The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  The foreign observer did not understand the competitive metabolism of local city boosters in America, determined to outhustle, outdo, out-build every other city. Wabash, the pioneer, bragged that it had earned headlines like “Wabash Enjoys the Distinction of Being the Only City in the World Entirely Lighted by Electricity.” It was not just small three-thousand-person towns in the Midwest that regarded aerial lights as an easy shortcut to electric lighting for a city. In Los Angeles, editorial writers advocated construction of multiple light towers atop the hills surrounding the city and provided poetic descriptions of the benefits. The lights “shall search the roads, alleys and corners, the streets will be safer and iniquity of all kinds will decrease. The brighter the light the better for truth, purity and honor, and the worse for fraud and all that fearful spawn of evil which flourishes in the darkness. Up then with the graceful and generous towers!”

  The towers in Los Angeles were never erected, averting certain disappointment. A source of powerful light mounted so high created a glow that stretched in all directions, sufficient to cast shadows at great distances, but not strong enough for the light to be of useful intensity. When a history of Detroit that was published in 1923 looked back upon the city’s tower lights, which by then had been dismantled, it described them as “more spectacular than efficient.”

  The initial sensation they had stirred upon their introduction, however, had drawn attention away from Edison and his light. In a contest, incandescent light could never match the sheer candlepower of arc light. The only way Edison Electric could regain some attention for itself was to come up with an entirely novel use of its low-candlepower light, a feat accomplished by William Hammer, formerly the chief engineer of the Edison Lamp Works and lately dispatched to London. In February 1882, Hammer unveiled at the Crystal Palace Electric Exhibition an electrified sign. It was about ten feet in length, spelling out “Edison” in foot-high letters, using about a dozen sixteen-candlepower bulbs for each letter. By means of a hand-cranked drum that was out of sight, the letters of “Edison” were illuminated, one by one, then all at the same time. With this, Americans introduced to the world the first electrified advertisement.

  While work on Pearl Street was in progress, Edison was able to test his newly designed electric light equipment in a full-scale, real-world demonstration—in the heart of London. Along a half-mile route following the Holborn Viaduct, streetlamps and interior lights in adjacent hotels, restaurants, shops, and offices were installed, including in part of the General Post Office. It was a technical success, impressed the newspapers of Fleet Street, which were nearby, and provided valuable experience that would be used in readying the Pearl Street system. But it was merely a demonstration, not a commercial operation, and so could not answer the critical question: Would Edison’s centralized system of supplying electricity for incandescent lighting be able to match the low price of gas lighting?

  Edison deployed a large battalion of canvassers to go house to house in the Pearl Street district, noting the number of gas jets, the usual hours of use, and their cost. He also learned which establishments had manufacturing operations in which a motor could be applied. Within the district, the researchers found some eighty horses who provided motive force by stepping on treadles in the top stories of buildings that they were never permitted to leave until death. The locations of prospective electricity customers were easier to determine, however, than the future cost of delivering power to them, generated in an untested centralized system likely to entail high distribution costs.

  The passage of time did not serve to bolster the public’s confidence in Edison’s system. In May 1882, when completion seemed too far off to be within view, share prices of gas utilities advanced to great heights. Edison was unable to remain silent. Concerned that he was losing the public’s support, Edison called in the newspaper reporters and predicted that his system would within a few years completely eliminate gas as a source of lighting. He was so confident that customers would prefer his light, “better, cleaner, purer, and more wholesome,” that he could charge $1.50 for electric light equivalent to that produced by one thousand cubic feet of gas, even if the gas companies lowered their price to a penny.

  Edison also boasted of his company’s considerable experience in the electric light business, pointing to the “isolated” site-based plants that the company had tried its best to avoid building while the Pearl Street project remained incomplete. The sheer volume of requests had worn down Edison’s resistance, and he had been least opposed to requests that had come in from overseas. By agreeing to build and supply the miniplants in places such as Italy, Austria, Finland, and Chile, Edison Electric was able to quickly establish its name in far-flung locations. By May 1882, two hundred of these small plants were in operation.

  As engines of publicity, the miniplants potentially could most help when they became highly sought after by the wealthy for use in their own homes. This required, however, that they supply electric light without mishap. William Vanderbilt was the first to place an order for his own personal power plant and lighting system for installation at his house under construction on upper Fifth Avenue. Having seen the electric light on display at Edison Electric’s offices, Vanderbilt turned the responsibilities of general contractor over to his son-in-law, who was acquainted with technical issues as the head of the telephone department of Western Union. Edison was present on the evening that the system was turned on for the first time. The test went well, and Vanderbilt, his wife, and his daughters joined Edison in the main parlor, admiring the light. Almost immediately, however, signs appeared of a smoldering fire within the wallpaper, which apparently had a fine metallic thread in its weave. Edison ordered the system shut down and was pleased that no flames had appeared. Mrs. Vanderbilt, however, “became hysterical,” according to Edison. She wanted to know where the fire had started. The electrical plant in the cellar was described, but the more that was explained, the more upset she became. She had not been told before then that a boiler for the power plant had been installed in the house. On her orders, the entire installation was removed.

  The unhappy ending to this first installation swiftly became public knowledge, and the gas utilities were glad to help spread the news. Edison did his best to minimize the problems that had been revealed. When asked whether it was true that Vanderbilt had ordered Edison’s electric lights to be removed from his new house because they did not work well—and had set fire to the woodwork—Edison declared, “It is false.” True, the lights had been removed, but they were not “our” lights, Edison maintained. “Our” lights will be those powered by the central station on Pearl Street. Mr. Vanderbilt had been so impatient, however, that he had insisted on installation of an individual power plant, which Edison appeared to disown. As for the report of a fire that had been caused by the lights, this, too, Edison tried to spin to his advantage. He told a reporter that one of the electric light wires had come in contact with a burglar-alarm wire, become overheated, and charred a few gold-thread wires in the cloth wallpaper, nothing more.

  Undeterred by Vanderbilt’s unhappy experience, J. P. Morgan wanted Edison to build a system of lights and self-contained power plant for his house, too, at 219 Madison Avenue. He directed that the plant be installed at a distance, however, in a cellar excavated for this purpose beneath the stables, which were at the rear of the property. A subterranean conduit, built of brick, ran from the plant to the house and wires were run through the gas conduits. The power plant was staffed with its own full-time engineer, who came on duty at 3:00 P.M. and fired up the boilers so power would be ready by 4:00. He completed his shift at 11:00 P.M., a fact the members of the Morgan household sometimes forgot when the house was plunged into darkness in the middle of a late-evening card game.

  The generating plant was situated far enough from the main house of the Morgan property that its presence did not annoy members of the household—the Morgan household, that is. Near the Morgan stables was the house of Mr. and Mrs. Jame
s Brown, however, and Mrs. Brown complained that the vibrations of the dynamo made her house shake. Pierpoint Morgan had rubber pads installed beneath the machinery and sandbags placed along the walls of the cellar to reduce the noise and vibrations, appeasing Mrs. Brown only somewhat. Fumes and smoke, she said, were penetrating her house and tarnishing her silver. Noise pollution in the neighborhood returned when stray cats in the neighborhood discovered a toasty place to gather and yowl in the winter: on the conduit that ran between the power plant and the Morgan house.

  Morgan prized being ahead of everyone else, and the next year was concerned that his plant was already less than state of the art, a suspicion that was confirmed when he persuaded Edison to send Edward Johnson to the house for an evaluation. Johnson was instructed to upgrade the equipment and also to devise a way to provide an electric light that would sit on Morgan’s desk in his library. At a time when the very concept of an electrical outlet and detachable electrical appliances had yet to appear, this posed a significant challenge. Johnson’s solution was to run wires beneath the floor to metal plates that were installed in different places beneath the rugs. One of the legs of the desk was equipped with sharp metal prongs, designed to make contact with one of the plates when moved about the room.

  In conception, it was clever; in implementation, it fell short of ideal. On the first evening when the light was turned on, there was a flash, followed by a fire that quickly engulfed the desk and spread across the rug before being put out. When Johnson was summoned to the house the next morning, he was shown into the library, where charred debris was piled in a heap. He expected that when Morgan appeared, he would angrily announce that the services of Edison Electric were no longer needed.

  “Well?” Morgan stood in the doorway, with Mrs. Morgan standing behind him, signaling Johnson with a finger across her lips not to launch into elaborate explanations. Johnson cast a doleful eye at the disaster in the room and remained silent.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Morgan asked. Johnson said the fault was his own and that he would personally reinstall everything, ensuring that it would be done properly.

  “All right. See that you do.” Morgan turned and left. The eager purchaser of first-generation technology handled setbacks with equanimity. “I hope that the Edison Company appreciates the value of my house as an experimental station,” he would later say. A new installation with second-generation equipment worked well, and Morgan held a reception for four hundred guests to show off his electric lights. The event led some guests to place their own orders for similar installations. Morgan also donated entire systems to St. George’s Church and to a private school, dispatching Johnson to oversee the installation as a surprise to the headmistress. The family biographer compared Morgan’s gifts of electrical power plants to his sending friends baskets of choice fruit.

  Every such gift basket sent by Morgan represented a mix of good and bad news for his supplier, Edison Electric. Keeping its most important investor happy was good; diffusing the company name into places likely to impress influential individuals was also good. But the self-contained plants were a distraction that required a diversion of precious talent and diffusion of focus while the main project, the centralized station at Pearl Street, was still unfinished. Outside of the New York City area, Edison Electric had obtained contracts to build centralized systems in other municipalities whose officials were willing to believe that the technology had been proven adequate in the demonstrations, without waiting for the real-world test in New York. In Appleton, Wisconsin, for example, the lighting system had been purchased by a local industrialist who was so thoroughly sold on the technology during a fishing trip with an Edison salesman that he had placed an order without even seeing a demonstration. It could have been ready for operation before New York’s Pearl Street, but Edison forbade its operators from progressing beyond the test stage so that Pearl Street would receive the publicity from being first.

  By August 1882, the underground conductors for the Pearl Street district were in place, and all that remained was to connect the street mains with the individual buildings, rewire the interior fixtures, and install meters. The very last step was the inspection of each customer’s premises by the city’s Board of Underwriters, a slow process as it had only one inspector. Kinks in the system were ironed out by tests that covered different portions of the district. By the end of the month, service to a few customers had begun unofficially. Though not all portions of the district had received underwriter approval, Edison decided the time had arrived for an official beginning. On the afternoon of 4 September 1882, he, Bergmann, Kruesi, and a few other Edison Electric staff members went to the offices of J. P. Morgan in the Drexel Building at Broad and Wall Streets. At 3:00 P.M., a switch was ceremoniously thrown, and Edison’s electric lights came to life.

  No throng of reporters was on hand to commemorate the event. It received the most complete coverage from the New York Times, but that was to be expected: The Times itself received service in the Times Building for the first time—a long-anticipated dividend from Edison’s decision to place the first central station where it was. The light was described as superior to that of gas by “men who have battered their eyes sufficiently by years of night work to know the good and bad points of a lamp,” said the Times. The comparison between electric and gaslight favored the former, but the differences were subtle. The shades on the electric light fixtures made them resemble gas fixtures, and “nine people out of ten would not have known the rooms were lighted by electricity, except that the light was more brilliant and a hundred times steadier.” The newspaper had not fully committed to switching to electric lights—only fifty-two of a possible four hundred or so lights in the building had been electrified—so the first evening of service did not mark a clean, dramatic beginning of a new era.

  The official beginning was covered more objectively by the New York Herald, which itself used five hundred incandescent bulbs in its offices in the evening, but these were supplied by power from its own plant, the largest on-site power plant in the city. Its report was a positive one, noting that the Pearl Street machinery worked well and about three thousand Edison Electric customers were ready to receive service, out of five thousand when all of the installations in the district were completed. Some customers were “a trifle disappointed at first” when they saw the soft electric light, but supposedly soon realized that a softer light was best for interior lighting and would be easiest on the eyes.

  The Herald reporter portrayed the moment as a satisfying denouement to a long-running drama involving unfulfilled promises and a loud chorus of skeptics. After recounting the various difficulties that had slowed the realization of the vision, the story said “many people shook their heads at [the] failure of the promised radiance and believed something was amiss.” Edison and his company had persevered nonetheless and now “the Edison light had a very fair degree of success.” This was the most generous review that the new service received.

  The launch of commercial service was not criticized so much as it was greeted with a yawn. It was not regarded by contemporaries as the red-letter date in the history of progress that would be featured in the textbooks assigned to later generations. Most of those people who the Herald said had shaken their heads skeptically no longer took an interest in the venture. It had taken four long years after Edison’s announcement in 1878 about inventing a new electric light to bring the complete system into operation. By 1882, the flighty public had moved on to other diversions. The technical community had had their doubts about the feasibility of the system, but demonstrations and awards in London and Paris had eliminated their interest at the same time that the doubts were removed. The only group that had cause to pay close attention was the small group of Edison Electric investors, and they could not yet relax because they still did not know whether this novel system would turn out to be profitable.

  At the time of the first announcement in 1878, Edison had painted a picture of electric ligh
ts in houses that also included electric meters. After a few weeks of experiments, Edison had declared that he did not think it necessary to measure the amount of electricity used; he proposed instead a simpler system, charging a flat rate for every light fixture (which he anachronistically referred to as a “burner”). “If I find that this works an injustice,” he said, “why I shall try to get up a meter, but I fear it will be very hard to do it.” Planning for flat-rate pricing had ended almost immediately, however, and he returned to working on a chemical meter. Reading the meter involved removing a metal plate and taking it to the central station to be weighed—measuring the quantity of zinc that had been deposited on it indicated the amount of current that had passed through. Characteristically, Edison announced that he had completed work on the meter well before he actually had. But his design eventually did turn out well; the mechanism was simple and accurate. To ensure that it worked well in winter, too, a lightbulb was added below the bottles that held the chemical solution, providing heat to keep them from freezing. The only shortcoming of the chemical meter, and it was not a small one, was that the customer could not verify its accuracy and had to trust the company that its reading was correct.