Gaming - Worldbuilding, Homebrew, "With the Rough Riders on the Western Front"

 I have an idea I've been storing up for years, and have never actually bothered to put on paper, so here goes, since the odds of it coming to publication are, among my other hobbies, slim to none.

In December of 1884, Thomas Edison walked into the offices of the Edison Machine Works to find his staff in an uproar.  A young Serbian engineer named Nikola Tesla was protesting that Charles Batchelor, the office manager, had promised him an improbably large bonus if he could complete a Herculean series of engineering challenges, and the last of them was now on Batchelor's desk.  When Edison asked what the number was, he was shocked: $50,000, enough to set the young Serbian up for life if he was careful with his money.  "Well, Charlie," reports have Edison saying, "better pay the man."

Tesla proved almost impossible as an employee.  He was brilliant but erratic, exasperating, bad at taking notes and documenting his processes, and terrible at refining his ideas into a production model.  At the same time, Edison recognized a gold mine.  When Edison's main lab moved to West Orange in 1887, the Edison-Tesla Electrical Laboratory took over Menlo Park.  With control of all of Tesla's patents, the financial backing of J. P. Morgan, and Tesla's arguments in favor of alternating current helping tip the balance for large-scale generation in the early 1890s, the Edison General Electric Company was a literal powerhouse of American industry.

The Wireless War of the late 1890s, fought between Tesla and Edison on one hand, and Gugliermo Marconi on the other, culminated in a coup for Edison when American correspondents in Cuba filed the first wireless reports during the Spanish-American War in 1898.  The bullet that damaged Edward Marshall's spine at San Juan Hill, reported in his dispatches, might as well have been the last shot of the Wireless War; Marconi came to dominate wireless in Europe, and Edison in the Americas.  Tesla, meanwhile, had begun to drift further and further into eccentricity and more and more of his projects began to resemble "mad science" experiments.  By 1905, Edison had been warned in no uncertain terms by his financial backers that Tesla's experiments had to produce results.

A chance meeting in mid-1905 led to the militarization of the Tesla lab.  Tesla had been working on a bladeless turbine design, mechanically complicated and difficult to turn into a practical machine like many of Tesla's inventions.  At lunch one day, he happened to encounter Isaac Rice, owner of the Electric Boat Company, the US Navy's main manufacturer of submarines.  The conversation persuaded Rice of the potential value of the turbine, and of several other Tesla innovations including remote-controlled torpedoes.  Tesla found himself horrified at the militarization of his work, but because Edison was on the Naval Consulting Board, military applications allowed him to continue his more obscure research.

Tesla's conflicted feelings, and the increasingly threadbare nature of American neutrality, led him to have a serious breakdown in 1915, and withdraw from active management of the lab.  Edison kept him on payroll - even at whatever it cost to pay his Waldorf-Astoria bills and finance his gambling habit, Tesla on payroll could not lead to a serious patent fight.  By then, of course, the Great War had consumed much of Europe.  Voices in the United States were clamoring for the United States to set aside its neutrality.

This was the age of the Preparedness Movement, and no one was more active in this movement than Theodore Roosevelt, former president, Nobel laureate, author, and national icon.  Roosevelt's long-standing enmity with President Woodrow Wilson was part of why Wilson clung so strongly to neutrality - anything Roosevelt endorsed, Wilson rejected.  It was therefore something of a surprise, when American public opinion finally hit an irresistible tipping point, that Wilson personally delivered a telegraphed Roosevelt his permission to raise a volunteer cavalry division for immediate service in Europe, as part of the American Volunteer Expeditionary Corps, under General Leonard Wood.

At the time, this was viewed as a shocking departure of character for Wilson, but it made sense: by dispatching Wood and Roosevelt to Europe, and by giving them command solely of volunteers in an age of mass conscript armies, Wilson effectively sidelined them from the massive military machine that began growing in the United States, and helped to starve them of equipment, as they would only have access to what the War Department was willing to provide, in the midst of the largest expansion of the United States military since the Civil War.

That, of course, was without reckoning with Roosevelt and Wood's other connections.  Even though many of these contacts had been badly strained by the 1912 presidential election, Roosevelt was a magnetic presence and it was widely believed that where he went, newsmen and photographers would follow.  Given the choice of the publicity guaranteed to follow Roosevelt, or the solidity of War Department contracts, manufacturers and financiers shrugged and said "both, of course."  Thus it was that the AVEC in Europe became a sort of proving ground of military hardware for the Entente as a whole, and American manufacturers specifically.

And so it came to pass that the first unit to field the Edison M1917 "Tesla Tank" was the First (Armored) Battalion, First Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (the Rough Riders), First Volunteer Cavalry Division, American Volunteer Expeditionary Corps.

Next up - Generalleutnant Fritz Haber, the Militär-Sanitäts Amt für Lebenschemie, and the solution to Germany's manpower and food problems.