The Last Days of Night

Paul has been representing George Westinghouse in litigation against Edison for months, but this is the first time they are meeting in person. In the cab to Edison’s fashionable downtown office, the driver reveals some of the mythology around, and curated by Edison, including his nickname of “the Wizard,” and the fact that his mother died long ago: “He makes miracles. Lightning in a glass bottle. Voices in a copper wire. What kind of man can do that?” (9). Paul doesn’t see the magic in this man, only the fact that he’s rich.

Edison’s right-hand man, Charles Batchelor, meets Paul at Edison’s building and leads him to Edison’s lavish office. Edison has tomorrow’s newspaper with a front-page article denouncing electrical power due to the day’s accident. The wires the burned workman had been servicing belong to U.S. Illuminating Company, another competitor that is now out of the race to bring electricity to all citizens.

Edison has called Paul to his office to urge him to give up, as Edison is the inventor, and his company is much larger than Westinghouse Electric Company. Paul responds by countersuing Edison, as he’s bought the earliest lightbulb patents (belonging to Sawyer and Man) that preceded Edison’s. Edison isn’t worried by this, as he is suing more than just Westinghouse: He has hundreds of lawsuits against all Westinghouse subsidiaries. To win his own lawsuit, Westinghouse will have to win all of Edison’s as well.

Edison displays his power by pressing a small button on his desk that controls the light of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, turning it off and then on again, and Paul feels a deep sense of fear.

This chapter details Paul’s past path from law school to his current position representing George Westinghouse. Recruited by the venerated Walter Carter immediately after law school, Paul almost immediately found himself in the middle of a rift between Carter and his partner. Paul had to choose between them, opting to stay with Carter. Although his firm was much smaller and had taken far fewer clients, Carter’s firm was where Paul would make partner (Carter, Hughes and Cravath). Discouraged by his inability to bring in new clients initially, Paul bemoans the paradoxical curse of being a prodigy but never feeling like a prodigy, wishing sometimes that he was still just a clerk.

A distant uncle recommends Paul to George Westinghouse, who reaches out to Paul promptly, to his surprise. Paul takes Westinghouse’s private train to his house for dinner. Upset over failing to capitalize on an opportunity to impress Westinghouse, Paul gets drunk and challenges one of the dinner guests on a racist comment (the professor was complaining about a black doctoral candidate teaching physics at Yale). Paul reveals his liberal roots: His grandfather supported the education of women at Oberlin, and his father founded Fisk (a “Negro college”). Paul says, “A generation that could have been lost to the fields will instead understand more about your air brakes and electrical wiring than I ever could” (22).

Westinghouse pulls Paul aside after dinner, to the surprise of everyone. He explains his legal situation with Edison, observing that although Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, his improvements upon the design are tremendous: “Edison is not suing me—he is suing progress itself because he lacks the ability to invent it” (23). He asks Paul to represent Westinghouse in this one-billion-dollar lawsuit.

Continuing with the flashback, Westinghouse proves to be an aloof client, with little interest in the legal details of the case. He comes to life at the mention of Edison’s name, bristling at the idea that he’s stolen Edison’s invention. Paul, “neither a scientist nor an engineer” (26), has no idea who is right; his only goal is to defend his client successfully.

The day after his late-night meeting with Edison, Paul travels to Pittsburgh and tells Westinghouse of their conversation. When he tells about Edison turning the light in the Statue of Liberty’s torch off and on from a switch on his desk, from a few miles away, Westinghouse refuses to believe it. “It’s the problem of distance,” he lectures Paul. “My own men go sleepless trying to solve it” (27). He decides that Edison must be sending a message to a controller with a generator much closer to the torch. When he asks Paul to describe the switch, Paul says he doesn’t remember.

Paul suggests a compromise: a merger that would pay each man royalties. Westinghouse again vehemently declares that his bulbs are far superior to Edison’s, and Paul recognizes the similarities between Edison and his client: “Each was so confident of his own genius as to be disdainful of the other’s” (29).

Westinghouse reveals that six months ago, he had offered Edison a compromise not unlike Paul’s proposal. He received a single word response from Edison: Never.

Written as a monologue for Westinghouse from Paul, this chapter ruminates on the history of electric light and the precise definitions within the lawsuit. Invented almost a century before, the first electric lamps were garish and dangerous, not fit for indoor use. On September 16, 1878, the already famous Edison (his telegraph and telephone work was already celebrated) announced that he had solved the problem of creating a safe, pleasing, and reliable indoor incandescent electric lamp. He’d have lower Manhattan wired within months.

Edison held private demonstrations for select reporters and investors to see his lit bulbs for a few minutes at a time: “For the first time in their lives, they witnessed a new kind of light […] The men wrote as if they’d discovered a new color. And they had named it Edison” (32). 

Over a year later, Edison filed a patent on the incandescent light bulb. A copy of this patent sets on Paul’s desk. Paul breaks down, word by word, the sentence: “Who invented the lightbulb?” For “who,” he questions how many others had helped Edison in his lab, and how many ideas were already in journals that Edison may have pilfered.

For “invented,” Paul raises the issue of Edison’s lightbulb being a brand-new invention or simply an iteration of a previous invention. Paul observes that others had already taken out patents on incandescent lamps before Edison (specifically Joseph Swan, as well as Sawyer and Man).

For “the,” Paul wonders why the definite article. Could Edison have simply invented “a” lightbulb? Edison’s lawyers were claiming that the patent covers all electric light bulbs, “because incandescent light itself was covered by Edison’s patent” (33).

For “lightbulb,” Paul wonders if the concept is “non-obvious,” as a patent requires. With the history of work in electric light, it seems Edison’s version of the lightbulb is only one offshoot of a larger arc of invention. He agrees with Westinghouse’s assertion that Edison owning the patent on lightbulbs as a whole is bad for scientific progress and everyone who might benefit from light. The chapter concludes with Westinghouse voicing his approval of Paul.

A rush of lightbulb lawsuits between large and small electric companies sweeps the States. Paul is busy trying to manage Westinghouse’s lawsuit as well as deflecting his own partners from poaching on his case. The other younger partner in his firm, Hughes, tells Paul that Edison has fired his senior staff, speculating that something must be going wrong in Edison’s lab. Paul intimates that it may be the problem with distance that Westinghouse had mentioned regarding the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Hughes proposes they try to engage one of Edison’s former top engineers, Reginald Fessenden, to their cause.

Fessenden has been teaching since Edison fired him. Paul visits him at the Purdue campus, where he finds Fessenden bitter and angry, revealing that the reason for his and many others’ departures was Edison’s stock values plummeting due to how much capital it is costing Edison to fight this legal battle.

Paul offers Fessenden a deal: to give out information about Edison and his laboratory’s secrets in exchange for a well-compensated position in Westinghouse’s laboratory as head of engineering. Fessenden accepts, and Paul starts asking questions about Edison’s process. Edison didn’t use others’ light bulb designs to forward his own; He used their designs to see what not to do. Edison’s laboratory is ingenious, operating as an “industrial process of invention,” working on “great projects from the top down” (42). Edison has truly developed the design for his light bulb on his own, in his own laboratory. Fessenden refers Paul to another disgruntled engineer who Edison fired: Nikola Tesla.