The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  In 1888 a terrific blizzard coated the thousands of miles of overhead wires with ice, bringing down innumerable live wires, which fizzed and snaked and blazed on the icy streets, and had to be captured, cut, and turned off by men with axes, who dealt with them as they might deal with hordes of poisonous snakes.

  But there were bigger problems, too, and one bigger than all the rest. It soon became apparent that the current Edison favored for New York—direct current, in which the electrons all move in unison in one direction along a wire—could not be easily transmitted along supply lines that were longer than a mile or two. This meant that more generating stations had to be built, creating noise, pollution, and expense. Yet at the same time that Edison and his immediate rivals and copycat inventors were installing their wires and lights, it was discovered that quite another kind of electric current—alternating current, in which the electrically charged particles move back and forth many times each second and essentially go nowhere at all—was, miraculously it must have seemed, not at all limited in terms of distance.

  Thus began the so-called War of the Currents, the decisive outcome of which would eventually lift electricity from purely local use and make it a truly national utility. It would also become, in common with such seemingly unrelated things as knowledge, fresh air, and lighthouses, a public good to which all should have access.

  One of the features of Edison’s direct current was that it needed to be generated at more or less the same voltage as that required by the devices it was powering. In the early days, almost all of these devices were electric lightbulbs. And because tests had shown that a carbonized cotton filament in an incandescent lightbulb survives longest and shines brightest when a current of about 100 volts passes through it, the generators at Edison’s power stations were designed to generate electricity only at 100 volts.

  Two problems resulted. The first, already mentioned, concerns the three-wire copper transmission lines taking this power from the generating station to the lightbulbs. When the wires warmed up as a direct result of carrying the 100-volt transmission, the current’s power dribbled slowly away. The longer the lines were, the more power they lost. Lightbulbs that were nicely close to a power station burned with a pleasing bright white light (“soft, mellow and grateful to the eye” wrote the New York Times). Bulbs that were in offices or houses half a mile away, on the other hand, burned with a yellowish, sickly look. A mile farther on and they were dimmed with a kind of invisible soot. More than that and the feeble glow of the filament wavered and faded until it was quite dark. DC power was indeed useless over any useful kind of distance.

  The second problem involved direct current’s limited ability to carry electricity to devices other than lightbulbs. As electricity became publicly available,* scores of inventors came up with uses for it that went far beyond the bulb, world-changing though it might be to have illumination at the touch of a switch. The electric motor, for example, found a myriad of uses—Edison himself came up with a motorized electric fan, which suddenly made the sultry American summertimes of the 1890s bearable; and before long there were electric clocks, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, and water pumps. The success of the motor never wavered: today half of all the electricity produced in the world is used by electric motors of one kind or another.

  But what is true of motors today was true in the 1880s: different motors required different voltages of electricity to perform the different tasks, and in those early days it proved tiresomely difficult and costly for engineers to transform Edison’s direct current into the different voltages that were needed. It was not impossible: a rotating device had to be attached to the generator to do this; but like all rotating devices of the day, it was expensive, it wore out, and it needed to be replaced. The whole process was formidably uneconomical.

  So arguments started to be put forward, most notably by George Westinghouse and his business colleagues, in favor of the significantly different alternating current, whose voltage could be easily altered up or down—transformed by a transformer—to power a tiny lightbulb or a massive heavy-duty electric motor, no matter how far away each might be. It was not long before the AC lobby, in spite of Edison’s charismatic, near-heroic standing in the America of the time, steadily began to gain ground. It was late in 1887 that the lines were drawn for a brief and vicious little electrical war, which would decide the future of the electrification of the United States.

  Although the name of George Westinghouse is the one most commonly associated with the currents war—Edison versus Westinghouse is how the bout is cast in present-day shorthand—he actually had little or nothing to do with the creation of alternating current. His expertise was in mechanical engineering, and he had made a fortune designing brakes for railway trains and making signaling systems and gas pipelines. He was quick to spot an opportunity, however, and late in 1887 he bought for $60,000 the patents for seven crucially important inventions in the field of AC power generation and distribution, all of which had been granted to the true pioneer in the field, Nikola Tesla, a young Serbian inventor and polymath who had come to New York in 1884 to work for Edison.

  The adoration of Nikola Tesla—some call him the father of the electric age—has recently made him almost a cult figure. It is easy to see why. He was tall, handsome, supremely clever, impeccably dressed. He was a fastidious gourmand who liked weighing his food and dining alone. He was shy, celibate, polite, soft-spoken, courteous, and kindly; a melancholic man blessed with a photographic memory; a man affected by phobias of such things as pearl earrings, spherical objects, accidental contact with women’s hair, and the imagined dirt on knives and forks. He liked to play billiards, chess, and poker and to feed the city pigeons—for one of which, its feathers pure white, he built a $2,000 splint when nursing it back to health after it broke one of its gray-tipped wings. He was also afflicted with an obsessive-compulsive disorder; he refused to shake hands, he would feel a need to read all the books written by any author he encountered, and he had a peculiar devotion to the number three and to any other number divisible by it.

  Though the Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla, clever, fragile, and an eccentric showman, was until recently widely overlooked, it is now generally accepted that he made vast contributions to the development of alternating electrical current and the invention of radio, long before Marconi. He has lately won legions of new admirers, mostly young, who see him as a forgotten hero of American science.

  Nikola Tesla was, in short, the classic exemplar of the mad scientist, and the fact that he made dangerously interesting inventions by the score resonates still with today’s imaginative fans of the far-fetched. He made devices like the Tesla coil, a step-up transformer that could raise current into the tens of thousands of volts and then generate Niagaras of gigantic electrical sparks. Smaller versions of the coil were used as scalp massagers and violet-ray-emitting devices for amusing the clients of beauty salons. He drew up blueprints for a gun that could shoot out thousands of tiny particles of tungsten. He promised the US Army a lethal particle-beam weapon, which was immediately seized upon by headline writers and comic-book editors as a death ray. He persuaded his backers to erect a huge iron pylon at a place called Wardenclyffe on Long Island, from which he promised he could beam waves of electrical power directly through the air, just like radio, and by doing so end the need for transmission lines and in theory connect the whole world electrically.

  Tesla is also said by some to have held Thomas Edison in spectacularly low esteem. The supposed antipathy went back to his first job at Menlo Park, which he had won after a brief interview soon after his arrival (with just four cents and a book of poems in his pocket) from the Balkans. He had reportedly told Edison he could remake a DC motor that Edison had designed and make it more efficient; Edison promised him $50,000 if he succeeded. But when he showed the successful result to Edison and asked for his money, the notoriously stingy inventor is said to have remarked with withering superciliousness that Tesla clearly had no understanding
of American humor, and offered him instead a $10 pay raise. Tesla resigned immediately and remained at daggers drawn with Edison for the rest of his life, making the war of the currents a highly personal crusade as well as a battle based on science and economics.

  The first demonstration of public distribution of Tesla’s generated alternating current was made in the hill town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A transformer manufacturer named William Stanley, backed by Westinghouse and basing his techniques on Tesla’s designs and patents, had established his small factory on the banks of the Housatonic River, which flows through the town on its way to Long Island Sound and the ocean. It was beside the river, in an old rubber mill on a short road named Cottage Street, that Stanley made his experiment.

  He had erected a generator, driven by the fast-flowing Housatonic water, that would produce 500 volts of single-phase AC electricity. There was nothing very difficult about this, but Stanley knew that if he simply supplied this voltage to the customers in town, their lights would grow dimmer the more distant they were from his generator. So he did what it was not possible to do with Edison’s DC current: he connected a big, heavy, wire-wound Tesla-style transformer into the circuit and stepped the output up to 3,000 volts, a hitherto unheard-of current.

  This he then sent out by wire to Main Street, hanging the cable from the giant elm trees (now replaced by flowering cherries) that lined the roadway. He connected this big, high-voltage wire to a series of six much smaller step-down transformers designed by Tesla and brought the voltage down to a manageable 100 volts. He connected these small lines to a chain of domestic lightbulbs. On March 20, 1886, he threw the switch and the lights began to glow.

  Every light came on and stayed on. Every house, every business that lined Main Street, from the small banks in the north to the piano factory in the south, suddenly had power. They were recipients of the first distributed AC electricity ever offered to any community in the world. And it all worked flawlessly.

  As a result of Stanley’s success, Edison was almost ready to acknowledge defeat. He railed against what he wanted the public to see as the dangers of Tesla’s AC. The back-and-forth current was peculiarly suited, he suggested ominously, for killing people, and even much larger creatures with what some might think were electrically impermeable skins. To the dismay of many and with lasting damage to his historical standing, Edison in 1903 demonstrated the use of a prototype AC-powered electric chair by fitting copper shoes onto a rogue circus elephant named Topsy and electrocuting her in public on a steel plate at a Coney Island zoo.

  Topsy was a disagreeable elephant, no doubt; she had killed three of her keepers, though perhaps understandably in the case of one of them, a man who had tried to persuade her to eat a lit cigarette. Few today believe she deserved electrocution, however, even though some at the time believed that “riding the lightning” was, as zoo visitors were told, quick and humane as these things go.

  Topsy is seen in a film, standing on the sheet of metal. She had already been given a quick pre-execution snack of cyanide-laced carrots, just in case. The current is switched on. Her legs immediately start to emit white smoke, as if they were stumps caught in a fast-moving forest fire. After no more than a second or two, she falls over on her side, her trunk flailing, her legs in wild seizure. She is dead within a minute. It is a dreadful few seconds of film—evidence of a cavalier attitude to cruelty, which when added to Edison’s reputation for plundering others’ ideas and for general irascibility, left an indelible stain on his reputation. That he was the first man to connect America by electric wire tends to get forgotten, despite the best efforts of the museum that stands today in Menlo Park, in the shadow of his monster lightbulb on a stick.

  One last contest, an event far less macabre than the public assassination of Topsy, proved to be the hinge of fate that decided the nature of the electrical system America would formally adopt before the transmission lines started uncoiling across the land. Companies offering the two competing systems were invited to bid to light the Columbian Exposition, the yearlong Chicago World’s Fair dedicated in 1892 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. It would be the first electrically lit exposition in history, and whoever illuminated Chicago would illuminate the nation.

  Money, rather than the relative utility or safety of the two competing systems, turned out to be the deciding factor.

  Edison had made an early pilgrimage to Chicago to sell his ideas for DC electrical supply to the exposition’s chief planner, Daniel Burnham. He certainly convinced Burnham to install incandescent rather than arc lighting, and up to that point, the meeting was cordial. But once the matter of how best to supply electricity to the lamps came up and the corporations became involved, all pretense of courtesy fled. Edison was no longer fully able to speak for himself in these matters since J. P. Morgan had become financially involved and Edison Electric had become a different and much grander organization, the General Electric Company. Such was its swagger, even in those early days, that it had no problems suggesting to Burnham that his exposition could be properly illuminated by DC-powered lightbulbs for $1.8 million.

  The backers of the Chicago show were indignant, suspecting they were being made fools of by tricky New York bankers. “Extortionate!” they chorused. They then welcomed the arrival of George Westinghouse, who asked to be considered and claimed he could install a more reliable and less costly system using AC. The organizers asked for new, sealed bids from the two companies. General Electric revised its opening bid downward to the more sensible figure of $554,000. But when the board members opened the envelope from Westinghouse, they read a quoted figure of $399,000. There was now no further question: the alternating-current system would be used to light the greatest world’s fair in American history.

  DC would continue to have its uses. Subway systems, New York’s most prominently, still employ direct current, and very new technologies these days allow for ultra-high-voltage transmission lines to carry DC across long distances also. However, AC promptly became the dominant electrical system in the United States, as it has been ever since the end of the nineteenth century.

  LIGHTING THE CORN, POWERING THE PRAIRIE

  The first transmission line in the country was opened in 1889, giving Portland, Oregon, a constant 4,000 volts of AC from a generating station built beneath the Willamette Falls, fourteen miles away. With 4,000 volts, people found they could do more or less as they wished—they could light streets and houses, run tramways, take X-rays, pump water, cool milk, cut hair, show movies, weld pipes, cut stone. Power companies sprang up like weeds; in 1892, Chicago alone had twenty of them. The output of their generators and the capacities of the wires that carried their electricity kept increasing. By 1907 certain transmission lines carried a hitherto unheard-of 110,000 volts—the first of these lines opening between a hydroelectric generating station under a waterfall in Michigan and the modest city of Grand Rapids.

  By the outbreak of World War I, more than fifty major electrical firms were making and distributing power, as were any number of smaller companies and municipally owned utilities. Come the 1920s and the number was more than six thousand, though most were controlled by much larger holding companies, of which there were about a hundred. Electricity, which everyone now wanted, was a means of making an almost limitless amount of money, and if the business was profitable, then big companies wanted as much of it as they could possibly acquire.

  That, however, was the problem. Not every aspect of the electric business was profitable. It was a good moneymaker in the cities: it cost next to nothing, relatively speaking, to throw up a shed full of boilers and turbines, string wires out a few miles to customers’ houses, and then send them a bill each month for the power they consumed. It was not much more difficult in the suburbs or in the smaller towns beyond: the generators might have to be a bit larger, the transformers a little more powerful; the transmission towers and the lines they supported might have to be
measured in tens or even hundreds of miles rather than in yards or city blocks. It was not as profitable to supply such places with power, but it still made money.

  However, there was no money at all to be made out in the farm country of the American Midwest. The pitiless arithmetic of capitalism did no favors for those who grew corn or alfalfa or soybeans out on the prairies or whose cattle grazed in the foothills of the Ozarks or up in the high country of Idaho. These people could be left safely disconnected from the electrical world. They could remain, though not of their own choosing, steadfastly outside the American dream. They could be reliant only on the wind and the sun and their own muscle and grit to give them the energy that they and their farmyards needed. The electric power was there, ready and waiting and straining at the leash, to give them relief and hope, but in the 1930s, the chiefs of the utility giants judged it as being too costly to bring to their doorsteps. So their hardscrabble lives were to remain that way for much longer than seemed the right of every other American.

  In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in running for the presidency, campaigned against what he saw as an inequity, attacking in particular “the Ishmaels and the Insulls” of the electrical industry, “whose hand is against every man’s.” His particular target was Samuel Insull, a Briton who had worked for Edison and had subsequently created a vast electrical monopoly from the Dakotas to Maine, a highly leveraged, precariously balanced corporate monster of a kind more familiar in modern times. Insull lived lavishly, spent freely, conducted his business recklessly, and was eventually charged with federal mail fraud (but later acquitted) and fled to Europe, dying penniless in a Paris Metro station and being buried ignominiously in Putney. Orson Welles said that his Citizen Kane, popularly supposed to have been based on the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, was in large part modeled on the equally megalomaniacal Samuel Insull.