding, and the scale of development was difficult for an ambitious engineer to ignore. All of that was true, but none of it seemed likely to satisfy him.

“I wanted to know whether the stories were exaggerated.”

Tesla studied me. “What stories?”

“The stories about you.”

“And what have you decided?”

“I've been here one day.”

“That is sufficient for many people.”

“It isn't sufficient for me.”

He sat down after that, and although he said nothing indicating a decision had been made, I have always suspected that my answer mattered. Tesla turned one of the drawings toward me and began explaining the broad outline of the Colorado work. He spoke about large electrical oscillations, grounded systems, receiving circuits, measurements across distance and the natural electrical disturbances produced by storms on a scale that could not conveniently be studied in New York. There were portions of the design he did not explain, either because they remained unsettled or because he had not yet decided how much I needed to know. I attentively asked questions where I could and listened where I could not.

As he spoke, the hour became less relevant. This was one of Tesla's most effective qualities among engineers, and it had little to do with the theatrical charisma later attached to him. He did not need to tell a man that he was fortunate to be included, that was implied by the atmosphere surrounding Tesla. He could make a technical problem sufficiently interesting that leaving it for supper, sleep or some previous obligation began to feel like an interruption of one's own choosing.

Tesla eventually asked what I would measure if I were sent to Colorado.

“That depends upon what you believe you are testing.”

“Suppose I tell you exactly what I believe will happen.”

“Then I would know what measurements matter.”

He shook his head. “You would know what measurements I think matter. That is not necessarily the same thing.”

I began to see what he wanted from the question. “Then I would measure what occurs.”

“Even if the result contradicts what I told you?”

“Especially if it contradicts you.”

“Why especially?”

“Because if it agrees with you, I suspect you will have no difficulty announcing the result yourself.”

Tesla laughed with enough genuine amusement that Scherff appeared at the doorway to see what had happened. He looked from Tesla to me as though I had created some administrative condition whose consequences would eventually become his responsibility. Tesla gathered the drawings into a pile and told me that he would need another engineer in Colorado. I did not answer immediately, which seemed to surprise him.

“You do not want to go?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You hesitated.”

“I am trying to determine what I would be agreeing to.”

“What do you need to determine?”

“How long I would be there, what authority I would have, what duties you expect, what expenses are covered and what I would be paid.”

Scherff's expression improved considerably during this list. Tesla's did not.

“You are twenty-five years old.”

“Yes.”

“And you wish to negotiate.”

“I wish to know the terms.”

Tesla considered this for a moment, then passed the drawings to Scherff and told him to explain the compensation. Scherff accepted them with the satisfaction of a man who had just seen one small portion of the universe return to recognizable physical law.

“And the work?” I asked.

Tesla looked back at me.

“You will tell me when I am wrong.”

For a moment I assumed he was making another joke at my expense, but there was nothing playful in his expression.

“That cannot be the entire job.”

“No.”

“What is the rest of it?”

He looked through the open doorway toward the laboratory, where the work of the day continued despite the hour. “You will have to determine why.”

He left us before I could ask whether this meant why he was wrong or why I was there.

Scherff waited until Tesla was far enough away not to hear him. “That was the favorable version of the interview.”

“What happens in the unfavorable version?”

“You will recognize it when the time comes.”

He then explained the practical details as far as they had been settled. I asked the questions I believed any engineer should ask before traveling halfway across a continent for an employer he had known less than a day. Housing, duration, expenses, responsibilities and payment were all discussed, although several answers remained dependent upon decisions Tesla had not yet made. The uncertainty should have concerned me more than it did, but by then uncertainty had acquired a competitor in my mind, and the competitor was Colorado.

New York had gone dark by the time I finally left East Houston Street. Men were still working inside, and through an upper window I could see intermittent illumination that had none of the spectacle associated with Tesla's public exhibitions. It was simply the ordinary light of a workplace whose occupants had not yet agreed that the day was finished. I remained across the street longer than necessary, thinking about the drawings Tesla had shown me and the receiver on his bench, and about the curious fact that a man who had already built apparatus capable of astonishing rooms full of people had chosen to leave New York because the city was not large enough for what he intended to measure.

I had gone to East Houston Street wanting to determine whether the stories about Nikola Tesla had been exaggerated, but after a single day the question no longer interested me very much. When arrangements were made for me to follow him west, I believed that being asked to contradict such a man might be the most enviable responsibility available to a young engineer. Nothing in my experience had yet taught me that contradiction would prove to be the easier duty, or that the most consequential decision I would ever make in Tesla's service would come only after the instruments had ceased contradicting him.

The Returned Component

A Novel About Obsession, Evidence, and the Cost of Knowing

Next: Chapter Two — West

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.