Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  To counter and protest the lack of a dignified presence for blacks, Douglass, antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett published a pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, which detailed the successes of blacks, the colleges they had established, and the inroads they'd made in medicine, law, and the arts. "We earnestly desired to show some results of our first thirty years of acknowledged manhood and womanhood," Douglass wrote in his introduction. "Wherein we have failed, it has been not our fault but our misfortune, and it is sincerely hoped that this brief story, not only of our successes, but of [our] trials and failures, our hopes and disappointments will relieve us of the charge of indifference and indolence.... And hence we send forth this volume to be read of all men."

  The struggle of African Americans for a presence in the White City anticipated the inequalities to come concerning electric light in their lives. Although at the time of the fair, electric light in homes was still a luxury attainable by only the very wealthy, its ubiquity throughout the Court of Honor must have given people a sense that its place in everyday life was inevitable. But electric lines wouldn't arrive in ordinary urban and suburban households for decades, and in rural homes for decades after that. Black neighborhoods would be among the last lit in cities—long after electricity had come to seem a matter of course in white neighborhoods—and rural blacks would have an even longer wait than rural whites. The longer they waited for electric light, which would continue to grow ever brighter and become ever more a symbol of modernity, the greater the disparity would seem, for electricity did say yes or no with the same voice: the lines ran—or did not run—along the streets and into the homes; electric light suffused entire windows (whereas oil lamps did not). Thus the distinction between those with and those without would come to be as pronounced as the gulf between the Midway Plaisance and the Court of Honor.

  At that time, however, when electricity in the home was out of reach for almost everyone, more visitors wandered among the exhibits in the Electricity Building than at any other exposition site, especially in the evening, when it was the brightest place in the White City. After visitors walked past the statue of Benjamin Franklin—"his gaze turned upward toward the lowering clouds, in one hand the kite, and in the other the key of which all the world has read"—they encountered the General Electric exhibit, with its displays of Edison's phonograph and his Kinetoscope, which continually projected a short film of British prime minister William Gladstone addressing the House of Commons. Beyond, visitors could peruse twenty-five hundred specimens of Edison incandescent lamps—"no two of which were alike, being in many colors and in candle power ranging from ½-c.p. to 300-c.p"—and other lamps in different stages of construction, as well as examples of the filaments that Edison carbonized in his quest for incandescent light and examples of his dynamos. At the center of it all stood Edison's Tower of Light, an eighty-two-foot-high column built of thousands of miniature colored lamps that flashed in various designs. It was crowned by a huge incandescent bulb made of cut glass.

  The attempt to subdivide electric light may have continued for almost a century and have involved dozens of experimenters and electricians, but Americans would always think of Edison as the sole inventor of the electric light, and he would always hold a particular and sentimental place in the popular imagination, as was clear during the opening ceremonies of the Electricity Building. One observer wrote:

  The Edison tower and the classic pavilion at its base stood revealed in all their cold, chaste beauty of outline. But for a few seconds only; the glare of search-lights focused upon them, causing their dark surface to shine with a dazzling radiance. Then the crystal bulb at the top burst into flame, flashing like a crown of diamonds; and finally the entire column was arrayed in robes of purple light like a pillar of fire ... and by a thousand voices was shouted the name of him by whom these marvels had been wrought.

  Beyond the General Electric exhibit, in displays of both foreign and domestic electric manufacturers, visitors encountered countless things that would have been uni maginable twenty years before: motors, engines, welding equipment, surgery and dentistry instruments. "Close at hand one may study the system of an electric signal company ... in a neat railway model marked 'dangerous'; he may have a suit of clothes cut by an electric machine, or he may seat himself in an easy chair while his boots are polished by electric brushes. Here also is an electric incubator, with eggs in the process of hatching." They marveled at the exhibit of an electric kitchen, where flameless heat for cooking turned on instantaneously, water poured from a faucet at the turn of a knob, and machines washed clothes and dishes. But electricity not only offered a vision of the future; it also seemed to redefine history. Dioramas depicted past civilizations retrofitted with electricity, such as Egyptians "dipping reels of wire into insulating baths, and bearing to their queen, typical of Chicago, lamps, dynamos, motors, batteries, and other appliances."

  The controlled use of power and light was but a part of electricity's allure. The mystery and seeming wildness of it was another, and that was Nikola Tesla's province. The Tesla exhibits in the Westinghouse section of the Electricity Building, inexplicable to almost everyone who saw them, included Tesla's whirling "egg of Columbus"—a copper egg spun on its end within a rotating magnetic field. Lightning crackled between two insulated plates, and various balls and disks spun simultaneously in different places in the room. "When the currents were turned on and the whole animated with motion, it presented an unforgettable spectacle," recalled one witness. "Mr. Tesla had many vacuum bulbs in which small light metal discs were pivotally arranged on jewels and these would spin anywhere in the hall when [an] iron ring was energized."

  Tesla also displayed various discharge lamps, offspring of the Geissler tube—the creation of Heinrich Geissler, physicist and maker of scientific instruments in Bonn, Germany, in the mid-nineteenth century. Geissler had taken an evacuated glass cylinder and attached electrodes to both ends, then filled the cylinder with combinations of rarefied gases such as neon and argon. The gases conducted a current from one end of the tube to the other, producing visible colored light in the process. Tesla shaped tubes of light into coils, circles, and squares and spelled out the names of famous electricians, the name of his favorite Serbian poet, and the very word "light."

  More intriguing than all his devices was Tesla himself, frail and hollow-cheeked from an exhausting year of ceaseless work. When he arrived at the fair to give a lecture, even the professors gazing at the hodgepodge of equipment he was about to use in demonstrations "lumped off the whole lot under the generic term of 'Tesla's animals.'" Tesla, the announcement for his lecture proclaimed, promised to pass a current of 100,000 volts through his body, "without injury to life, an experiment which seems all the more wonderful when we recall the fact that the currents made use of for executing murderers at Sing Sing, N.Y., have never exceeded 2,000 volts." The promise drew crowds of people clamoring to get into the auditorium, although the demonstration was open only to members of the International Electrical Congress, who were convening at the fair.

  Whereas low-frequency current would have meant certain death, Tesla, dressed in a white tie and tails, employed a very high frequency current, which traveled along the surface of his body, not through it. He explained:

  The streams of light which you have observed issuing from my hand are due to a potential of about 200,000 volts, alternating in rather irregular intervals, sometimes like a million times a second. A vibration of the same amplitude, but four times as fast ... would not burn me up.... Yet a hundredth part of that energy, otherwise directed, would be amply sufficient to kill a person.... The amount of energy which may thus be passed into the body of a person depends on the frequency and potential of the currents, and by making both of these very great, a vast amount of energy may be passed into the body without causing any discomfort.

  Those lucky enough to get a seat were astonished to witn
ess him onstage engulfed in light and perfectly sensible. One reporter of the time wrote: "After such a striking test, which, by the way, no one has displayed a hurried inclination to repeat, Mr. Tesla's body and clothing have continued for some time to emit fine glimmers or halos of splintered light." Engulfed in light is how he is imagined still. Photographs of Edison, whose successes inched forward by dint of ceaseless trial and error, depict him posing with his crew, or perhaps napping on a laboratory table, the background cluttered with bottles and vials and hand tools. The most renowned photographs of Tesla show him alone and somehow saturated with electricity. One, a double exposure, portrays him calmly seated in his spare and cavernous Colorado lab while jagged streaks of light shoot through the air above and around him.

  For all the wildness of Tesla's exhibits, his greatest accomplishment at the fair stood in Machinery Hall: twelve perfectly synchronous polyphase dynamos—each about ten feet high and weighing seventy-five tons—which sent current to every corner of the grounds. The hall, Jill Jonnes, notes, was "alive with the deafening mechanical clanking and whirring ... and unpleasantly redolent of fumes and oil and grease.... Great engines in the Westinghouse nave ran even greater generators, which in turn flashed 2,000 volts of AC from each double Tesla machine forth through the subways." But it wasn't the machinery alone that held people's attention. "Popular interest was divided between these machines, the largest of their kind up to the time, and the switchboard," wrote Westinghouse biographer Francis Leupp. That switchboard, made of a thousand square feet of marble and situated in a gallery that was reached by spiral staircases, controlled 250,000 incandescent lights. "What astonished visitors most, perhaps, was to see this elaborate mechanism handled by one man, who was constantly in touch, by telephone or messenger, with every part of the grounds, and responded to requests of all sorts by the mere turning of a switch."

  One of the most provoking testimonies to the quality of the light controlled by the turning of that switch is Winslow Homer's The Fountains at Night, World's Columbian Exposition, which he painted while visiting the White City. For centuries, artists had depicted nights in warm, muted colors and worlds disappearing in shadow where a viewer might sense the ongoing fading of light. But in Homer's work, the illumination feels endless. This isn't the light of antiquity: flowing and falling water spans the picture, and the light has turned it entirely luminous—no wake of light in the dark here—against which the statuary and the gondola with its oarsmen and passengers seem all that much darker. Bright white flecks the forelocks, foreheads, and noses of the resolute horses of Frederick MacMonnies's fountain and the upturned face of one of the fairgoers in the gondola that swiftly cuts across the lake. It feels as if the boat will momentarily race past the frame of the painting—it is we who are ephemeral—but the light will never change, or so it seems where the work now hangs, in the midst of other nineteenth-century oil paintings. Surrounded by a nimbus of rich reds, browns, and greens; by paintings of pastures and marshes in pure daylight or slowly disappearing in the dusk; by depictions of fruit and wood and faces kindled by oil lamps and toned down by varnish and time, Homer's Fountains —with its blacks and whites and grays, its grave intensity—stands at odds with everything else in the room, as if he has painted the unblinking eye of the late century staring into the future.

  When the World's Columbian Exposition went dark after six months, the Laplanders put oceans between themselves and the Dahomey, the belly dancers, and the sword fighters. The buildings, sheathed with "staff" (plaster of Paris mixed with jute fiber and cement), had always been mere spider weaves of struts and supports meant to last only for a summer and fall. Both the mayor of Chicago and the architect of the White City, Daniel Burnham, advocated burning the grounds. "I believe," the mayor said, "if we cannot preserve it ... I would be in favor of putting a torch to it ... and let it go up into the bright sky to eternal heaven." Although some of the buildings were destroyed by an accidental fire in 1894, much of the fair was dismantled. "There are 'bits' of the World's Fair at the present time all over the world—in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in the two Americas, in Australia," reported Scientific American. Some of the plaster ornaments were sold as souvenirs; some of the glass went to greenhouses; the salvaged steel was sent to Pittsburgh furnaces. Flagpoles ended up at schools and convents. The statue of Benjamin Franklin found a home at the University of Pennsylvania.

  The stuff of the fair may have been dissipated across the globe, but the brilliant, unbounded lights of the Court of Honor would not be forgotten. It seemed that forever afterward, Americans would prize more and more dazzle in their cities, prize electric marquees and electric advertising on an outsize scale made all the more possible by George Westinghouse's next project. Long before the last bits of the White City's plaster were sold off, Westinghouse turned his attention to Niagara Falls, where with the help of Nikola Tesla's dynamos, he would develop the first extensive and practical long-distance power lines.

  9. Niagara: Long-Distance Light

  BY THE TIME Charles Dickens visited Niagara Falls in 1842, it was already thick with visitors. Taverns, viewing towers, stairways, and hotels sprinkled the banks, but their presence couldn't diminish his astonishment:

  I was in a manner stunned, and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene. It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked—Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright-green water!—that it came upon me in its full might and majesty.... Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one—instant and lasting—of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace. Peace of Mind: Tranquility: Calm recollections of the Dead: Great Thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of Gloom or Terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.

  Changeless in Dickens's heart, perhaps, but although the State of New York—interested in maintaining the natural beauty and the appeal of the place for tourists—preserved the area directly around the falls from industrial development, Niagara contained so much exploitative potential that it could not possibly remain changeless in the industrial age. Nineteenth-century magnates believed that its power was lying in wait for them, if only they could arrive at a way to harness the force of the water. In the words of inventor Sir William Siemens, "All the coal raised throughout the world would barely suffice to produce the amount of power that continually runs to waste at this one great fall."

  Niagara's 160-foot precipice of dolostone and shale isn't among the highest of cataracts, but with a breadth of more than 3,500 feet, it is second only to southern Africa's Victoria Falls in width. And the lakes that feed into the Niagara River—Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie—contain 20 percent of all the fresh water in the world. When Swedish traveler Peter Kalm encountered the river in 1750, almost all of it rushed over the falls and then through a series of gorges before flowing into the fifth Great Lake, Ontario. "The greatest and strongest battoes would here in a moment be turn'd over and over," he wrote. "The water ... seems almost to outdo an arrow in swiftness.... When all this water comes to the very Fall, there it throws itself down perpendicular! It is beyond all belief the suprize when you see this!...You cannot see it without being quite terrified."

  When Kalm visited Niagara, the rugged, lush country—its vines, flowers, mosses, and pines drenched by mists rising from the falls—held few human traces beyond the cold fires of old encampments and the portage and trading paths of the Iroquois. The river, far too vast and swift to navigate, was mostly an obstacle to the tribes in the region, though they sometimes gathered up fish that perished in the roil at the bottom of the falls—the drop being deadly to all kinds of wildlife caught in the currents. Kalm wrote:

  Several of the French gentlemen told me, that when birds come flying into this fog or smoak of the fall, they fall down and perish in the Water; either because their wings are become wet, or that the noise of the fall astonishes them, and they know
not where to go in the Dark. And very often great flocks of [swans, geese, ducks, water-hens, teal, and the like] are seen going to destruction in this manner; they swim in the river above the fall, and so are carried down lower and lower ... till the swiftness of the water becomes so great that 'tis no longer possible for them to rise, but they are driven down the precipice, and perish.... They find also several sorts of dead fish, also deer, bears, and other animals which have tried to cross the water above the fall; the larger animals are generally found broken to pieces.

  The Europeans and Americans who settled northern New York in the eighteenth century, like the area's native peoples, found the power of Niagara far too great to exploit. As they cleared the woods and planted fields and orchards, they instead dammed small area streams and rivers for their sawmills, gristmills, and carding machines. The one village—a tavern, a blacksmith, and a handful of homes—along the river above the falls, where a narrow canal fed a small sawmill, then a gristmill, burned to the ground during the War of 1812. A new community, eventually called Niagara, established itself on the ruins of the old town, and several small mills there were driven by water channeled through a canal.