by Jill Jonnes
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition was formally launched. All told, twenty-seven million visitors (half Americans, half foreigners) would pay fifty cents to enter the great fair and experience its astonishments. Above all else, visitors came to marvel at the fair’s electrical astonishments. Just as George Westinghouse had hoped, this fair showcased as nothing else ever had the new age of electricity, with its wonders, both startling and prosaic.
Day after day, during the first official week of the 1893 World’s Fair, the cold, rainy deluge returned. This was probably just as well, for despite Burnham’s best efforts, much of the six-hundred-acre fair was still unready. But even as the naysayers gloated over the inauspicious start and prophesied failure, the weather warmed, the exhibits were whipped into shape, sultry spring zephyrs wafted in off Lake Michigan, and Olmsted’s million trees, shrubs, and plants, planted so artfully about the giant lagoon and sinuous canals, unfurled their buds. The people began to arrive, and from the first, they were truly astounded. Everything about this fair was the biggest, the most astonishing, the most exotic, the most glorious. Over on the lively Midway Plaisance, the fair’s section for rides and less rarefied pleasures, George Washington Ferris’s great wheel loomed 250 feet high, the engineering marvel Burnham had hoped would eclipse Monsieur Eiffel’s tower at the 1889 Paris Exposition. Altogether different, the Ferris wheel was equally enchanting. At night, the great wheel glittered in the sky, its gradual (electrically powered) turning outlined with three thousand light bulbs. More than a million fair visitors would pay fifty cents just to ride in one of the thirty-six shiny Pullman cabins and enjoy two stately revolutions with their incredible views of the nearby smoke-enshrouded Chicago and the fair’s fabulous grounds. As they circled slowly around in the air, the Ferris wheel riders could see right below them the exotic Turkish village, the delightful German beer garden, and the Cairo street with its camels, minareted mosque, and Egyptian tombs.
Woven through it all was electricity. In one of the many guidebooks, the chief electrician boasted, “The Columbian Exposition is a magnificent triumph of the age of Electricity … all the exhibits in all the buildings are operated by electrical transmission. The Intramural Elevated Railway, the launches that ply the Lagoons, the Sliding Railway on the thousand foot pier, the great Ferris Wheel, the machinery of the Libby Glass Company on the Midway, all are operated by electrically transmitted energy … everything pulsates with quickening influence of the subtle and vivifying current.”24 There was even an electric kitchen! Here in Chicago’s Jackson Park, in this planned, short-lived paradise, ordinary men and women still living in rural worlds untouched by any electrical wonders could see for the very first time abundant electricity naturally employed in modern daily life, an utterly invisible but supremely powerful phenomenon put to the most pleasing, startling, and useful effects. “The World’s Fair probably comes as near being the electrician’s ideal city as any spot on the globe,” declared the Review of Reviews.25 Writer Hamlin Garland urgently wrote his father, “Sell the cook stove if necessary and come. You must see this fair.”26 The fair would ultimately generate and use three times as much electricity as the whole city of Chicago. But the White City was not plagued with the dangerous webs of electric wires that lurked overhead in most big U.S. cities. Burnham had sunk miles of big “subways,” roomy enough for men to walk in, reachable by 1,560 manholes. There the electrical wires were tidily and safely ensconced, easy to inspect, and unable to shock (or kill) any unsuspecting souls. Just four years earlier, the 1889 Paris Exposition had used 1,150 arc lights and 10,000 incandescent lamps; the Chicago Exposition had ten times that number in its buildings and grounds. Paris had generated a grand total of 3,000 horsepower, Chicago 29,000.
The White City illuminated at night was a radiant electrical vision long remembered by all who witnessed it, acclaimed as the most fabulous spectacle in a fair brimming with fabulous spectacles. On Monday evening, May 8, as twilight gathered, the Reverend F. Herbert Stead was once again among the crowds ringing the Court of Honor. The sky darkened to a deep indigo over the lake, and the air grew perceptibly chillier. Suddenly, the gold-domed Administration Building came brilliantly to pulsating electrical life, provoking a prolonged sigh of pleasure from the crowd. Next, the long classic sweep of the peristyle on the far end of the Great Basin burst forth from twilight’s shadow, wondrously luminous with the tens of thousands of Westinghouse “stopper” lamps glowing softly up in the cornices and along the pediment, highlighting the hundreds of statues. The crowd clapped wildly at this bravura burst of electricity. Next, all the white palaces glowed to electric life, radiant visions of an imagined past, followed swiftly by the thousands of lights encircling the dark waters of the 1,500-foot Great Basin, its rippling surface now a-shimmer. Hundreds of arc lights lining the walkways came on, spreading their clear, blue white coronas. Again, the crowd roared its approval. Ghostly gondolas and long electric craft looked like a fairy fleet. Then, from the highest roofs swung to luminous life four massive searchlights, each raking the night sky, even as it shone white, then bloodred, then green, then blue. The people, who had never seen such concentrated, artistic electrical luminosity, let out a steady, breathless chorus of “Oh!” and “Ah!”
Then all went dramatically, suddenly dark, and the White City loomed only as a spectral vision. The murmur of the crowd mingled with the sound of the chilly spring winds off the lake. Out of the total blackness, with a rush and a roar, “the great electric fountains lifted their gushing and gleaming waters. There were two of these fountains, one on either side of the MacMonnies fountain, and through all their many changes each was the counterpart of the other, alike in color and form.”27 The gushing colored waters formed beautiful shapes and hues. Finally, at 9:30, the lights were quelled and the electrically dazed and sated crowds drifted slowly home, awed by the transformation of the dark into something so magically new.
Yet for all its front-page rhapsodizing about the White City’s first sublime nighttime illumination, the biggest local story in the Chicago Tribune issue of May 9 was not the long-awaited triumph of the fair, but the abrupt closing of the local Chemical National Bank. It was the first of the fast-widening ripples of the Panic of 1893. Forty-eight hours after the celebratory opening day of Chicago’s World’s Fair, the nation’s brittle but booming economy began to collapse in horrifying slow motion. Already that spring, there had been rising uneasiness about the continuing flight of European capital. Then the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad failed, along with the bloated National Cordage trust, setting off the May 5 Wall Street panic known as “Industrial Black Friday.” Three days later, the vice president of Chicago’s Chemical National Bank said blandly, “Yes, the rumor is true. We found today our cash was running so low that we decided it would be best to quit.” He claimed depositors would lose nothing. The Panic of 1893 was gaining ominous momentum. The Review of Reviews wrote, “Not since 1873 has there been such a critical time. Reports of bank suspensions and of the failure of old and established financial and commercial enterprises have been crowding the newspapers. The worst aspect of these failures is the seeming needlessness of so many of them…. If people would only think that nothing is wrong, nineteen-twentieths of the problem would disappear at once.” The magazine urged President Cleveland to move up to August the extraordinary and early session of Congress he was already calling for September.28
Inside the enchanted precincts of the White City during that first month, visitors became well aware that all around them electricity was at work, dazzling with a multitude of lights, powering all variety of engines, and operating that most amusing of conceits—a long “moving sidewalk” along the steamboat pier that fairgoers could leap onto and off of at will. But it was the easy transmission of such great volumes of electricity with alternating current that so clearly distinguished this Chicago fair. Here at the Columbian Exposition, Harold Brown’s “executioner’s current” quietly shed that fearful sobriquet to become the “subtle and vivify
ing current.” George Westinghouse had, as promised, installed all his AC behemoths in the south nave of Machinery Hall, a vast cavernous space alive with the deafening mechanical clanking and whirring of hundreds of huge machines 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. Once out in the park, these high voltages came down for use via “converters [transformers] placed in fire-proof and water-proof pits outside the buildings, and the secondary wires were led into the buildings in vitrified-tile ducts. The largest converter used had a capacity of two-hundred lights, and nearly all were of that size.”29
Westinghouse had initially contracted for ninety-two thousand incandescent lights. But no one quite knew how many lights would really be needed or how many motors. So from the start he had factored in great excess capacity, one of the strengths of the flexible AC system. Delivering additional power was not a great trouble. By the time the fair was fully opened and up and running, the Westinghouse Electric Company had installed almost triple the number of lights—250,000 “stopper” bulbs—called for in the original contract. But each night only 180,000 of those came aglow, leaving 70,000 as a sufficient electrical cushion when others burned out. (There were Westinghouse employees who did nothing but rush about high in the fair rooftops changing dead light bulbs.) Many motors were run also. The nerve center for this biggest of AC central stations was the highly visible Westinghouse switchboard in Machinery Hall, the control panel monitoring the 15,000 horsepower of electricity flashing out to the fair. The switchboard, made out of (noncombustible) marble, was a hundred feet long, ten feet high, and divided into three sections. Accessible by spiral iron staircases and walkways, the switchboard’s many plugs, levers, and wires operated forty circuits so arranged that if one broke, another could be substituted instantly.
“What astonished visitors most, perhaps,” said Westinghouse biographer Francis Leupp, “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.”30 And that young man maintained a cool, easygoing demeanor, as if it were all very simple. Here, finally, at the World’s Fair, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla could beguile the American public with their shared dream of cheap power, sketching the outlines of the radiant electrical world taking shape, where electricity was cheap and universal, changing forever—in ways almost too momentous to imagine—how people managed the physical world, how they spent their evening hours, the very nature of work and leisure. Here for the first time, millions would see the electrical motors that would take over the burdensome physical tasks long performed by man or his animals, and the lamps that would light their houses.
By the time the Electricity Building was finally ready for its belated opening on the rainy evening of Thursday, June 1, another twenty national banks had gone belly-up and the newspapers were filled with stories of business failures due to “financial stringency.” But the White City served as an enchanted retreat from the impending hard times, and those approaching the Electricity Building through the stubborn drizzle that night had their hearts lightened by the loveliness of the looming delicate and airy neo-Renaissance white palace. A colossal statue of Benjamin Franklin attired in colonial frock coat and knee breeches, famous kite in hand, welcomed all who approached. Those walking into the monumental three-acre exhibition hall found their eyes briefly overwhelmed by intense electric glare: the combined candlepower of thirty thousand incandescent and arc lights. Once eyes adjusted, visitors could see the gray evening light filtering in softly through the skylighted vaulted roof high above and many flags and tricolor bunting draped from the second-story balcony. What could not be missed was General Electric’s large and dominating corporate presence. Most noticeably, there was front and center a towering eighty-foot Columbian column, set atop a charming round Greek pavilion, its top covered with a huge concealing drapery. As visitors came closer to the foot of the tower, they saw that among the pillars of its base, the adorable colonnaded temple, hung hundreds of lovely and highly artistic Edison light fixtures.
Charles Coffin of GE, who had had little use for Thomas Edison as an actual business partner, made sure the public would still associate the new GE with the beloved inventor and his world-famous name. Therefore, all things Edison were given full and extravagant play: Edison’s newest and most amazing invention, the Kinetoscope, forerunner of the motion picture, ran a short film of English prime minister William Gladstone delivering a speech in the House of Commons. On the Kinetoscope’s screen, he was as real to visitors as if they were watching him through a window. A tasteful arena of palms displayed 2,500 different kinds of Edison incandescent bulbs. Much of the exhibit catered to nostalgia for Edison’s historic lighting breakthrough, thus establishing the primacy of all Edison inventions. Yet Edison’s epochal direct current central station was fast becoming a technology of the past. The future, of course, was what the Wizard would never have countenanced in an Edison display—the alternating current central station. But because Charles Coffin now ran GE, the firm showcased variations of its own alternating current apparatus.
One suspects that Westinghouse—who avoided such ceremonies—would have enjoyed the scene on that wet June night when the cavernous Electricity Building formally opened. For as soon as the aisles were suitably full of electrical visitors and the hour struck 8:15, John Philip Sousa’s band began to smartly play his “Picadors March.” All eyes now turned curiously to the towering top of the drapery-shrouded GE column. Slowly and ceremoniously, the concealing cloth was pulled away. Great hooting, laughter, and clapping erupted, echoing clamorously off the curved rooftop skylights. For there perched atop the sturdy column rose an eight-foot-tall, half-ton Edison incandescent light bulb, shimmering gorgeously through five thousand laboriously installed prisms. It was nothing less than General Electric’s triumphal monument to the Seven Years’ Incandescent Light Bulb War, the corporate victor’s visible and sculptural declaration that the superior light bulb was theirs exclusively. (In keeping with this triumphant theme, GE displayed the full seven-thousand-page, seven-volume “Filament Case” testimony, a happy sight for any lawyer.) Lovely and legally instructive as the gargantuan Edison bulb might be, Westinghouse would have appreciated the irony that it was also one of the few Edison bulbs in the whole vast fair, for everywhere it was his “stopper” lamps that lit the night.
Edison’s column turned out to be almost alive. It could dance! The audience gasped to see the eighty-foot column come pulsatingly to life. Reported the Chicago Daily Tribune, “Electricity danced up and down and all about its circumference in time with the rhythm of the music. First, slender lines of purple fire ran straight up and down its great height. Between them, at the next measure, came waves of crimson flame, and then, cutting up the spaces between in geometric figures and circling the column from top to bottom, clear dazzling whites.”31 One man yelled, “Edison!” in thrilled tribute. Others joined, and soon the whole building resounded to the delighted chant, “E-di-son, E-di-son, E-di-son.” When at last the show ended, the crowds returned to roaming the aisles and alcoves. On the main floor were the major inventors, men like Edison and Tesla and Elisha Gray, whose teleautography machine was a protofax. Upstairs was the purview of lesser mortals flogging all kinds of electrical gadgets, many dubious—charged belts for a better sex life, body invigorators, electrical hairbrushes.
With such dazzlements at hand, it was perhaps natural that few appreciated the exhibit that was key to the electrical revolution slowly unfolding. This was, of course, the alternating current system of Nikola Tesla set up within the Westinghouse exhibit in the Electricity Building’s north end. Only the most informed understood the extraordinary significance of the humble working model sitting on a long sturdy wooden table. It merited barely any mention in the m
any written popular accounts of electricity at the World’s Fair. Yet here was the technology that would soon change the whole world. It included “a generating station, a high tension transmission circuit about 30 feet long and a receiving and distributing station. The first contains a 500 h.p. two-phase alternating current generator, a 5 h.p. direct current exciter, a marble switchboard and the necessary step-up transformers. In practice the generator and exciter would naturally be driven by water power…. Both generator and wheel are driven by a 500 h.p. Tesla polyphase motor with a rotating field, and the exciter by a 5 h.p. motor of the same type, both operated by current from the large two-phase alternators in Machinery Hall.”32 This collection of machines signified little to all but the cognoscenti. Here was power at its most versatile: a single source sending electricity a distance, where it then could run incandescent or arc lights, street railways, motors for factories.
While only the best-informed electricians appreciated the supreme importance of the small working model of Tesla’s AC system, thousands of fair visitors breathlessly pressed in around Tesla’s other crowd-pleasing exhibits in the Westinghouse section. There was the whirling Egg of Columbus (this being a large ostrich-size copper egg) such as had so captivated the reluctant Mr. Peck but six years earlier. The egg vividly demonstrated the rotating fields created by polyphase currents. The World’s Fair version also included many smaller copper “planets.” All were set to twirling until slowly but surely they all spun to the outer ring of their small electrified universe. Great crowds watched spellbound as seemingly inexplicable forces moved the copper balls inexorably about. Far more flashy but equally inexplicable to the general public was the eerie and almost occult darkened Tesla room, a tiny claustrophobic place. Over its entry door, a Westinghouse sign emitted brilliant and startling miniature crackling lightning, followed by a thunderous boom that echoed throughout the noisy hall. Inside, above people’s heads could be seen “suspended two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil. These were about fifteen feet apart, and served as terminals of the wires leading from the transformers. When the current was turned on, the vacuum bulbs or tubes [arrayed about the room], which had no wires connected to them … were made luminous…. Shown by Mr. Tesla in London about two years ago … they produced so much wonder and astonishment.”33 Glass tubing formed the names of famous electricians, all hauntingly aglow. As high-frequency currents crackled across the exhibit, beautiful long fingers of white sparks played across the flat, aluminum-covered surfaces. It was ethereal and magical, as if small pieces of lightning had finally been captured from the heavens and tamed.
