The Last Days of Night

Arriving to the Huntington’s one day, Paul is angry to discover a stranger at Tesla’s bedside. Agnes has brought in an “alienist,” or the predecessor of a modern-day psychoanalyst, named Dr. Daniel Touff. Touff is fascinated by Tesla’s fit, not deeming him sane or insane, but analyzing his hallucinatory state in a new approach. Paul recalls that a similar state preceded Tesla’s alternating current invention. This fit is a part of Tesla’s creative process. To Tesla, imagining is the same as inventing, leading Paul to question, “What if Edison believes that saying that you’ve invented something is just as good as inventing it?” (166).

This thought inspires Paul to shift his Edison case’s entire argument. He retraces Edison’s steps: Edison announced that he’d invented the light bulb, but only let select reporters view it for mere minutes at a time. He filed the patent on the actual bulb a full year later, then his products started hitting the marketplace another year after that.

Within that time, other inventors moved on to other projects, assuming Edison had solved all the engineering challenges they themselves were also facing in their race for electric light. Paul wonders, however, if Edison’s team didn’t have a working lightbulb until much later. If he patented the idea of the lightbulb, rather than the lightbulb itself. If Paul can prove that Edison’s patents were a lie, his case would be a “moot point.”

Winning the case would open the lightbulb market, and the public would decide, rather than the courts, which they prefer. The last thing Edison wants, Paul contends, is a fair fight.

Paul wonders if Agnes has affection for him as she does for Tesla, concluding that she may someday be his friend but probably nothing more.

He begins gathering materials for his new argument. Edison’s actual patent application is only three pages long: two sketches of the lamp and one brief summary. There are also pages and pages of later correspondences between Edison and his patent lawyers, all dated and verified.

Among his materials are the other patents filed for over a dozen similar incandescent lamps, as well as interviews, pamphlets, and articles surrounding Edison’s invention.

The sheer amount of material to comb through is daunting. Paul thinks to ask Carter and Hughes to help, but their strategy is defensive, and he doesn’t think they’ll change it.

Paul muses on Edison’s epic laboratory. He compares Edison’s system to a kingdom, an empire of invention, not unlike empires of other successful industrial barons. Edison’s genius “was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention” (172). Edison looks for weaknesses in the marketplace, areas ripe for invention, then sets engineers to work on them until they make breakthroughs. Then, Edison’s army tinkers with the creations until they become full-fledged inventions. After his engineers’ trials and errors, the finished product only has one name: Edison.

The chapter ends with Paul envying Edison and wondering why he can’t have a legal organization of his own.

The historically anti-intellectual United States has found itself on the forefront of scientific innovation. The two most technologically advanced laboratories in the world are in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, not to mention within the mind of Tesla. Paul wonders at the deep anxiety underlying this age, reflected in the Gothic architecture of Columbia’s campus.

Paul sits in on a former professor’s moot court class to pick out a few law students to hire for his new legal “factory.” He is impressed by the ones who are the best storytellers: “It wasn’t that their legal analysis was the most astute; it was that they knew how to lay out their analysis in a concise narrative” (174).

He explains to the four he’s chosen that they will be “associate attorneys” to assist him in his work on the Edison v. Westinghouse case. One of the students, Bynes, challenges the idea, saying legal work is categorically different than physical work. Paul responds, “If you can arrange a process for producing one, why not a process to produce the other?” (175). He offers them $10 a week and positions at the firm by the end of a year. Inspired by Edison, Paul hopes to construct a “new phalanx of a legal entity” (176). Paul “stores” his new assistants in a cheap office building half a mile from his firm.

Once Paul runs out of his personal money to pay his assistants, he will embezzle funds from Westinghouse’s account. When his partners find out what he’s doing, he will certainly lose his job and Westinghouse or his partners will likely sue him. Paul knows the huge risk he’s taking. If he succeeds, his partners will learn everything only in his moment of victory. If he fails, the Westinghouse Electric Company will go bankrupt, and Paul will be jobless, back in Tennessee. 

Tesla spends Christmas with the Huntingtons, while Paul spends it alone, working at his apartment. The day after, he has arranged an interview for Agnes at the New York Times. His plan is to “use his two clients’ respective reputations in each other’s service. He thought of this like the symbols common to all of Thomas Edison’s products” (179). Paul is branding himself as a lawyer.

Agnes rarely grants interviews, so the journalist, Leopold Drucker, is thrilled to do it, even though Paul has compensated him with exclusive access to Westinghouse and reports of his products. Paul emphasizes that he hasn’t stooped to Edison’s level by bribing Drucker; rather, he is fostering a relationship.

Agnes carefully crafts a subtle attack on Foster. By using very choice words, she makes it seem like she is trying to protect his reputation, but her words cast Foster in a bad light. The interview goes to press that evening.

As they leave, Drucker takes Paul to look at a full-page ad taken out by Brown, the slanderous reporter bribed by Edison to denounce A/C.

Brown has been slandering Westinghouse and alternating current in many newspapers for months. He’s now taking to the road to demonstrate how deadly A/C could be to the public, stopping all along the East Coast.

Paul attends his demonstration in New Jersey, alongside about 100 others (engineers, city safety officials, lighting company reps, and reporters). At the head of the room, there is a dog in a cage. Brown has attached wires to the dog’s limbs. He first demonstrates low voltages of direct current from an Edison machine. They hurt the dog but cause no lasting damage.

Then he replaces it with another generator “identical to the variety produced by Mr. Westinghouse” (185). When he turns on the device with the same low voltage, and it kills the dog in seconds. Brown asks the audience what that might do to a child.

Despite a formal protest by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Brown continues performing this same demonstration with different dogs. Paul’s hopes that the public will find these displays horrifically comical are in vain. Although newspapers denounce the act, they denounce Westinghouse’s technologies, as well. Negative press for Brown leads to negative press for Westinghouse, as Brown’s villainy is associated with Westinghouse’s device.

Paul visits Tesla, who recognizes him immediately but then doesn’t speak again. Still, he is showing improvement, and Paul hopes he will be back to his A/C task as well as his lightbulb redesign soon.

Agnes and Paul have begun a late-night ritual of drinking a glass of port together at the end of his visits to Tesla. Paul is grateful for the friendship, an oddity in his work-dominated life, though he still longs for romance with her. Paul tells her that he’s come across multiple rejected patent applications from Brown, including a design for a lightbulb. Brown, a failed inventor, seems to be playing a fake Edison.