He was a leader, an opportunist, egoist, and charmer. He was also one of the most influential personalities in the glamorous futuristic field of electrical engineering. Having discovered this new volcano of vision in Nikola Tesla, Martin approached him with the idea of helping choreograph Tesla’s entrée into the electrical-engineering community.
The Serb was mysterious. He could rebuff lesser mortals and enjoyed the habits of a recluse. But Thomas Commerford Martin had tact and tenacity of purpose. He helped arrange for the esteemed engineering professor William Anthony, of Cornell University, to come to Liberty Street and test the new AC motors for efficiency. And Tesla reciprocated by traveling to Cornell to display his motors to Anthony and three other professors, R. H. Thurston, Edward Nicholas, and William Ryan. Anthony, who was twenty years their senior and a graduate of both Brown and Yale universities, had just retired from Cornell after fifteen years in order to take a position designing electrical measuring instruments for Mather Electrical Company in Manchester, Connecticut. Soon to be president of the AIEE himself, Anthony was pleased with his tests. Along with Martin,he helped coax Tesla into presenting his motor before the newly formed electrical society.
Martin had great difficulty persuading Tesla “to give any paper at all.” Martin said that “Tesla stood very much alone, [as] the majority [of the electricians] were entirely unfamiliar with [the motor’s] value.” In haste, Tesla wrote out his lecture the night before in pencil. It had not been easy for him to construct an efficient machine, but having finally succeeded and having passed all of Professor Anthony’s stringent tests for efficiency, “nothing now stood in the way of [its] commercial development…except that they had to be constructed with a view to operating on the circuits then existing which in this country were all of high frequency.” 22
On May 15, 1888, Tesla appeared before the AIEE to read his landmark paper “A New Alternating Current Motor.” He had already filed for fourteen of the forty fundamental patents on the AC system, but he was still reluctant to fully announce his work. Realizing that the invention was worth at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars, Tesla and company sought investors through the advice of their new patent attorneys, Parker W. Page, Leonard E. Curtis, and Gen. Samuel Duncan, the last a leader of the firm and respected member of the New York Bar Association. 23 By the time of the lecture, Tesla, Peck, and Brown had already been negotiating with prospective buyers, such as Mr. Butterworth, a gas manufacturer from San Francisco, and, through General Duncan, George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh, 24 but nothing as yet was settled.
Westinghouse was already utilizing an alternating current system developed by the “erratic” French inventor Lucien Gaulard and the “sporty” entrepreneur John Dixon Gibbs of England. 25 In 1885 his manager of the electrical division, Guido Pantaleoni, had returned to Turin, Italy, to attend the funeral of his father. By coincidence, through his engineering professor Galileo Ferraris, whom Westinghouse himself had met while visiting Italy in 1882, Pantaleoni was introduced to Lucian Gaulard, who had installed his AC apparatus between Tivoli and Rome. Gaulard and Gibbs had already made headlines two years earlier when they first exhibited their invention at the Royal Aquarium in London; but in Turin the system won a gold medal and a prize of £400 awarded by the Italian government. Westinghouse purchased the American patent rights in late November after receiving a cable request from Pantaleoni.
The Gaulard-Gibbs system, although improved by the Hungarian ZBD system, still had serious problems. For Westinghouse, this was further complicated by the fact that Edison owned the option on the ZBD; and it was probably to block competitors that Edison purchased the
The Serb was mysterious. He could rebuff lesser mortals and enjoyed the habits of a recluse. But Thomas Commerford Martin had tact and tenacity of purpose. He helped arrange for the esteemed engineering professor William Anthony, of Cornell University, to come to Liberty Street and test the new AC motors for efficiency. And Tesla reciprocated by traveling to Cornell to display his motors to Anthony and three other professors, R. H. Thurston, Edward Nicholas, and William Ryan. Anthony, who was twenty years their senior and a graduate of both Brown and Yale universities, had just retired from Cornell after fifteen years in order to take a position designing electrical measuring instruments for Mather Electrical Company in Manchester, Connecticut. Soon to be president of the AIEE himself, Anthony was pleased with his tests. Along with Martin,he helped coax Tesla into presenting his motor before the newly formed electrical society.
Martin had great difficulty persuading Tesla “to give any paper at all.” Martin said that “Tesla stood very much alone, [as] the majority [of the electricians] were entirely unfamiliar with [the motor’s] value.” In haste, Tesla wrote out his lecture the night before in pencil. It had not been easy for him to construct an efficient machine, but having finally succeeded and having passed all of Professor Anthony’s stringent tests for efficiency, “nothing now stood in the way of [its] commercial development…except that they had to be constructed with a view to operating on the circuits then existing which in this country were all of high frequency.” 22
On May 15, 1888, Tesla appeared before the AIEE to read his landmark paper “A New Alternating Current Motor.” He had already filed for fourteen of the forty fundamental patents on the AC system, but he was still reluctant to fully announce his work. Realizing that the invention was worth at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars, Tesla and company sought investors through the advice of their new patent attorneys, Parker W. Page, Leonard E. Curtis, and Gen. Samuel Duncan, the last a leader of the firm and respected member of the New York Bar Association. 23 By the time of the lecture, Tesla, Peck, and Brown had already been negotiating with prospective buyers, such as Mr. Butterworth, a gas manufacturer from San Francisco, and, through General Duncan, George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh, 24 but nothing as yet was settled.
Westinghouse was already utilizing an alternating current system developed by the “erratic” French inventor Lucien Gaulard and the “sporty” entrepreneur John Dixon Gibbs of England. 25 In 1885 his manager of the electrical division, Guido Pantaleoni, had returned to Turin, Italy, to attend the funeral of his father. By coincidence, through his engineering professor Galileo Ferraris, whom Westinghouse himself had met while visiting Italy in 1882, Pantaleoni was introduced to Lucian Gaulard, who had installed his AC apparatus between Tivoli and Rome. Gaulard and Gibbs had already made headlines two years earlier when they first exhibited their invention at the Royal Aquarium in London; but in Turin the system won a gold medal and a prize of £400 awarded by the Italian government. Westinghouse purchased the American patent rights in late November after receiving a cable request from Pantaleoni.
The Gaulard-Gibbs system, although improved by the Hungarian ZBD system, still had serious problems. For Westinghouse, this was further complicated by the fact that Edison owned the option on the ZBD; and it was probably to block competitors that Edison purchased the
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