The Last Days of Night

This chapter is a series of short vignettes of fast-moving action. In the first, Paul finishes his phone conversation with Westinghouse. Morgan waits for him in the doorway with his cigar. Paul tells Westinghouse that Tesla is alive in Tennessee, but Westinghouse must tell his entire staff that Tesla is in Chicago working on the new lightbulb design. Westinghouse resists lying to his entire staff, but it’s the only way to get the false information to Fessenden (thus, to Edison) without arousing suspicion.

The next evening, Paul finds Agnes leaving the opera house. He tells her the time has come for her to collect Tesla from Tennessee and bring him back to New York. He tells Agnes of the recent developments: everything Morgan has told him and their plan to send Edison to Chicago where he will be seeking to kill Tesla. Agnes tries to comfort him over his difficult conversation with Westinghouse, but Paul is focused on his task at hand.

Next, Paul goes to his office and speaks with Carter. He’d written from Nashville to delay the bankruptcy, but his partners have otherwise been left in the dark. Carter calls Paul’s secrets unconscionable, but Paul insists the secrecy is necessary for a little while longer. He tells Carter that he needs to sue someone represented by Tesla’s lawyer, Serrell. Mysteriously, he doesn’t care who it is.

Paul receives a telegram from Morgan. Heavily coded, it states that Edison and his entire team are on their way to Chicago to locate Tesla. Paul responds that since the journey to Chicago takes 36 hours, they have three days to finish. Later, Paul travels to Massachusetts to meet with Coffin, the Westinghouse licensee who had betrayed them to Edison and Brown. He is there to offer Coffin the position of president of Edison General Electric Company. With the most financially successful organization, Coffin is the best businessman of the scientist bunch, with “a profit ratio triple that of EGE and quadruple that of Westinghouse” (313).

Coffin will sell his company to EGE, Paul explains, just as Morgan convinces the other investors to fire Edison. After combining the two companies, Morgan will instate Coffin as president. Coffin concludes that in this position, he will be able to negotiate licensing deals with Westinghouse. Edison will have to retire. He agrees on one condition: Edison’s name will be removed from the organization’s title. Thus, General Electric is born. 

Paul and Westinghouse collect a healthy, vibrant Tesla from his carriage upon arriving in Manhattan. Westinghouse is overcome: “Paul could not pretend to know how deeply he’d hurt Westinghouse with his subterfuge, or how profoundly Tesla moved him by descending, alive, from a two-horse hansom” (316). Agnes has gotten Tesla to New York right on time. Paul reflects that for a person living under a fake name and history, she is the most trustworthy person he knows.

Westinghouse and Paul show Tesla to his shiny new laboratory, fully stocked with necessary equipment, taking up a full floor of a building in a coveted neighborhood on Fifth Avenue. Tesla’s royalties on Westinghouse sales have been adding up in his absence; they’ve composed a trust that has paid for this large laboratory. Tesla immediately begins working. “‘Do you think he likes it?’ said Paul. ‘I think for him any moment he is not creating is a moment spent thinking about things to create’” (318).

Paul interrupts Tesla’s work to ask him to give up his royalty fee and essentially give his technology to the world as a gift. Agnes is irate, trying to talk to Paul in private, but he refuses. If Westinghouse goes bankrupt, he argues, Tesla won’t receive his royalties anyway. This is the only way to beat Edison and keep America from unsafe D/C and a decade of technological backwardness: “Tesla’s face darkened. This was a serious and terrible consequence that he had not previously imagined” (320).

Agnes advocates for Tesla to wait until his lawyer is present to make a decision. Serrell is away in DC, however, defending an arbitrary suit from Paul’s partners. Agnes sees through all of this, furious at Paul and Westinghouse for taking away Tesla’s financial security. Her anger stings Paul more than he thinks it should. Tesla reassures her that he will have many more ideas that can make him money. He signs the contract, agreeing to help “for the future of these sciences” (321).

Paul chases after Agnes, catching up with her on the street as she tries to hail a cab. She calls him despicable, a criminal, manipulative, and a fraud, telling him the Jayne is a much better man than he. Paul is hurt and tries to explain himself in vain. He feels everything he’s done has in some way been out of his love for her: that if he succeeds, he will be worthy of her love. She refuses his statement, “Your need to beat Edison is so great, your own ego so consuming and cancerous, that it has devoured whatever was good in you to begin with. You are no better than Edison; you are worse” (324).

Paul is humiliated. He thinks Agnes would have understood bending the truth, being as she had lied about who she was to gain the standing she is in now. She slaps him across the face when he says that everyone does things they aren’t proud of. He responds angrily, saying she is acting like an ignorant child. Agnes reveals that she had even considered breaking off her engagement to Jayne for Paul, thinking that Paul actually understood her. Before walking away, she tells Paul she’s seen his cynical, social-climber-type before. She tells him that winning will only show him that he’s not much of a man at all, let alone a great one.

Trying to put Agnes's words out of his head, Paul works hard alongside his partners to put the finishing touches on the final paperwork. Distrusting Morgan, they pour over everything, but find no dishonesty or sneakiness. They are at the ends of their ropes, barely sleeping, crawling to the finish line.

One morning, Morgan signs the paperwork anticlimactically at his office. On his desk is the first electric lamp, Edison’s. Present are a few of Morgan’s attorneys, Westinghouse, and Paul. Westinghouse gives Paul the simple acknowledgment that he did it. Paul responds that they did it together. He wishes Erastus was there to see him in his moment of victory, but he knows his father would never understand what Paul has done. Just then, a pale and disheveled Thomas Edison walks into the room.

Edison has come to confront his betrayers. Paul fears Edison will be violent, either by bringing Batchelor with a gun or trying to destroy the paperwork. Edison is alone, however, and despairing. Edison doesn’t embody the fearsome rage Paul anticipates; rather, he is deflated, knowing he’s been beaten. He begs them to keep his name on the company. His ego still supersedes all.

Edison pleads with Westinghouse to understand him. He says that Morgan and the lawyers haven’t built anything with their own hands, as they have. He bows in the formal salutation of a losing general to a winning one, conceding that A/C may be the better system, but his name shouldn’t be forgotten. Westinghouse assures him that everyone will know General Electric came from him. Paul is furious and horrified. His simmering bitterness of the last few years erupts: “I hope they forget you by the morning,” he tells him. Edison lied, cheated, stole, spied, attempted to murder Tesla, almost killed Paul, bought off the police, bribed a state legislature, and paid off a judge. Paul says:

‘[You] promoted a horrific instrument of death in an attempt to convince the public of something that was not true. You would knowingly install an electrical system across the cities of the United States that would kill thousands per year. And those are just the crimes I know about. You deserve a punishment far worse than this’ (331).

Edison admits he’s done wrong but not all those things are true. Westinghouse again promises that Edison’s name will live on, and the rivals shake hands. Westinghouse apologizes for his part in things and encourages Edison to start anew, like his old days of fresh inventing.

Anticlimactically, Edison leaves the room. Paul is shocked that Westinghouse could apologize, after everything Edison’s done, but Westinghouse assures him that one day he’ll understand.