Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  After immigrating to the United States in his twenties, Tesla worked briefly for Edison, who never seemed to truly acknowledge his genius and refused to pay him a promised bonus, after which Tesla left Edison's employ. But even before their final falling-out, Tesla felt hampered by Edison's fidelity to direct current. When he brought up the subject of alternating current, Edison snapped, "Spare me that nonsense. It's dangerous. We're set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it's all I'll ever fool with."

  Edison publicly condemned alternating current. "It will never be free from danger," he declared, while also claiming it was unreliable and unsuitable for central station systems. He took to calling alternating current "the executioner's current," and after promoting a series of high-profile electrocutions of animals—a dog, a calf, and finally an elephant—to prove its fatal power, he publicly supported its use for the first electric chair. The competition between Westinghouse's alternating current and Edison's direct current played out publicly and bitterly in what came to be known as the War of the Currents.

  Edison at first seemed to have public anxiety on his side after a series of events in New York City reinforced the dangers of high-voltage wires. First, in the winter of 1888, a blizzard crippled the city: "The wind at times seemed to make the entire circuit of the compass, and men and women were whirled about it like so many dolls. The snow was sharp and dry, and ... it cut like so many pieces of glass. It clung to whiskers and froze ... until the hair on men's faces [was] transformed into glistening miniature icebergs." During the storm, electric lines throughout the city came down. "Poles, with their long arms laden with wires and cables, were wrenched and twisted mercilessly by the wind. Roof fixtures, with their tangled masses of twisted and broken wires, met the eye on all sides, and the loose ends, lashed by the wind, whistled through the air like whipcord.... The breaking of the telegraph, telephone, and electric light wires, with the danger to vehicles and pedestrians attendant thereon, was added to by the danger of falling poles."

  The devastation alarmed both citizens and officials, and the alarm was compounded by a subsequent series of "deaths by wire" in the following months, including that of a young boy who was electrocuted after he playfully jumped up to touch a dangling wire. When, in the fall of 1889, a telegraph company employee was killed as he worked on the lines, his brutal death was witnessed by a crowd of New Yorkers: "The man appeared to be all on fire. Blue flames issued from his mouth and nostrils and sparks flew about his feet." A public outcry ensued, and the mayor ordered several light companies, which illuminated three-quarters of the city below Fifty-ninth Street, to extinguish their streetlights and repair their lines before lighting up again. Darkness fell over much of a city accustomed to light. The New York Times reported that the

  aspect of the city was decidedly provincial.... In the vicinity of Union and Madison squares, City Hall Park, and other open spaces the view was particularly cheerless and depressing. Thoroughfares like Broadway, Fifth, Madison, and Seventh avenues looked by contrast like endless tunnels of gloom.... The Edison system was working as usual in all the Broadway and avenue stores and in all public places through the central section of the city, where its subways are laid.... Orders were at once sent out to all police stations in the darkened district that a double patrol force should be sent out and patrolmen given special instructions to use extra vigilance while on post in guarding life and property from footpads.

  Westinghouse countered Edison and sought to assure the public by insisting on the safety of well-constructed lines: "As to the accidents from electric currents," he wrote, "the records of deaths in the city of New York show that there were killed by street-cars during the year 1888, 64 persons; by omnibuses and wagons, 55; and by illuminating gas, 23; making the number killed by the electric current (5) insignificant compared with the deaths of individuals from any of the other causes named."

  However dangerous it appeared to be, versatile alternating current was also the ideal current for a rapidly expanding nation and its economy. Although electricity was still almost fully aligned with light in most minds, and the growing number of companies that produced and sold electricity were still called "light companies" rather than "power companies," the mechanical uses of electricity had begun to emerge: electricity began to drive all kinds of devices and machines for factories and households. By 1891 alternating current systems had begun to gain favor; there were almost five times as many alternating current stations in the country as there were direct current stations. Then George Westinghouse outmaneuvered Edison's General Electric Company for the major contract to supply electricity to Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, meant to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage to America. Tesla's polyphase motors would power the greatest ode to electric light the world had yet seen, and the momentum alternating current gained from the exposition would consign direct current to the past.

  8. Overwhelming Brilliance: The White City

  Electricity is the half of an American.

  —HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT,

  The Book of the Fair

  THE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION of 1893—the largest world's fair up to that time—sprang from the most unpromising stretch of land: "a marsh when work upon it was begun, a sopping combination of low lands, water, and hummocks," noted one observer. Another called it "a treacherous morass, liable to frequent overflow ... bearing oaks and gums of such stunted habit and unshapely form as to add forlornness to the landscape." Over three years' time, thousands of men downed the trees; dredged out the muck and hauled it away in wheelbarrows; reshaped more than six hundred acres along Lake Michigan—six miles from downtown Chicago—into promontories and islands; and constructed viaducts, bridges, pathways, and paved boulevards. Countless more skilled workers and laborers—using more than eighteen thousand tons of iron and steel—framed fourteen massive structures around a broad lagoon and plaza to create the Court of Honor, the centerpiece of the fair.

  Although a different architect designed each building in the court, chief planner Daniel Burnham required all of the buildings to be adorned with neoclassical arches, towers, and pinnacles; all of the cornices to be set sixty feet above the ground; and all of the edifices to be painted white—the shade, one observer noted, "of darkened ivory or slightly smoked meerschaum." Such unified architecture, Burnham imagined, would create an exposition reminiscent of Venice, without the grime, raw sewage, or ruins. He even imported sixty gondolas from Italy to carry passengers along the waterways. The court came to be known as the White City, in part for the way its pale edifices gleamed in the prairie night.

  Never had there been so much light in one place—and it was all electric: 200,000 incandescent bulbs traced the edges of the edifices, and countless more lit the interiors of the massive exhibition halls; 6,000 arc lights on twelve-foot-high posts lined the paths and walkways. That light glinted in the lagoons and bounced off the fountain waters; it glittered in the wakes of the gondolas and the currents of Lake Michigan. Such brilliance seemed all the more miraculous because there were no leaning poles and sagging wires, nothing obvious carrying the current: so as not to mar the beauty and unity of the buildings, the wires ran underground.

  Colored lights shone as well. From the rooftops, search-lights fashioned with blue, green, red, and violet slides swept the city and waterways; colored bulbs illuminated water fountains "so bewildering no eye can find the loveliest, their vagaries of motion so entrancing no heart can keep its steady beating." Every night, fireworks went off from different locations. "There would be a dozen or more rockets sent up all at once, and they would all explode together, almost filling the air with red, blue, and green stars, which floated ... for a moment, and then dropped slowly into the water," remembered one fairgoer. The incandescent bulbs, the arc lamps, the search-lights, the fireworks—separately each would have astonished nineteenth-century eyes; together, they overwhelmed. "It is the part that each one plays in the general effect," wrote
one commentator, "all contributing to give this wondrous display the aspect of a veritable fairyland, to raise it, for the moment, almost beyond the realm of matter."

  Night at the fair had come a long way since London's Crystal Palace, or Great Exhibition of 1851, which had closed at dusk. Not until the 1867 Paris Exposition did a world's fair stay open at night. There gas and oil lamps "were used lavishly[,]...music and theatricals were supplied of satisfactory character and quality, restaurants and cafés were kept open, and the exposition generally was given as gay and festive an air as possible. The prodigal expenditure of time, money and labor were without avail, however, and the effort to force attendance after dark was a signal failure, solely because of the insufficient light, and the refusal of the people to be entertained in the dark." Only in the 1880s did evenings at fairs and expositions begin to succeed. Most notably, at the Paris Exposition of 1889, the grounds were officially illuminated with more than a thousand arc lights and almost nine thousand incandescent bulbs (in addition to private displays).

  The White City not only had more lights than the 1889 exposition; it had more lights than any real city in the country. Every day, the lights at the exposition consumed three times the electricity used to illuminate nearby Chicago. And the fair required electricity for mechanical power as well: a moving sidewalk equipped with chairs transported people who arrived by boat from Lake Michigan to the heart of the fairgrounds; electric boats, along with the gondolas, ferried people across the manmade lake—lined with statuary and dotted with fountains—at the city's center; and the world's first Ferris wheel carried passengers seated in Pullman cars 264 feet in the air, giving them a kaleidoscopic view of the city, Lake Michigan, and the Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan countryside before it brought them back to earth.

  If Chicagoans, who had already grown accustomed to electric light and gaslight, were stunned by the "brilliance almost too dazzling for the human eye to rest upon," how must it have seemed to the many visitors from small settlements and farms along the Mississippi Valley and in the surrounding states who'd left homes that were illuminated only with oil lamps and candles? To those from rural places everywhere? As one young girl, newly arrived from Poland, exclaimed, "Having seen nothing but kerosene lamps for illumination, this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven." Country visitors knew that the future lay in the cities—the young had been leaving the farms for decades, and rural life, based on the self-sufficiency of the family, had ceased to be typical. To them, the fair might have been not only dazzling but also consoling in its stark contrast to Chicago or any other late-nineteenth-century American city, for the White City—full of oddity, irony, brilliance, grace, and absurdity—was also a dream city, one without the burden of reality: a city without factories or tenements, skyscrapers, stockyards, slaughterhouses, trash heaps, coal ash, or tax collectors. Its furnaces ran on oil piped in from forty miles away, and the tenders wore white uniforms. What trash the visitors scattered about the grounds was picked up every night and carted away.

  Chicago, with a population of more than a million, was the American city of the moment, having grown and flourished, observed architect Louis Sullivan, "by virtue of pressure from without—the pressure of forest, field and plain, the mines of copper, iron and coal, and the human pressure of those who crowded in upon it from all sides seeking fortune." Along with its stockyards, train yards, smokestacks, and factories, it could brag of having two dozen skyscrapers—more than any other city at the time—as well as three dozen railroads and hundreds of millionaires. Advertising splashed across the sides of streetcars and loomed on large billboards. "Chicago, one might say, was after all only a Newer York," suggested writer and editor William Dean Howells, "an ultimated Manhattan, the realized ideal of that largeness, loudness and fastness, which New York has persuaded the Americans is metropolitan." Electric wires cluttered the air above the streets. The elevated railways clanged and screeched. Grime and soot settled upon the city's countless poor and working poor, their broken-down tenements, and the red-light district. "'Undisciplined'—that is the word for Chicago," proclaimed H. G. Wells, "a scrambling, ill-mannered, undignified, unintelligent development of material resources."

  Strange to think that much of it had risen out of the ashes of its infamous and devastating fire in 1871. Stranger still to consider that sixty years before the exposition, at a time when thousands of gaslights already lined the streets of London and Paris, Chicago was a French and Indian trading village of fewer than four thousand residents, its homes and shops illuminated with tallow lamps and candles. The area had been home to the Prairie Potawatomis, known as the People of the Place of Fire for the way they set the country alight to burn off young trees and old grasses so as to keep the prairie vigorous for game, a world where people kept alive even the smallest flame brought to life from the friction between hardwood and softwood.

  Perhaps they husbanded fire in the manner of the Blackfeet, who had once inhabited the country west of Illinois. Around the time of the White City, naturalist George Grinnell wrote of the them:

  Within the memory of men now living ... fire used to be carried from place to place in a "fire horn." This was a buffalo horn slung by a string over the shoulder like a powder horn. The horn was lined with moist, rotten wood, and the open end had a wooden stopper or plug fitted to it. On leaving camp in the morning, the man who carried the horn took from the fire a small live coal and put it in the horn, and on this coal placed a piece of punk [a fungus that grows on birch trees, which the Blackfeet gathered and dried], and then plugged up the horn with the stopper. The punk smouldered in this almost air-tight chamber, and, in the course of two or three hours, the man looked at it, and if it was nearly consumed, put another piece of punk in the horn. The first young men who reached the appointed camping ground would gather two or three large piles of wood in different places, and as soon as some one who carried a fire horn reached camp, he turned out his spark at one of these piles of wood, and a little blowing and nursing gave a blaze which started the fire. The other fires were kindled from this first one, and when the women reached camp and had put the lodges up, they went to these fires, and got coals with which to start those in their lodges. The custom of borrowing coals persisted up to the last days of the buffalo, and indeed may even be noticed still.

  At the World's Columbian Exposition, the Native American exhibits were installed in or near the Anthropological Building. According to historian Robert Rydell, "The Native Americans who participated in the exhibits ... were the victims of a torrent of abuse and ridicule. With Wounded Knee only three years removed, the Indians were regarded as apocalyptic threats to the values embodied in the White City." The verbal threats, perhaps, weren't the worst they had to endure. As it so happened, Rydell notes, "several of the exhibits of Dakota, Sioux, Navajos, Apaches, and various northwestern tribes were on or near the Midway Plaisance, which immediately degraded them."

  The Midway Plaisance, a mile-long entertainment district, led up to the entrance of the White City proper. The cultures deemed by the organizers as "barbarous and semi-civilized" were jumbled there along with food concessions and the Ferris wheel: a Moorish mosque, a Tunisian village, an Egyptian temple, a bazaar from India selling Benares brassware and inlaid metalwork, the huts of South Sea Islanders, a settlement of Laplanders complete with reindeer that pulled sleds around a circus ring. The official history of the exposition notes: "Here was an opportunity to see these people of every hue, clad in outlandish garb, living in curious habitations, and plying their unfamiliar trades and arts with incomprehensible dexterity.... There were three thousand of these denizens of the Midway gathered from all quarters of the earth."

  If, in the future, the honky-tonk sideshows and game booths of midways would be most garishly lit, in 1893 this very first midway claimed a smaller portion of electric light than other areas of the fair, although that didn't stop it from being enormously popular in the evening. As visitors arriving from Chicago walked along the mal
l toward the entrance to the White City, they could sample chapati and yogurt, Cracker Jack, stuffed cabbage, hamburgers, or steamed clams while they watched boxing matches, donkey races, beauty contests, camel drivers, belly dancers, and sword fighting in a street typical of Algiers. They could listen to a German brass band, Sumatran gong players, Chinese cymbalists, or Dahomean tom-tom players.

  The Dahomey village housed sixty-nine people, "of whom twenty-one were Amazon warriors," notes the official history. "Sight-seers ... were fascinated with the savagery of the fetich war dance performed by the Amazons." This exhibit was particularly galling to African American writer and lecturer Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave: "As if to shame the Negro," he wrote, "the Dahomians are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.... It must be admitted that, to outward seeming, the colored people of the United States have lost ground and have met with increased and galling resistance since the war of the rebellion." Almost thirty years after the end of the Civil War, the black population of the country stood at more than 7.5 million, yet not one black person had been included in the planning committee for the exposition. "When it was ascertained that the seals and glaciers of Alaska had been overlooked in the appointment of National Commissioners, it was a comparatively easy task for the President to manipulate matters so that he could give the far away land a representative," observed Ferdinand L. Barnett, editor of Chicago's first black newspaper. "It was entirely different, however, with the colored people. When the fact was laid before the President that they had been ignored and were entirely unrepresented, he found his hands tied."

  Not only had black people no representation on the planning committee, but they also had almost no formal presence at the fair. The White City housed more than sixty-five thousand exhibits, which seemed to one observer to be "the contents of a great dry goods store mixed up with the contents of museums." It included a Japanese teahouse, the dungeons of the Inquisition, and the electric chair; sea anemones, devilfish, sharks, catfish, and perch; Bach's clavichord, Mozart's spinet, and Beethoven's grand piano; almost every known fruit and vegetable seed; examples of pests that afflicted crops and pesticides used to counter them; more than a hundred exhibits on tobacco and more than another hundred on nuts; a Statue of Liberty carved out of salt; a thirty-five-foot tower of navel oranges—the oranges changed every few weeks—topped by a stuffed eagle; a Liberty Bell made out of wheat, oats, and rye; a map of the United States made out of pickles; and a 2 2,ooo-pound mass of cheese encased in iron. Within that glut of variousness, African Americans could claim only several exhibits by black colleges; a painting by George Washington Carver; Edmonia Lewis's sculpture of Hiawatha; and "Aunt Jemima," portrayed by a former slave who wore a red bandana and flipped pancakes outside the R. T. Davis Milling Company booth.