The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  The next few days he lived on 5-cent meals of apple dumplings and coffee. That infamous Black Friday when Gould and Fisk tried to corner the gold market, Edison stood on a telegraph booth to watch in wide-eyed wonder as men went mad and fortunes were lost. Amid the frenzy a telegraph operator held out his hand and cried, “Shake, Edison! We’re okay. We haven’t a cent.” Edison later said, “I felt happy because we were poor.” By the time of his death his many inventions had spawned business interests worth more than $25,000,000,000; the New York Times declared that this gave Edison’s brain the highest cash value in history.

  The quality, utility, and volume of his brainchildren quickly brought financial independence. By 1876 Edison had taken out 122 patents. By 1878 he had a home and laboratory at Menlo Park, 7 miles northeast of New Brunswick, New Jersey. He searched 13 long months for an incandescent lamp to replace the arc lamp. At last he discovered carbonized cotton filaments and produced a light bulb that burned 40 hours.

  The first public demonstration of Edison’s new electric lamp was held at Menlo Park on December 31, 1879. Two days later the “Wizard of Menlo Park” held a special preview for New York City aldermen. He had strung his lamps along wires so that he could light or extinguish any bulb without affecting the others. Although the aldermen were impressed, they did not care to spend city money to subsidize Edison’s plan to light the sidewalks of New York. After all, the Brush Electric Illuminating Company of New York was already doing that job.

  Edison appealed to private investors, and soon the Edison Electric Illuminating Company was incorporated with a capitalization of $1,000,000 to light stores and homes. Officials of the various gas companies, aware of Edison’s great reputation, watched his every move with glum eyes, hoping that he would fail. The creation of a central power station and commercial lighting system was the biggest project Edison had ever undertaken. All the equipment had to be “home-devised and home-made,” as Edison put it.

  J. Pierpont Morgan, the financier, always welcomed new ideas. In January, 1881, he went to New Jersey to find out for himself if Edison’s fights could be used to illuminate private homes. (Back in 1859 a professor, named Moses Gerrish Farmer, had lighted his own parlor in Salem, Massachusetts, with lamps powered by a galvanic battery in the cellar.) Edison convinced Morgan that an electric lighting system could be installed in a house. The banker promised that when he moved to 219 Madison Avenue, he would buy an Edison system. Before Morgan changed residences, however, James Hood Wright had installed a generating plant in his home in the Fort Washington section of Manhattan.

  In the autumn of 1882 Morgan moved his family to Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street, and soon thereafter the renovated house was wired for electricity. Morgan’s son-in-law, Herbert L. Satterlee, said in his biography of the banker:

  This apparatus was one of the very first ever made. . . . A cellar was dug underneath the stable. . . in the rear of the house, and there the little steam engine and boiler for operating the generator were set up. A brick passage was built just below the surface of the yard, and through this the wires were carried. The gas fixtures in the house were wired, so that there was one electric light bulb substituted for a burner in each fixture. Of course there were frequent short circuits and many breakdowns on the part of the generating plant. Even at the best, it was a source of a good deal of trouble to the family and neighbors. The generator had to be run by an expert engineer who came on duty at three P.M. and got up steam, so that at any time after four o’clock on a winter’s afternoon the lights could be turned on. This man went off duty at 11 P.M. It was natural that the family should often forget to watch the clock, and while visitors were still in the house, or possibly a game of cards was going on, the lights would die down and go out. If they wanted to give a party, a special arrangement had to be made to keep the engineer on duty after hours. The neighbors complained of the noise of the dynamo, and Mrs. James M. Brown next door said that its vibrations made her house shake. . . .

  Edison, too busy to give the Morgan house personal attention, promised his stockholders that his commercial generating station would begin operations almost any day. To impress the men who counted most, he chose to light offices in the financial and communications center of the city. This was an area bounded by Spruce Street on the north, Nassau Street on the west, Wall Street on the south, and Pearl Street on the east. Realtors, aware of the capital Edison had raised, charged him $75,000 for two old four-story buildings at 257 Pearl Street.

  He commissioned engineer Charles T. Porter to build six 240-horsepower engines capable of running at a maximum of 700 revolutions per minute. Edison himself went to work on the first of six 110-volt dynamos—“built them by guesswork,” he later admitted. Sensitive to the public anger at overhead wires, Edison elected to run his electric wires under the streets, and in the summer of 1881 gangs of laborers began digging. Electricity was such a strange new phenomenon that most people believed it was a liquid that might flow into their basements. To educate his own workers, Edison opened a night school for them at 65 Fifth Avenue. While his underground tubes were being laid, Edison was summoned to the office of the city commissioner of public works, who snapped, “You are putting down these tubes. You need five inspectors to look after this work. Their salary is five dollars a day. Good morning!”

  Edison was constantly on the go, supervising each detail of his monumental project, watching as each connection was made, and trusting no one to do things right. At night he stretched out on piles of pipes in the growing power station and fell asleep instantly. By October 1, 1882, he had strung wires into the homes of 59 customers, and although the power had not yet been turned on, there was a great demand for securities in his company. Issued with a par value of $100 per share, this stock advanced rapidly—sometimes as much as $100 an hour. It rose to $500 a share, then $3,000, then $5000, then $8,000. Gashouse workers grumbled that soon they would lose their jobs. But by the time Edison inaugurated his commercial lighting system, he had only 85 homes fully wired with a total load of 400 bulbs.

  Having postponed the premiere many times and fearful that it might be a fiasco, Edison shunned any fanfare that great day. He stayed up all the previous night to rehearse his men in their new jobs after the first switch had been thrown. Despite his precautions, reporters for the metropolitan papers and for some scientific Journal’s were on hand. Monday, September 4, 1882, they gathered in the dynamo room at 257 Pearl Street, along with some directors of the Edison company.

  All eyes were on Thomas Alva Edison. The thirty-five-year-old inventor was of less than average height and was already beginning to flesh out. A handsome man, he had gray eyes, a sturdy chin, a large and sensitive mouth, a prominent nose, and large ears. Locks of hair hung in careless disarray over his domed forehead. When he concentrated on a theoretical problem, his eyes were those of a dreamer; in an emergency they were the eyes of a man of action; in moments of relaxation they were as boyishly mischievous as those of Tom Sawyer. Tom Edison spat on the floor. He swore manfully. He said “git” for “get.” He pronounced “does” as “doos.” But on this day of days in his life he did not wear his usual baggy pants and rumpled jacket. Instead, he had struggled into a Prince Albert coat, a white cravat, a starched shirtfront, and a white derby hat.

  At 3 P.M., with summer sunlight smiling on downtown Manhattan, Edison signaled his chief electrician, John W. Lieb, to pull the master switch and thus light offices and homes with his electricity. The effect was anticlimactic, like striking matches in the glare of a bonfire. Not until the descent of velvet dusk could the radiance of this man-made illumination be appreciated.

  The New York Times Building, at 41 Park Row, had been wired. The next day a Times article said:

  To each of the gas fixtures in the establishment a bronze arm was attached, and the electric lamps were suspended from the ends of these arms. . . . The light was more brilliant than gas, and a hundred times steadier. To turn on the light nothing is required but to tu
rn on the thumbscrew. . . . As soon as it is dark enough to need artificial light, you turn the thumbscrew and the light is there, with no nauseous smell, no flicker and no glare.

  Only one dynamo went into operation that first day, but Edison declared that it would run forever, provided there was no earthquake. It did function eight years with only one minor stoppage. But other small troubles occurred that first day—such as the blowing out of underground safety catch boxes—and Edison raced from the plant first to one spot and then to another to make repairs. Soon his collar had been torn off, and his white derby hat was stained with grease.

  A few days later a policeman rushed into the central station to report trouble at Ann and Nassau streets. Edison and a helper trotted to this corner and found a junction box leaking onto the moist street. Later Edison said:

  When I arrived I saw a ragman with a dilapidated old horse come along the street, and a boy told him to go over to the other side of the road—which was the place where the current leaked. The moment the horse struck the electrified soil he stood straight up in the air, and then reared again. The crowd yelled, the policeman yelled, and the horse started to run away. . . . We got a gang of men, cut the current off . . . and fixed the leak.

  Aware of J. Pierpont Morgan’s influence, Edison personally oversaw the installation of lights in the white marble Drexel Building, at Wall and Broad streets, where Morgan had his private office. On that notable day of September 4, 1882, Edison scurried down to the building to turn on the lights himself.

  The first few months after the Edison system went into operation, no customer received a bill. Fourteen months later there were 508 subscribers and 12,732 bulbs, but each bulb cost $1. Trouble of one kind or another was forever developing. If it wasn’t a leak from an underground junction box, it was a fire in a house or shop wired for electricity. New Yorkers were pleased with Edison’s invention and agreed that it was superior to either gas or arc lights, but in the following decade they were slow to adopt it.

  Chapter 28

  BUILDING BROOKLYN BRIDGE

  THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE was opened on May 24, 1883. During the previous two and a half centuries of New York’s history no bridge had spanned the East River to connect Manhattan Island with Long Island.

  John Augustus Roebling, the man destined to succeed in this undertaking, was born in the German state of Thuringia in 1806. Brilliant, imaginative, and ambitious, Roebling studied at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, then the world’s best engineering school. Roebling was twenty-five years old when he came here in 1831. He was a many-sided genius, like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Goethe. He was a master of mathematics, a scholar who put together a magnificent private library, a philosophy student who wrote a 2,000-page book on the universe, a musician who played the piano and flute, a linguist who spoke German and English and French, an engineer, a technologist, and an inventor. Despite all his many abilities, Roebling had just one ambition—to become a builder of great bridges. He was a man in a hurry. Forever fighting the clock, Roebling refused to see anyone five minutes late for an appointment. Still, his compassionate nature attracted both men and women.

  Peter Cooper came to know this young man, instantly recognized his genius, and encouraged him. Cooper had a son-in-law, named Abram S. Hewitt, who was later elected mayor of New York. On June 19, 1857, Roebling wrote Hewitt a letter in which he proposed to build a bridge across the East River. During the 1840’s the idea of such a bridge had been raised, because in winter months the ferry trip between New York and Brooklyn was slow and uncomfortable and dangerous. Most New Yorkers regarded the project with indifference because they lived where others wished to come, but many Brooklynites who worked in Manhattan had to use the ferry twice daily. Roebling was the first engineer to suggest that a bridge was feasible. Hewitt had his letter published in the New York Journal of Commerce.

  By this time Roebling had fabricated the first wire rope in America, established a wire factory in Trenton, New Jersey, built several suspension bridges, and won a good reputation. However, publication of his letter aroused little interest because of New Yorkers’ smugness and because of the outbreak of the Civil War. After the war Roebling submitted to a group of Brooklyn civic leaders a set of plans calling for construction of a bridge twice as long as any in existence and capable of bearing a load of 18,700 tons. He estimated that it would cost $4,000,000.

  Except for a few enlightened New Yorkers, such as Hewitt, enthusiasm for the Brooklyn Bridge came not from the people of Manhattan, not from public officials, but from a small group of Brooklyn’s private citizens. One prominent New Yorker said, “Our city is not a jealous city, but then to ask it to build a bridge in order to send its trade to a neighboring city is asking a good deal even from the best of natures.” Another New Yorker warned that a bridge would “drain the resources of the city of New York in order to fertilize the sandy wastes of Long Island.” The Union Ferry Company, which was transporting thousands of commuters a year between Brooklyn and New York, certainly did not favor the bridge.

  The winter of 1866 proved decisive. So bitterly cold was the weather and so choked with ice was the East River that ferry traffic became annoyingly slow. Brooklyn’s daily commuters figured that it took them longer to get to Manhattan than it took railway passengers to make the 150-mile trip from Albany to Manhattan.

  On the frigid evening of December 21 a Brooklyn businessman, named Alexander McCue, was surprised to see William C. Kingsley drive up to his home in a carriage. Kingsley was a prominent contractor and a Brooklyn civic leader. He already had convinced McCue that a bridge could and should be built. Now Kingsley asked his friend, “Will you drive with me to Mr. Murphy’s this evening? I want to get him to consent to prepare a bill for the bridge.”

  Henry C. Murphy had been editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, had risen to power as the Democratic leader of Brooklyn, had served a term as mayor, and was now a state senator. That winter evening he was resting on his estate in what today is Owls Head Park in western Brooklyn near Colonial Road and Wakeman Place. After hearing Kingsley’s invitation, McCue had looked out a window of his home and shivered. However, McCue was impressed with Kingsley’s electric personality and hoped that he would win over Murphy. Climbing into Kingsley’s carriage and pulling buffalo robes over their laps, the two men braved the night to drive to the Murphy estate.

  The senator was astounded to see them emerge from the winter wasteland but hurried them inside so that they could get warm in front of a roaring fire. After they exchanged pleasantries, Kingsley explained their mission. He declared that a bridge was badly needed. Senator Murphy raised objections. Kingsley met all of them. Kingsley went on talking, knitting a logical argument that fascinated Murphy. At last, raising a hand in a gesture of surrender, the senator said that he agreed. It was late in the morning when Kingsley and McCue left Murphy’s home, but they had his promise to draft an enabling bill.

  Senator Murphy’s measure was passed by the state legislature on April 16, 1867. It granted a charter to a company of private citizens to build a toll bridge across the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Kingsley was so optimistic that even before die bill passed, he signed contracts worth thousands of dollars for construction materials. Thirty-nine investors—most of them from Brooklyn, a few of them from New York—met on May 13, 1867, to organize the New York Bridge Company. Three days later Murphy was elected its president, and three committees were appointed. John A. Roebling was made chief engineer at $8,000 a year. He predicted that this “will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of this continent and of the age.”

  Although the company was privately owned, the state permitted New York and Brooklyn to buy part of its stock. At a meeting of New York’s city council it was proposed that the city buy $1,500,000 worth of bridge securities. The aldermen, with their usual avarice, forbade the city comptroller to make this purchase unless and until some money changed hands. B
ridge company officials, bending to political reality, gave Boss Tweed $65,000 to pass along to the boys in City Hall. For this service Tweed got 560 shares of stock, with a par value of $40,000, for himself.

  By the end of 1868 Brooklyn had subscribed $3,000,000 worth of securities and New York half as much, the total capital issue being $5,000,000. The biggest single subscriber was William C. Kingsley. Despite the fact that money now was available, many people doubted the wisdom of the whole project. They were staggered by the length of the span Roebling proposed. Owners of the East River ferries fought the bridge. Editor Horace Greeley and Brooklyn Mayor Martin Kalbfleisch expressed their nervousness. That Roebling! Now he wanted to use steel wire in the bridge instead of iron wire. Why, this never had been done in the history of the world! To allay fears, Roebling invited a board of prominent engineers to review his construction plans, and in May, 1869, they unanimously agreed that for strength and durability Roebling’s bridge was more than adequate.

  Congress passed a bill authorizing construction of the bridge, and President Grant signed it. The Secretary of War ordered three military engineers to ascertain if shipping along the East River would be impeded by the proposed bridge. They recommended raising the span from 130 to 135 feet above the river at mean high water, and Roebling agreed. The height became standard for future bridges over navigable waters in America. When the War Department approved the project on June 21, 1869, the last legal hurdle had been cleared.