The Kingdom of Ohio (17 page)

“You sure gave me a run for my money,” Harrison continues, leaning back in his chair and lighting the cigar. “But as I told you six months ago, I wanted your railroad and, by God, I wasn't going to stop till I got it.”

Morgan sighs. “Mr. Harrison, you seem to believe I wanted to keep the Northern Pacific out of your hands for some personal reason.” He lowers himself into his chair. “However, let me assure you that is not the case.”

“Then why'd you turn down my offer to buy you out?” Harrison exhales a cloud of smoke. “I offered a fair price.”

“It was a fair price.” Morgan concedes. “I refused, Mr. Harrison, because you have already bankrupted a dozen companies. For the public good, an essential piece of infrastructure like the NP cannot be entrusted to such irresponsible care.”

Harrison leans forward, his face darkening. “And you suppose that you can decide what's for the public good? Just like that?”

“Yes.” Morgan closes his eyes, feeling for an instant unutterably weary and alone. “Just like that.”

“I'll be—” Harrison shakes his head, then chuckles bemusedly. “Well, anyway, the NP is mine now. When you saw what I was doing, and chased up the price of that stock, there wasn't a banker in town who'd help me.” A note of genuine admiration enters his voice. “None of 'em wanted to interfere in your business.” He grins. “Except the one.”

“Yes. The Schwab brothers.” Morgan scrutinizes the other man's reaction as he mentions this name. For the briefest of moments, a flicker of fear crosses Harrison's face—but he recovers quickly, the smile returning.

“That's right, I guess you heard by now. They floated me that extra capital I needed. So as of yesterday, Mr. Morgan”—Harrison's cigar goes out and with exaggerated leisure he relights it—“as of yesterday morning, I own fifty-one percent of the old NP. Despite your efforts.”

“That is true,” Morgan nods. “You own fifty-one percent of the Northern Pacific Railroad. You have also caused me a good deal of trouble and expense, Mr. Harrison. Fortunately, my brokers are selling NP stock short as we speak. That should be enough to recoup our costs when you dump your shares on the market.”

“When I dump my—?” An incredulous expression crosses Harrison's face. “Why would I? That damn railroad's mine, understand? I intend to keep it.”

“Because while you and the Schwab brothers were buying stock in my railroad, I found it more convenient to buy out the Schwabs.” Morgan opens a desk drawer and withdraws a folder. “We acquired a controlling interest in their bank yesterday.”

Harrison's features go slack, the cigar dangling, forgotten, in his hand.

Expressionless, Morgan flips through the contents of the folder for a moment, then slides a sheet of paper toward the other man. “Sign here, please.”

“What—” Harrison blinks dumbly and shakes his head. “What's this?”

“In your haste to acquire the NP, Mr. Harrison,” Morgan rumbles, “I believe you agreed to some rather unfavorable terms with the Schwabs. It says here”—he gestures at the folder—“that the balance of your loan can be called in with a notice of twenty-four hours. The document in front of you now is such a notice.”

Harrison stares at the typewritten page, the color draining from his face.

“You owe me thirty-six million dollars, Mr. Harrison.” Morgan climbs to his feet. “As a lump sum, due in cash or securities tomorrow.”

The other man doesn't answer, his face shading from white to ashen gray.

After a moment Morgan sighs. “I take your lack of response to mean you are unable to raise that amount.”

Harrison nods, looking up at the financier like a mouse transfixed by a hawk's stare.

“Believe it or not, Mr. Harrison, I have no interest in ruining you.” Morgan nods toward the office door. “See Mr. Perkins. He has drawn up a payment schedule that covers our costs without destabilizing your other operations, or the market.”

Harrison stumbles to his feet. “But—but why—?” He shakes his head helplessly.

“Why have I decided to offer you terms? Because your bankruptcy would not serve the public good.” Morgan turns away from the other man, toward the windows. “Good day, Mr. Harrison.” A few moments later, he hears the door slam behind him.

Glancing upward, the pale stone of a building against the sky reminds Morgan suddenly of a certain, precise, white-slatted bungalow on a hill with a palm tree next to it, near the banks of the Nile, a few miles from the ancient ruins of Luxor. He had rented the bungalow with his first wife, Amelia, for their honeymoon; she had died there in his arms, coughing herself to death and racked with the spasms of tuberculosis. The first love of his life, dead before their vows were ever consummated.

He thinks of this, dispassionately noting his own momentary grief over having ignored her doctors' insistence on absolute bed rest, as a fact to be filed away for future reference. Morgan remembers this, then brushes away these clinging fragments of the past. He has always prided himself on his clear-eyed perspective and awareness of his responsibilities to society, his freedom from regrets and nostalgia.

There is a soft knock at the door.

“Enter,” Morgan barks.

A secretary in his early twenties timidly pokes his head into the office. “A Mr. Thomas Edison for you, sir.”

“Edison? Send him in.”

DESPITE THE SHELVES of biographies and historical treatises written about Thomas Edison, one crucial detail is nowhere recorded: the moment when the great inventor lost his soul.

If one had to guess, it probably happened at some point after Edison, already famous for his work on the telegraph, opened his research laboratory in Menlo Park and turned his attention to the development of small-scale, practical electric light. At the time, gas lamps and candles were used in private houses (society aesthetes preferred candles, complaining that gaslight made diamonds look dull), but city streets and big public spaces had already started to be illuminated by arc lights, which sparked a brilliant discharge between two carbon electrodes. Arc lights were too intense for domestic use, however, and after the inventor toured a Connecticut arc-lamp plant he became fixated on the idea of subdividing electrical energy into smaller units.

The following years of Edison's life were consumed with the struggle of this project as the inventor worked literally around the clock, sleeping in snatches under his desk, until his own wife and children hardly recognized him. It was during this period that he first met J. P. Morgan, and that the financier became the primary backer of the newly founded Edison Electric Light Company, supplying millions in capital and acquiring a majority stake in the venture.
³⁴
It was Morgan who arranged for the 1881 Paris Expositionto be lit by Edison's system in the first large-scale public demonstration of the filament bulb, and also Morgan who paid for Edison's first two lighting installations in New York: one at the offices of Drexel, Morgan & Co., and the other at a private residence, 219 Madison Avenue, the financier's home.
³⁵

But after the success of the filament lightbulb, and his subsequent invention of the phonograph, some subtle, essential thing had changed for Edison. Perhaps it was the fame and publicity of being heralded as America's “most valuable citizen,” followed everywhere by newspaper reporters. Perhaps it was the betrayals by friends and business associates, hungry for a share of his wealth and glory. Perhaps it was a casualty of the drawn-out electrical war Edison had been forced to fight against Tesla—a rivalry that had been inevitable even before he rejected the younger inventor's alternating-current electrical system.
³⁶
Edison had always been suspicious of theoretical scientists like Tesla, while Tesla was contemptuous of Edison's plodding trial-and-error approach to research, and their relationship was defined by their antithetical natures: Edison the practical, Tesla the overwrought genius; Edison the small-town boy, Tesla the polished European.

Still, Edison could never think of those endless cruel experiments that he and his assistants had conducted in order to discredit the rival inventor's work, without wondering if that was the point when some unnoticed but important part of himself—call it a sense of wonder—had slipped away, leaving him just a tired, aging man with a mind full of machines.

 

 

Standing in a corner of Morgan's living room, on an autumn evening in the year 1897, his back to the luxurious furnishings and the crowd of party guests, the Wizard of Menlo Park briefly considered these things. But all of it was nonsense, he reminded himself. One hundred percent pure nincompoopery, a waste of time and energy.

As he turned from the window Edison's gaze fell on a gilt-framed mirror, and for an instant he hesitated, struck by the mechanics of the moment. Light from the candles in the chandelier overhead, angling downward through the crystal facets and reflected off the mirror's surface, to be absorbed by the eye and reconstructed by his brain into the image of an elderly man with bushy eyebrows, pale blue eyes, wearing a rumpled white linen suit: his own reflection, transmitted instantly from the modest flickering of a half-penny candle overhead.

If there were only a way to use light as a means of sending information at this speed, Edison thinks, a kind of instantaneous Morse code—he shook his head, making a mental note of the idea.

In the background of the mirrored image, the room behind him was a swirl of color and motion, men in evening coats and bejeweled ladies gathered together, their lips moving soundlessly.

Edison's hearing had started to disappear when he was twelve years old, an aftereffect of his bout with rheumatic fever, and had slowly grown worse since then. Most of the time, at the lab among his assistants, blackboards and sheets of drafting paper could substitute for speech well enough that he hardly noticed the handicap. At certain rare introspective moments, Edison was even glad for the affliction that had driven him to pursue his self-taught education, shutting him off from the foolish noise of everyday life. It was only at times like this, during his infrequent appearances at social events, that Edison became aware of the silent chasm between himself and the rest of the world

For a brief instant he pictured the cellar of his parents' house, where he had built his first workshop after being taken out of school—too backward for ordinary lessons, his teachers had said. There in the basement, the shelves of chemicals stored in old milk jars, purchased with the money he earned selling newspapers at the village train station. The sense of discovery he had felt with those early experiments, unlocking new worlds in that quiet space beneath the floorboards.

He shrugged the image away and turned to face the bustle of the financier's soiree. A diamond-encrusted dowager was hovering near his elbow, Edison noticed, indistinct murmurs issuing from her mouth. He nodded politely in response, picturing a device like a windmill strapped in front of her lips to capture the wasted energy of her speech. If enough people would wear such things, he thought, a city could power itself. Call it a fashion accessory of some kind.

Glancing around, he spotted his secretary, Tate, approaching through the crowd, trailed by the young reporter who had been accompanying Edison for the past few weeks. Waving in their direction, the inventor stepped away from the old woman, interrupting her commentary in mid-sentence.

“Been a real pleasure, talking like this.” He smiled amiably. “Have to do it again soon. You take care.”

Ignoring her response, he crossed to stand beside Tate, gripping his shoulder and whispering—at least, he hoped it was a whisper—into the other man's ear. “Think it's about time for us to leave, don't you?”

As usual, instead of answering aloud, the secretary reached for Edison's wrist, tapping out his reply in Morse code: a technique that the inventor had taught all of his closest assistants.

Talked with Morgan
, Tate quickly spelled out.
He wants to see you.

The inventor stifled a sigh. “You realize how many experiments I've got waiting at the lab? All we need, see, is a good solid escape plan. Now, if you examine those windows—”

Tate shook his head, tapping impatiently.
After. Follow me.
As the secretary began threading his way through the crowd, Edison reluctantly trailed him across the room, navigating the crowd of air-displacing mouths, through a doorway into a smaller parlor.

As he entered, Morgan looked up from the green velvet sofa where he was sitting beside his wife Fanny and waved the inventor toward an overstuffed armchair flanked by a pair of large ceramic elephants. Edison lowered himself into the seat, dimly aware of Tate and the journalist hovering somewhere behind him.