Hey, it’s Nikola.
I have good news for the first time since I arrived in this country.
After the ditch situation, my foreman connected me to a couple of men — a businessman named Brown and a lawyer named Peck. I explained my Alternating Current system to them. Peck isn’t a scientist — when I started talking about rotating magnetic fields he looked at me like I was speaking Serbian. Which, to be fair, I sometimes accidentally do.
But when I told him my system could do what Edison’s does at a fraction of the cost and across a hundred times the distance, Peck didn’t need to understand the science. He understood what that meant in dollars. They gave me a laboratory. My own laboratory.
Three weeks before this I was standing in a ditch, and now I’m walking into a room full of equipment with my name next to the door. I stood in the doorway for a long time and just looked at it. I’m not an emotional person but I’ll admit my eyes were not entirely dry.
I built the motor in weeks. The one I designed in my head while digging — I built it exactly as I’d seen it, and it worked on the very first attempt. Peck watched the demonstration and kept walking behind the machine looking for some kind of trick. There was no trick. It just worked.
Peck started looking for someone powerful enough to take this technology and go to war with Edison. He found a man named George Westinghouse.
Westinghouse is an industrialist out of Pittsburgh — factories, railroads, enormous wealth. But he’s not like Edison, and he’s not like the men who stole my company. I walked into his office fully expecting to be lied to again. Instead this man sat down, listened to every word I said, asked real questions, and at the end made me an offer so generous I honestly thought he was making fun of me. For the first time since I came to this country, someone treated me like a person and not like something to use up and throw away. I could have wept right there in his office in Pittsburgh. I didn’t, because I have some dignity left, but it was close.
He actually paid.
So now the situation is this: the immigrant Edison refused to pay is now funded, armed, and holding the technology that makes everything Edison built look like a toy.
He doesn’t know yet. He’s still sitting comfortably in New Jersey, fully convinced he runs the future of electricity. He has absolutely no idea what’s coming for him.
I almost feel bad.
I’ll write again soon. Things are about to get very ugly.
— Nikola
