Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  However, Gramme’s original dynamo design, where a device called a “commutator” directed the current to mimic the direct current produced by batteries, caused one carbon stick to burn twice as fast as the other, a serious flaw. Monsieur Gramme, who now had his own company, solved the problem by redesigning his dynamo to generate an alternating electric current that burned the candle pairs at equal rates. Unlike direct current (DC), where the electrons are spaced evenly as they flow steadily along the conductor, alternating current (AC) causes the electrons to cluster and advance and retreat in fits and starts. Despite all the advances, early arc lights were still more difficult to service than gaslights, and their dazzling glare still restricted use to large spaces—major squares and avenues, department stores, railroad stations, circuses, building sites, wharves, and factories. They required the erecting of special towering poles so the light would not impinge on the normal visual field, hurting people’s eyes.

  One visitor to Paris hailed the arc light for its “magnificent illumination,” exclaiming, “The whole street, to the tops of the loftiest houses, is ablaze with a flood of beaming light which makes the streets seem like the scenes of some grand play at the opera.”33 Robert Louis Stevenson, however, was appalled when he first saw the arc lights of Paris, denouncing them as “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance.”34 The French authorities and many businesspeople felt differently, and by 1878 the half mile of the supremely elegant avenue de l’Opéra was ablaze with arc lights, as were other major Parisian venues, including the Magasins de Louvres and the Théâtre de Châtelet.

  American scientists and businessmen were as interested in arc lights as their counterparts on the Continent, and when they learned of the Jablochkoff “candles” in Paris, the race was on to introduce something comparable in the United States. The Yankee businessmen who came up with the first workable arc light system might become the Vanderbilt of lighting, reaping fame and fortune brightening the American night. At the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, most famous for its 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engines and Thomas Edison’s multiplex telegraph, electrical inventor Moses G. Farmer exhibited three of his own versions of the glaring arc lights. They were powered by the first dynamo designed by Americans, the work of the brilliant Farmer and William Wallace, his partner and proprietor of the nation’s foremost brass and copper foundry in Ansonia, Connecticut. Within the year, a major arc light competitor emerged out in Cleveland: a young chemist named Charles F. Brush. He beat Wallace and Farmer to the market and by the fall of 1878 was installing his hissing, brilliant arc lights inside a Boston department store, Continental Clothing House.

  Thomas Edison’s longtime friend Professor George Barker of the University of Pennsylvania was certain this was a terrific and fertile field for Edison, and he tried to pique his interest by sending along numerous reports on this newest form of artificial illumination. When that had no effect, on Sunday, September 8, Barker escorted Edison to Wallace’s large brass foundry. Under a cool gunmetal sky, Edison and Barker stepped off the train with a journalist in tow from Charles Dana’s New York Sun. For the first time, Edison finally had a chance to really see and examine Wallace and Farmer’s steam-run 8 horsepower electric dynamo, which they dubbed the “telemachon.” This was the machine that lit up their whole line of eight arc lights at one time. Reported the Sun, “Edison was enraptured. He fairly gloated over it…. He ran from the instruments to the lights, and from the lights back to the instruments. He sprawled over a table with the SIMPLICITY OF A CHILD, and made all kinds of calculations. He estimated the power of the instrument and of the lights, the probable loss in transmission, the amount of coal the instruments would save in a day, a week, a month, a year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing.”35 The actual machines and their blazing light were having exactly the effect Professor Barker had hoped for. Edison was now afire with excitement. Ever the competitor, he turned to his host, William Wallace, and said, “I believe I can beat you making the electric light. I do not think you are working in the right direction.”36 William Wallace, who had been working on arc lights for several years and had his system up and going, was a good sport. He accepted the bet and shook hands on it.

  Then Edison rushed back to quiet, bucolic Menlo Park, his research workshop in backwater New Jersey, to throw himself into creating a better and more practical electric light. He worked feverishly, thrilled at the possibilities of this new field. “It was all before me. I saw the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance. I saw that what had been done had never been made practically useful. The intense light had not been subdivided so that it could be brought into private houses.”37 Edison always liked to go after “big things.” In examining Wallace’s lights, he had grasped both the immense possibilities of the dynamo and the limited nature of the blazing arc lights. The man who came up with the best arc light system might well make a fortune stealing away even that 10 percent of the gas lighting business—that of the streetlights. But the man who could subdivide the light—to take it indoors and tame it into a gentle glow—and power it with a dynamo, he would be the true Promethean, the blazing electrical pioneer, the hailed benefactor of humankind (and wealthy to boot). The race to illuminate with electricity the houses and offices of America—nay, of the entire world—and to power the machines of the new industrial order, was on.

  Thomas Edison’s laboratory, Menlo Park, New Jersey

  CHAPTER 3

  Thomas Edison: “The Wizard of Menlo Park”

  On a mild September day in 1878, a reporter for the New York Sun headed to the Cortlandt Street dock, making his way through the cursing teamsters, their horses straining under great loads, past the oyster stalls, and into the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry terminal, there to board the railroad’s ferry for Jersey City. Up on the boat’s top deck, one could feel the harbor breeze and study the panoply of commercial vessels plying the Hudson River—the brigs and schooners, a three-masted clipper billowing toward the open seas, the workhorse barges coming down from the Erie Canal, and long side-wheel steamers. At times, it seemed the whole world, with all its woes and its wealth, was converging on Manhattan. Half a million immigrants surged in every year now. True, most kept moving, their eyes and hearts set on farms or striking it rich in the mines out west, but fifty thousand stayed here, cramming into the old tenements and filling the almshouses. The downtown slums had become sinkholes of cholera and typhoid. At night, paupers huddled in doorways near the steam grates. When the cold grew killing, those piteous beings retreated to the city’s dank indoor sleeping dens. Yet the nation’s wealth poured in, too. Every day the wharves were jammed with sailing vessels and steamships, more than ten thousand a year coming and going. The magnificent buildings of Wall Street and the financial district reflected this great economic power, as did the sheer energy of the rushing, intent crowds. It was generally believed that the hard times following the Panic of 1873 were finally over.

  On the New Jersey side of the river, hundreds who had debarked the Pennsylvania trains waited to board the giant ferry, all heading toward the cacophony of daytime New York. On the southbound accommodation train, it was just over twenty miles to Menlo Park, where Thomas A. Edison had moved from Newark two years earlier and established America’s first invention factory. There Edison planned to develop “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”1 Menlo Park had no real railway station, just a small wooden platform, and arriving visitors walked up a steep flight of crude steps to find themselves on the highest point between New York and Philadelphia, a pastoral place of fields edged by stands of woods, cows grazing in the distance, and a mellow sky that arched high overhead. Shortly after moving, Edison wrote a friend that his new lab was located at �
�Menlo Park, Western Div., Globe, Planet Earth, Middlesex County, four miles from Rahway, the prettiest spot in New Jersey, on the Penna. Railway, on a High Hill.”2

  Walking up the dirt road from the train tracks, one heard only birdsong, the sound of the wind, and mechanical rumblings from the handful of big plain buildings surrounded by a white picket fence. The two-story clapboard of grayish white was already famous as Edison’s laboratory. Telegraph wires sprouted from the upper reaches, met up with tall wooden poles, and were carried off toward Manhattan. The laboratory was the center of this small universe, and Edison was its animating spirit, around whom all else revolved. Thomas Edison had announced he was becoming a full-time inventor in early 1869. The previous six years had been spent drifting from city to city as a crack itinerant Western Union operator, while he was continually devising improvements in telegraphy and soaking up technical books on telegraphy and electricity. Once committed to full-time inventing, Edison had done well enough with such clever items as an electric copying pen. But he really hit the jackpot in late 1874 when he sold rights to his quadruplex telegraph system to Western Union rival and Wall Street manipulator Jay Gould for $30,000.

  This was heady success for a small-town boy from Port Huron, Michigan, whose father had muddled along in various grocery, real estate, and truck farming enterprises, while his mother took in boarders. Young Alva, as he was known, had received very little formal education, being taught mainly by his mother, who had briefly been a schoolteacher. His Michigan boyhood revolved largely around his many ingenious efforts to make mechanical things or brew new chemistry experiments, including one that produced “an explosion [that] … wrecked a corner of the building and burned [Edison] and some of the other boys.”3 When Edison, age thirteen, joined the Grand Trunk Railroad as a newsboy, he impressed his bosses as hardworking, entrepreneurial, and intent on self-improvement. He spent $2 (two days’ pay) to join the new Detroit Public Library and proceeded to read his way through its shelves.

  It was during these railroading years that Edison became partially deaf. Once as he was struggling to get aboard a moving train with his newspapers, a conductor helping him clamber on “took me by the ears and lifted me. I felt something snap inside my head, and my deafness started from that time.”4 Ever the optimist, Edison viewed his deafness as an advantage, a built-in buffer against outside distractions that helped him concentrate on whatever he was doing. By his teens, that was telegraphy. Edison’s avid curiosity about all things mechanical had led him to befriend the local telegraph operators wherever he was. When Edison turned sixteen in 1863, his natural flair for banging out and receiving Morse code (honed by eighteen-hour bouts of practice) earned him a slot as a junior operator. The Civil War was on, and telegraphers were in great demand. And so Edison was launched in the world of telegraphy, invention, money, and getting ahead.

  Edison’s work with the telegraph, telephone, and the amazing talking phonograph had given him an excellent grasp of the current primitive state of electrical knowledge. Such was his reputation that he was on retainer to Western Union for $400 a month. He had invested much of his considerable earnings in Menlo Park, determined to have at hand everyone and anything he might need to create and work out the practical problems that interested him. As one interviewer noted, “The keynote of [Edison’s] work is commercial utility. He asks himself when a new idea is suggested, ‘Will this be valuable from the industrial point of view? Will it do something important better than existing methods?’”5 Now Edison, that marvel of hard work, imagination, and enterprise, having seen Wallace and Farmer’s dynamos and arc lights, was, in September of 1878, concentrated on the electric light. The previous spring, a reporter and artist from the New York Daily Graphic had made the pilgrimage to Menlo Park to “see Edison and his wonderful inventions.” When they entered the laboratory to sketch scenes for their readers, they found a long open room humming with activity: “The first floor is occupied by scribes and bookkeepers in one end, and at the other some ten or twelve skillful workers in iron, who, at anvil and forge, lathe and drill, are noisily engaged in making patterns and models for the genius of the establishment. His iron ideas, in tangled shapes, are scattered and piled everywhere; turning lathes are thickly set on the floor and the room is filled with the screech of tortured metal.

  “Upstairs we climb, to a room the size of the building, with twenty windows on sides and ends. It is walled with shelves of bottles like an apothecary shop, thousands of bottles of all sizes and colors. In the corner is a cabinet organ. On benches and tables are batteries of all descriptions, microscopes, magnifying glasses, crucibles, retorts, an ash-covered forge, and all the apparatus of a chemist.”6

  Menlo Park offered cheap real estate and blessed peace and quiet. Edison’s right-hand men and many of his workers had moved out with him from Newark, where he had opened a lab and workshops in 1870. Preeminent were Charles Batchelor, a dark-bearded English mechanic who had learned unholy patience and exquisite motor skills in Manchester’s textile mills, and John Kruesi, a master Swiss machinist who sported a huge drooping mustache over a thick black beard. Kruesi’s task, at which he excelled, was to translate Edison’s rough sketches into high-quality working models. When Edison was on to a problem, there was no day or night, just hours in which to work, as his long-suffering, neglected wife and two small children well knew. Though his family lived in a wooden house just a few hundred yards down a plank road, Edison could rarely pull himself away long enough to dine at home, instead fueling himself on yet another slice of pie, preferably apple. Most of the men roomed across the way at Mrs. Jordan’s boardinghouse.

  For forty years, scientists and inventors—American and English, French, Russian, Belgian—had been largely frustrated in their efforts to create a practical indoor electric light, some kind of enclosed glass globe that could safely and brightly glow. Edison himself had toyed briefly with both arc and incandescent lights in November 1877, but with little success. He would later recall, “The results of the carbon experiments, and also of the boron and silicon experiments, were not considered sufficiently satisfactory, when looked at in the commercial sense, to continue them at that time, and they were laid aside.”7 Now on this September Saturday—a mere week since his tour of Wallace’s shop—Edison pronounced with characteristic hubris to the reporter from the New York Sun, who had come out to Menlo Park, that he, Edison, would be the one to succeed with the electric light (and more—far more!) where all others had failed. He, Edison, would be the Prometheus who would divine the secrets of this mysterious agency and light up America and the world. He had—in one inspired week—just invented the first practical incandescent light bulb, one where a wire inside the glass bulb glowed brilliantly as electricity flowed through it.

  So on September 16, 1878, the New York Sun duly proclaimed: EDISON’S NEWEST MARVEL. SENDING CHEAP LIGHT, HEAT, AND POWER BY ELECTRICITY. As befitted one who as yet had not secured his patents, Edison was understandably vague on the details of his historic breakthrough, except to say, “I have obtained it [the light] through an entirely different process than that from which scientists have sought to secure it. They have all been working in the same groove. When it is known how I have accomplished my object everyone will wonder how they never thought of it…. I can produce a thousand—aye, ten thousand lights from one machine.”8 Edison’s great but unrevealed breakthrough was, says biographer and Edison scholar Paul Israel, “a thermal regulator to prevent the incandescing element of his lamp from melting.”9 Edison was proclaiming these breakthroughs—a workable light bulb and a whole electrical lighting network—with a large dollop of showmanship, intended to attract investors and scare off rivals.

  Edison proclaimed to the New York Sun reporter, “I can light the entire lower part of New York city, using a 500 horse power engine. I propose to establish these light centres in Nassau street, whence wires can be run up town as far as the Cooper Institute, down to the Battery, and across to both rivers … the same wire th
at brings the light to you … will also bring power and heat … you may cook your food.” Edison’s vision had already vaulted beyond mere light bulbs into a glorious and immediate future of electrical grandiosity: Not only did he have in hand a workable incandescent light bulb (that would in short order make gas lighting obsolete), he would create an entire electrical power system. In a brief editorial, the Sun’s famous editor Charles Dana wryly allowed as how “if Edison is not deceiving himself, we are on the eve of surprising experiences.”10 Yet Dana, whose early years of poverty made him and his popular two-penny daily ardent champions of the workingman, did not view Edison’s Promethean assertions as worthy of his lively front page, faithfully devoted to murder, mayhem, and disaster. Electricity would not displace detailed coverage of the yellow fever plague ravaging the South, or the riveting trial for the “murder of Mrs. Jesse Billing,” or the previous day’s FINDING A CORPSE IN A BARREL IN A SECLUDED RAVINE, or the three boys who drowned in a coal chute.

  With Edison suddenly promising cheap and easy lighting within mere months, his attorney, Grosvenor P. Lowrey, leapt into action. Within the week, he informed Edison that he was rounding up investors for Edison’s new venture. Developing practical electricity would be costly, far beyond the inventor’s own resources. On October 3, 1878, Edison wrote, “Friend Lowrey: Go ahead. I shall agree to nothing, promise nothing and say nothing to any person, leaving the whole matter to you. All I want at present is to be provided with funds to push the light rapidly.”11 As reporters streamed down to Menlo Park and Edison insisted that he was on the verge of lighting up Manhattan, Lowrey established the Edison Electric Light Company on October 16, 1878, with 3,000 shares of stock. Edison was assigned 2,500 shares worth $250,000 for his electric light patents—those pending and in the future—leaving 500 shares worth $50,000. These were subscribed to by the initial investors, including Lowrey; three of his law partners; Western Union president Norvin Green; Drexel, Morgan partner Egisto Fabbri; capitalists Tracy Edson and James Banker; financier Robert L. Cutting Jr.; and last but not least, Hamilton McK. Twombly, son-in-law of the immensely wealthy William H. Vanderbilt.