The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore

Author:Graham Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what is going on.

—JACQUES COUSTEAU

PAUL’S COLLECTION OF Harold Brown’s incendiary editorials had grown considerably over the previous months. The pile rested on the floor in his office, stacked to a point of structural instability. Almost every major newspaper in America had published one of the screeds. Their tone was as unyieldingly hyperbolic as the first. Alternating current had arrived, it had come to murder your children, and its deliverer was George Westinghouse.

Paul and Westinghouse had tried to educate the public on the science involved, to explain why alternating current was in fact less dangerous than direct. Westinghouse had personally penned editorials vouching for the safety of his systems. But so far the public had not been as moved by scientific reasoning as they had been by Brown’s colorful fabrications.

Brown was now taking his campaign a step further. He was set to launch a traveling road show. He would demonstrate to the public just how deadly Westinghouse’s current would be.

On New Year’s Day, 1889, Paul took the train to West Orange, New Jersey.

He found a crowded lecture hall. He guessed there to be almost a hundred other attendees besides himself, comprised of city safety officials, lighting company representatives, assorted engineers, and a healthy contingent of reporters. Brown’s tour was being advertised all along the East Coast. He was to perform in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. Edison country, Paul thought. Though on such trips Brown would have to travel on trains with brakes designed by George Westinghouse.

Harold Brown entered the lecture hall. To Paul’s surprise, he looked more like an actuary than a huckster. He was small, mild of demeanor, soft voiced; if he wasn’t the man of the hour, he would have disappeared into the crowd. Brown began his lecture by explaining that he had no “financial or commercial interest” in the nationwide debate over A/C versus D/C; his involvement in this scientific dispute was motivated only by his commitment to the truth. He then directed his audience’s attention to an animal cage. It was constructed from wood, but strung with copper wires between the bars. Inside, Brown had placed a generously sized black retriever. An assistant attached wires to the animal’s legs. One on the front right, the other on the rear left. The unsuspecting retriever did not bark as the copper pressed against its fur. Brown then showed his assembled crowd a direct-current generator. It was of “the type manufactured by Mr. Edison,” he explained. With the flick of a switch, Brown sent what he described as three hundred volts through the dog. The animal emitted a small yelp and briefly struggled to shake free. But of course the shackles wouldn’t budge.

“You see,” Brown intoned, “the direct current hurts no worse than a pinprick.”

He then turned the generator to four hundred volts and reapplied the current to the unhappy retriever. The barking grew louder.

Next it was seven hundred volts of D/C.

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