New Jersey, General Electric Central Laboratory.
Thomas Edison held a file in his hand, polishing the edge of a piece of insulating Bakelite. Various sizes of brass gears and glass fragments were scattered across the workbench.
Heinrich White pushed open the door and walked in.
He held a draft of the "Home Power Supply Agreement" obtained from the legal department.
"Tom, how is the progress on the Civilian Electricity Meter the boss wanted?"
White walked to the workbench and glanced at the new device, which was a full size smaller than an industrial Electricity Meter.
Edison put down the file, picked up a glass cover polished bright with a cotton cloth, and fitted it tightly onto the base.
"It's mostly finished; the volume has been reduced by half."
Edison pointed to the white ceramic tube on the side of the base.
"This is the blow-out fuse added as requested. The voltage for home use is stepped down to 110 volts by a transformer. If a household circuit shorts or the current suddenly overloads, the lead wire inside this ceramic tube will melt instantly, cutting off the power. The house won't burn down."
White picked up the compact Electricity Meter and weighed it.
"Have you tested the sensitivity of the dial? Home power consumption is low; if the aluminum disc's rotational resistance is too high, the meter might not even move for users who only turn on one or two lights a month."
"Of course... I switched to a lighter aluminum alloy and re-lubricated the bearings. Even with only half an ampere of current, it will turn dutifully."
Edison yawned; he had stayed up all night to adjust this set of gears.
"The prototype for the Electric Fan has also been assembled in the next workshop. That thing is a total power-hungry monster."
White put the Civilian Electricity Meter back on the table.
"Consuming power is a good thing. Box up the first batch of ten Electricity Meters and twenty Electric Fans. Vincent Thorne and his people are waiting for the goods in Manhattan."
Two days later.
New York, Greenwich Village, Third Block.
May in New York had already begun to show the sweltering heat of early summer.
The air felt like a mass of soggy cotton, clogging one's chest.
Archibald Vance stood under the porch of his two-story brownstone residence. He had taken off his suit jacket and wore only a vest, using a linen handkerchief to constantly wipe away sweat.
His wife, Mrs. Vance, stood inside the doorway, nervously watching several workers in dirty canvas overalls.
OConnor, the lineman, shouldered a bundle of copper wire wrapped in black rubber and climbed a ladder to the second floor of the Vance house's exterior wall.
He used a hand drill to make holes in the red bricks, hammered in wooden wedges, and then screwed on white porcelain insulators to fix the wires.
"Be careful! That's brand new wallpaper!"
Mrs. Vance watched a wire pass through the window frame into the living room and couldn't help but call out a reminder.
Vincent Thorne stood next to Vance, his face full of smiles.
"Madam, please rest assured. Our workers are very experienced. All indoor wiring will be covered with polished wooden moldings, attached to the baseboards and ceiling edges, and will never ruin the beauty of your room."
By the porch pillar, another worker was fixing the glass-covered Civilian Electricity Meter to the brick wall.
In less than two hours, the indoor wiring was completed.
A brass chandelier with five incandescent bulbs was installed in the center of the living room.
A desk lamp was also added to the study table.
"Mr. Vance, the circuit is connected," OConnor said, walking out with his toolbox. "You can flip the switch now."
Vance took a deep breath and walked into the living room with a mix of anticipation and nervousness.
Hearing the commotion, the neighbors also gathered outside the door, poking their heads in to look.
Vance walked up to the toggle switch on the walnut base on the wall.
"Do I just press it down?"
Vance looked back at Vincent.
"Yes, just press it. No need to look for matches like lighting gas."
Vincent made a gesture of invitation.
Vance extended his finger and pressed the brass lever firmly.
*Click.*
The five glass bulbs on the living room ceiling instantly burst into a steady golden-white light.
There was no hissing of leaking gas, no pungent odor, and certainly no black soot. Every corner of the room was illuminated clearly.
A chorus of exclamations came from the neighbors outside.
"God, this is brighter than the midday sun."
Mrs. Vance covered her mouth, looking at the light bulbs.
"My velvet curtains are finally saved."
"This is just the appetizer, Mr. Vance."
Vincent walked in carrying a heavy iron block.
It was a mechanical device with a base made of cast iron and a brass mesh guard on top. Inside the mesh were four fan blades stamped from thin brass sheets. Behind the base, a black cylinder protruded.
Vincent placed the twenty-pound Electric Fan on the living room coffee table.
"This is the latest product from Argyle Laboratory. An indoor breeze-making machine. We usually call it an Electric Fan."
Vincent plugged a wire from the back of the fan into the power outlet reserved on the wall.
"Mr. Vance, perhaps you could sit on the sofa to experience it."
Vance sat on the sofa across from the coffee table with half-belief.
Vincent turned the knob on the fan's base.
The motor at the back emitted a low hum.
The brass blades began to spin, faster and faster, until they turned into a blur inside the mesh.
A strong, steady stream of air blew out from the mesh, hitting Vance directly in the face.
In this sweltering weather where even using a hand fan felt like too much effort, this mechanically generated gale was like rain after a long drought.
The sweat on Vance's forehead was blown by the wind, instantly bringing a great sense of coolness. The corners of his vest fluttered in the breeze.
"This... this is incredible!"
Vance closed his eyes, enjoying the blast of the gale, and couldn't help but laugh out loud.
"It's like the sea breeze of the Atlantic Ocean has been packed into this iron cage!"
Seeing Vance's hair being blown by the wind, the neighbors outside the window crowded forward.
"Hey... Vance! Is that iron cage safe? Will it cut off your fingers?" a neighbor shouted.
Vincent stepped forward and patted the brass mesh guard.
"Absolutely safe. The gaps in the mesh are very small; an adult's finger cannot fit through at all. As long as you don't stuff long hair or ties into it, it's the safest tool for escaping the heat."
Vance stood up from the sofa and walked over to Vincent.
"How much for this fan? I'll take it. And I want one installed in my second-floor bedroom as well."
Vincent pulled a contract from his briefcase.
"The fan sells for fifteen dollars each, Mr. Vance. As for the electricity bill, the meter outside will faithfully record it."
"Fifteen dollars, that's really not expensive. It's well worth it."
Vance pulled out his checkbook without hesitation and wrote a string of numbers on the coffee table.
"This is for the installation and equipment fees."
Vincent tucked away the check.
"A wise choice, Mr. Vance."
As Vincent and the workers walked out of the Vance home, the onlookers immediately swarmed them.
"Mr. Thorne, install a set for me too. I want that machine that blows wind!"
"Me too! My house is on the corner, run the lines to me first. I can pay a ten-dollar rush fee!"
Vincent looked at these middle-class people waving their cash, and a smile spread across his face.
Industrial electricity is about calculating costs, while home electricity is about selling comfort. In this field, no one can refuse Argyle' copper wires.
At the confluence of the Ohio River and the Monongahela River, the river terminal on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.
The river surface here presented a murky yellow-brown color.
Densely packed flat-bottomed wooden barges were moored along the riverbank. Sailors, stripped to the waist, smoked low-grade tobacco on deck, loudly cursing the fickle weather.
Bill, President of the Metropolitan Trading Company, wore a waterproof oilskin trench coat and tall rubber boots, trudging through the cinder-and-mud-covered pier.
Behind him followed more than a dozen Vanguard Security members with bulging waistlines.
Bill walked to a large two-masted tugboat at the end of the pier. A man with a fleshy, aggressive face stepped out of the captain's cabin.
He was the owner of the largest independent barge fleet in the area, nicknamed "Blind" Pete. Although he wasn't actually blind, one of his eyes had been injured in a fight years ago, leaving the eyeball cloudy.
"Hello... Captain Pete."
Bill stopped, having no intention of boarding the ship.
"The matter my men discussed with you three days ago—how have you considered it?"
Pete spat a glob of saliva, which landed in the murky river water.
"Mr. Carter, your Metropolitan Trading Company is in the trading business. Since when did you start taking an interest in dirty coal-hauling boats?" Pete leaned against the gunwale.
"The rent you're offering is indeed very high, fifty dollars per boat per month. Just to let my boats sit at the pier and soak up the sun."
"Getting paid for doing nothing—isn't that a good deal?"
Bill pulled a thick envelope from his trench coat pocket and weighed it in his hand.
Pete shook his head, a look of regret on his face.
"Money is a good thing, but I, Pete, have been knocking around on the river for twenty years and I value my reputation. I've already signed a transport contract with Mr. Andrew Carnegie. My forty barges are responsible for transporting iron ore from West Virginia to his blast furnaces this month. Breaking the contract means paying damages."
Bill gave a cold laugh.
"I'll pay the breach of contract penalty for you. How much freight does Carnegie pay you per ton? I'll pay double. The only condition is that your boats cannot weigh anchor. Not a single ounce of ore is allowed to be transported into Braddock."
Pete narrowed his one good eye.
"Mr. Carter, you're trying to smash Mr. Carnegie's rice bowl. That Scotsman is a tough character. He has guns in his hands and bankers from Philadelphia backing him. If I take your money and my boats are scuttled in the middle of the night, who compensates me?"
Bill put away the envelope and took a step forward, his gaze becoming sharp.
"Pete. Do you think I'm negotiating with you? You're afraid of Carnegie scuttling your boats; aren't you afraid my men will burn your boats to ashes right now?"
The security guards behind Bill uniformly pulled back the hems of their trench coats, revealing vanguard rifles hanging at their waists.
"Carnegie's guns are in Pittsburgh; my guns are pressed against your forehead right now."
Bill's voice sounded exceptionally cold in the river wind.
"I'll say it once more. The barges on the Ohio River will either become assets of the Metropolitan Trading Company, sitting in the harbor, or they will become rotten wood at the bottom of the water. Carnegie's blast furnaces must go out. Anyone who dares to transport a single piece of coal for him is my mortal enemy."
Pete's expression changed.
He swallowed hard and looked at those dark muzzles. In this lawless, murky territory, if a few boats sank or a few people died, even the police wouldn't bother asking.
"Fine," Pete said through gritted teeth.
"I won't move the boats; leave the money. But my men are leaving the ships. I don't want to get caught up in the war of you big bosses."
"A wise choice."
Bill threw the envelope onto the deck.
As he turned to leave, Bill gave orders to his deputy behind him.
"Go to the next pier and keep buying. For those you can't buy, send men to scuttle them in the middle of the night. I want nothing on this river, except for fish, to be able to swim to Pittsburgh."
Two days later.
Pittsburgh, Braddock Steel Works.
The roar of the blast furnaces continued, but the coal and iron ore in the plant's storage yard were visibly decreasing.
Andrew Carnegie stood by his office window, looking at the empty unloading pier outside, his face ashen.
The accountant, Henry Phipps, burst in with several telegrams in his hand.
"Andrew! Something's happened! The mine owners of the Appalachian Alliance in West Virginia sent an urgent telegram. Their ore has been piled up on the pier for three days, and not a single barge has come to pick it up!"
Carnegie spun around abruptly.
"What happened? Where is Pete's fleet? I paid him a deposit in advance!"
"It seems Pete has breached the contract."
Phipps pushed up his slipping glasses, his voice trembling.
"It's not just Pete. More than seventy percent of the independent barge owners on the Ohio River are refusing to weigh anchor. As for the remaining thirty percent, either their hulls are leaking or their steering gear was smashed in the middle of the night."
"It was Argyle."
Carnegie slammed his fist against the window frame, shaking loose a cloud of dust.
"He's built a wall on the waterway."
His brother, Tom Carnegie, also walked into the office, drenched in sweat.
"Andrew, our coal inventory is only enough to keep the blast furnaces burning for four days. If there's no new fuel supplement in four days, the furnace temperature will drop, and the molten iron will solidify in the hearth."
"Find Garrett!" Carnegie roared.
"Let the Baltimore Railroad send more railcars to West Virginia!"
"Garrett is also facing trouble over there."
"There's been a sudden massive sell-off in the Philadelphia bond market. The prices of those Midwestern railroad bonds have plummeted. The bonds we traded for have now shrunk by thirty percent. Mr. Drexel stated that if the value of the collateral is insufficient, he cannot continue to provide us with cash flow."
"Argyle is trying to drive us to a dead end."
Carnegie paced back and forth in his office like a trapped beast. He felt an invisible net tightening simultaneously from the waterways, the railroads, and the financial sector, strangling him.
"Andrew, should we stop production to cut our losses?" Phipps suggested quietly. "Stabilize the cash flow first."
"We can't stop!"
Carnegie stopped abruptly, his eyes bloodshot.
"Once the blast furnaces stop, we're completely out of the game. Argyle will have a total monopoly on the pricing of steel rails!"
"If we don't have barges, we'll build them ourselves! Go buy timber! Have the workers put down their shovels and go to the river to nail rafts for me. We'll use the most primitive methods if we have to, but get that coal here!"
"And the bonds!" Carnegie gnashed his teeth.
"Notify Drexel that even at half-price, we must exchange the bonds for pounds sterling! Old Morgan wants to see me nail Argyle down in Pittsburgh; he doesn't care about a loss of a few tens of thousands of dollars!"
Carnegie rushed out of the office and ran toward the plant area. He was going to the pier to oversee the battle personally.
In this struggle of capital, no one would easily admit defeat. Even if he had to use his teeth to bite, Carnegie would tear a piece of flesh from Argyle's encirclement.
Argyle Central Laboratory, New Jersey.
Eleven o'clock in the morning.
Inside the acoustics laboratory on the east side of the main building.
The air was thick with the pungent smell of scorched material and the acidic tang of sulfuric acid, while several small DC generators hummed steadily in the corner.
Thomas Edison wore a linen shirt so filthy its original color was unrecognizable. His hands were stained with black powder, and several black streaks marked his face, making him look like a coal miner who had just crawled out of a pit.
"Come on, try it again, Arthur! Adjust the battery output voltage to five volts!"
Edison shouted to his assistant sitting at the other end of the long table.
Arthur Jennings turned the knobs on the resistance box.
Stretching between the two men was an insulated copper wire fifty feet long.
One end of the copper wire was connected to a cylindrical brass receiver, which Edison held in his hand.
At the other end, in front of Arthur, was a crude transmitter: a metal horn connected to an iron diaphragm, behind which was a small porcelain cup filled with black granules.
"Hello! Hello! Can you hear me! Testing! One, two, three, four!" Arthur shouted at the top of his lungs, his mouth almost pressed against the metal horn.
Edison pressed the cylindrical receiver tightly against his ear.
A sharp, grating "crackling" sound came from the receiver, like countless small insects scratching against sheet metal.
Beneath the layer of static, the vague outline of Arthur's voice could be heard, but it was weak and garbled, making it impossible to distinguish specific words.
"Stop!"
Edison irritably threw the receiver onto the table. It hit with such force that the brass casing left a dent in the wooden surface.
Arthur stopped shouting and walked over, rubbing his sore throat.
"Another failure, Tom. The sound fidelity is too low. Even if we increase the voltage, the noise increases exponentially."
Edison walked to the transmitter and used a screwdriver to open the small porcelain cup. A pile of black powder fell out.
It was crushed charcoal granules.
"It's fine. I can feel it; the direction the Boss gave us is absolutely correct in theory."
Edison pinched a bit of the charcoal granules with his soot-stained fingers.
"Using sound vibrations to change the contact area of the carbon powder, thereby changing the resistance and allowing the current to fluctuate with the sound's waveform. This provides much more power than Bell's method of using electromagnetic induction to generate weak currents."
Edison slammed his fist onto the table.
"But this damn material won't work! The charcoal granules are too hard! When the sound vibrations press on them, they squeeze together and jam, losing their elasticity. The resistance can't quickly return to its initial state. The current just becomes a tangled mess!"
The door was pushed open.
Felix entered the laboratory wearing a black trench coat, with Frost following behind him.
"I could hear your complaining all the way from Long Island, Tom."
Felix approached the workbench and looked down at the scattered black powder.
Edison immediately stood up straight, though he couldn't hide the frustration on his face.
"Boss, the principle of carbon resistance is sound. But we can't find the right carbon material. We've tried charcoal, graphite, and even crushed pencil lead. None of it works. Either the resistance is too high for the current to pass, or the particles are too fine and pack into a solid block."
"Uh-huh. Any news from Boston?"
Felix turned to look at Frost.
"Flynn's intelligence network reports that Bell has rented a larger laboratory in the Cambridge area. His partner, the lawyer Hubbard, has provided him with capital. I hear his electromagnetic telephone has already transmitted clear syllables over short distances. They are drafting patent application documents."
Frost reported truthfully.
Edison grit his teeth, feeling the humiliation of being outperformed by a peer.
"Give me another week, Boss. I'll definitely find elastic carbon powder."
Felix didn't respond directly, instead picking up the screwdriver to absentmindedly poke at the charcoal in the porcelain cup.
Memories from the 21st century were spinning rapidly in his mind.
Though he wasn't a chemist and couldn't remember specific molecular formulas, he knew the course of history.
"Tom. If you want an elastic sponge, you don't go crushing a rock," Felix said, setting down the screwdriver.
"Perhaps the physical structure of charcoal and graphite destines them to be unable to rebound quickly under minute pressure."
Felix walked over to an old-fashioned kerosene lamp used for lighting in the corner of the lab.
He pointed to the thick layer of black, smoky soot on the upper part of the lamp's glass chimney.
"Look here..."
Edison walked over, looking at the soot with confusion.
"That's soot, Boss. Impurities from incomplete combustion."
"But it's also carbon, isn't it? The purest, most minute carbon," Felix said, looking Edison in the eye.
"Charcoal made from wood has a skeleton that gets jammed. But this soot suspended in the air has no skeleton."
An electric arc flashed in Edison's mind.
His brain, like a high-speed generator, instantly caught that faint spark.
"Soot... Lampblack..."
Edison muttered to himself.
"Yes, that's right. Its particle size is extremely small and it's incredibly loose. If we collect it..."
"Pure powder won't do," Felix continued to guide him.
"Powder will leak and shift with vibration. You need to turn it into a single unit while maintaining its loose characteristics. Find a way to press it into a button, or bake it. Turn it into an elastic 'Carbon button'."
(Note: Edison eventually solved the transmitter problem precisely by baking Lampblack and pressing it into Carbon buttons.)
Edison slapped his hands together, his eyes shining as bright as the electric lamps in the laboratory.
"Baking! Yes, just like baking bread! Collect the Lampblack, add a tiny amount of binder, and then bake it to shape in a high-temperature furnace. That way, it maintains particle friction on a microscopic level while being an elastic whole on a macroscopic level!"
"Quick... Arthur!"
Edison rushed toward the workbench like a madman.
"Dump out all the charcoal and go to the warehouse for kerosene lamps. Take all the chimneys off; we're going to scrape soot!"
Arthur immediately ran out.
Felix watched Edison sink back into his work and turned toward the door without concern.
He only paused at the doorway. "Tom, remember your promise."
"As long as this 'Carbon button' is made."
Edison didn't even look up, frantically calculating baking temperatures on a blueprint.
"Bell's set of electromagnetic toys won't even be fit to be megaphones. I'll make sure General Electric's telephones can hear a pin drop from ten miles away."
Once the technological barriers were broken, all that remained was pure capital crushing.
Whether it was Carnegie in Pittsburgh or Bell in Boston, nothing could stop this juggernaut named Argyle.