Prometheus Unbound

August 15, 1886, Pittsburgh: Grand Opening of Tesla-Frankenstein

When biographer Mary Shelly ended her scathing indictment of the Swiss vivisectionist, Victor Frankenstein, with his imminent voyage to Greenland the better to track down his creation, most assumed that both doctor and protege would perish in the frozen wastes. Though several expeditions, including the doomed voyage of Sir John Franklin and his HMS Terror, sought to recover news of the infamous pair, none was forthcoming until 1885 when the errant Adam Frankenstein arrived with much fanfare on the docks of Cleveland, Ohio, after a three month voyage south.

Most could not have predicted the transformation in the world's most famous revenant. The descriptions given by Shelly alongside the late Doctor's notes suggested that Adam Frankenstein's reanimation had occurred through the concoction of an elixir vitae in close combination with a primitive water powered galvanizer. The Adam Frankenstein that arrived by steamship was utterly remade: his limbs reinforced by magnetized steel, his heart powered by all the force of the new electrical age. 

The next year, Serbian scientist and protege of the great Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, announced that he and the younger Frankenstein would be launching a jointly held power company, publishing the details of their long correspondence over the previous decade. Dissatisfied with his ill-treatment at the hands of electromantic capitalist, Edison, Tesla had put forth considerable funds to advertise himself to the younger Frankenstein as a mechanic of sorts, updating the original doctor's designs and making him much more capable in the new age of science. Frankenstein had been wary at first but, upon seeing some of Tesla's designs, could not help but accede that the time had come to leave his settlement just north of Thulic Qaanaaq. 

The Tesla-Frankenstein Power Company (later the TF Polyphase Company, by then a subsidiary of Westinghouse) came to represent everything hopeful about the burgeoning field of electric magnetism. It also set off a sometimes secretly violent "Current War" with Tesla and Edison on the one side, and Edison's Bear Flag Dynamics on the other. This brought the issue of race to the forefront, which would prove to be the undoing of the burgeoning alternating current partnership.

Edison's ties to the Elven community, through his mother, were at their ugliest and most visible (his slightly arched ears aside) in his condemnation of what many elves called the Tusked Abomination, a reference to Frankenstein's Orcish face and brain.* This set off a firestorm of controversy, smear ads against TF Polyphase incited hate crimes--the burning of factories, The Confederate States of America boycotting their company, and a lengthy screed written by John Fiske on the subject of Orcish inferiority. Eventually Adam Frankenstein was forced into resignation and Tesla followed soon after. Frankenstein moved his interests to Xanadu, where the Orcish Government offered to fund his research, albeit at a much lower price than did him any good. 

*Though, to be clear, the matter of Adam Frankenstein's brain was never fully explored. Shelly reported that Victor Frankenstein sought to use Orcish parts since most of the itinerant laborers in the alps had no family and the "well-known mental deficiency of the Orcish breed" ensured that his creation would not be able to replicate the experiments.