by Jill Jonnes
To appreciate the universality of electricity in American urban homes by 1930, one has only to consider that even in a midsize midwestern city like Muncie, Indiana, 95 percent of families had electricity. This was true even though more than a third still had no bath and a fifth still used outhouses. Yet virtually every Muncie household opted for the electricity that allowed one to sit for hours during the darkest evenings in a bright room and suffer no strained eyes or gas-induced headaches. Equally persuasive were such labor-saving conveniences as electric irons, vacuums (750,000 sold in 1919), washing machines, toasters, and hot-water heaters. Just thirty years after Edison figured out how to build the first power grid, electricity was changing the daily tenor of life all over urban America. Many a wife happily dispensed with the maid and did the now easier job of housekeeping herself.
For all the convenience of lamps and washing machines, probably no early electrical appliance brought such change (and pleasure) into the American home as the radio in the early 1920s. For the first time, just as Tesla had once predicted, people could tune in to the world far distant, receiving new voices and sounds from a big wooden box. Now, when their ball team played out of town, or the president gave a speech, or a famous soprano sang in New York, Americans could follow these events. The soap operas kept them enthralled, comedy hours lightened their days. Was it surprising that within a decade almost every American family (with electricity) had a radio? It would probably be hard to overstate the influence of radio in both knitting together the nation and inspiring many a small-town boy or girl to more exciting ambitions. Electrical power made possible the important and the frivolous, the noble and the idiotic.
Because electricity was viewed strictly as a commercial commodity in these early decades, access to electricity came far more slowly for citizens out in the hinterlands, where a third of Americans still lived in the 1930s. As late as 1934, only a tenth of the nation’s farms had electricity, for service was determined by profitability. It was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who first proposed the radical notion that isolated farmers were as entitled to the liberating benefits of electricity as Americans living in cities and suburbs. The private utilities, which had long seen electricity strictly as an economic proposition, balked. The New Deal stepped forward with government-backed rural electrification projects. Even so, it would take twenty-five years for the high-tension wires carrying electricity to straddle the hills and prairies into even the most remote farms, finally ending their long dependence on tallow candles and kerosene lamps. During these decades, as electricity became the invisible lifeblood of our modern civilization, its price dropped almost by half. Farmers were as quick as the businessmen and housewives to put electricity to work doing all kinds of drudgery.
For all the immense gains and almost magical gifts that electricity bestowed, there were, of course, some small losses, felt only by a few. The world, now powered by machines, became far noisier. The hum, rumble, and roar of motors and engines, the persistent sound of electrically amplified noises, all came to fill the air. Natural sounds, just plain silence, were drowned out by man-made din. The once ubiquitous horse largely disappeared, no longer needed for mobility or sheer horsepower. The American night sky, once truly black and blazing with billions of glistening stars, decade by decade became steadily more permeated by man-made electric light, until now, when the sun sets and true darkness descends, it is not inky black, but an orange gray color, especially just above the horizon. In consequence, the stars, especially the Milky Way, are difficult and often impossible to see. In Electrifying America, one man laments, “We of the age of machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself…. Today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of the night, who have never even seen night.”52 Electricity allowed a greater regimentation of life, ripping away the natural rhythms of time and season. The quieting of work and home as the natural light disappeared no longer existed, nor did families gather about the hearth for heat and light. Men, women, and children retreated more and more into their comfortable and convenient homes or became more and more obliged to toil on in their well-lighted offices and factories.
The rise of such electrical machines as radio, movies, television, videos, computers, and the Internet also meant the rise of life at a remove, life experienced passively through a screen, the watching and observing of activities organized and presented by others. Before electricity, men, women, and children who wanted to enjoy music, theater, dance, politics, speeches, or sports were present as active participants or spectators. Nineteenth-century human experience was firsthand, in person, intimate, authentic, with the notable exception of that described by the written word and still images, whether paintings or photographs. With electricity came a veritable cornucopia of possible new human experiences, far more than most modern people can begin to absorb. But many of them are experienced secondhand.
Nikola Tesla lived to see his great invention, his great gift to mankind, spread across the landscape, brightening homes, enlivening communities, and enriching the whole country, just as he had hoped. Despite the travails and frustrations of his later life, Tesla, ever the idealist, said: “I continually experience an inexpressible satisfaction from the knowledge that my polyphase system is used throughout the world to lighten the burdens of mankind and increase comfort and happiness.” The rise of the railroads and the telegraph changed forever age-old notions of distance and time; the steam engine had already hinted at the potential of machine-created energy. Electricity unleashed the Second Industrial Revolution, bestowing on man incredible gifts: the untold hours once lost to simple darkness, the even greater hours lost to drudging human labor, and the consequent freeing and flourishing of the human mind and imagination. Even acknowledging a loss of nineteenth-century intimacy and authenticity, the intrusion of perpetual din, and the mechanized rush of modern life, the coming of electricity ultimately expanded the whole human sense of time, energy, and possibility. Great, indeed, has been the power of electricity.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
“Morgan’s House Was Lighted Up Last Night”
1.
James D. McCabe, New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (Philadelphia: Douglass Bros., 1882), p. 332.
2.
Letter from Major Sherbourne Eaton to Thomas A. Edison dated June 8, 1882. Thomas A. Edison Archives website, Rutgers University.
3.
George William Sheldon, Artistic Houses (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883), pp. 75–80. Many of the photos reprinted by Dover Books as Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age.
4.
Herbert Satterlee, J. Pierpont Morgan: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. 208.
5.
Letter from J. P. Morgan to Mr. James Brown dated December 1, 1882. Morgan Library Archives, New York, New York.
6.
Letter from J. P. Morgan to Sherbourne Eaton dated December 27, 1882. Morgan Library Archives, New York, New York.
7.
Satterlee, J. Pierpont Morgan, p. 208.
8.
Edward H. Johnson, “Personal Recollections of Mr. Morgan’s Contribution to the Modern Electrical Era,” November 1914. Morgan Library Archives, New York, New York.
9.
Satterlee, J. Pierpont Morgan, p. 214.
10.
Ibid., p. 216.
11.
“The Doom of Gas,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 1, 1882. Item #2192 in Charles Batchelor Scrapbook (1881–1882), Thomas A. Edison Archives website, Rutgers University.
12.
Frank L. Dyer and T. Commerford Martin, Edison: His Life and Inventions (New York: Harper & Bros., 1910), p. 374.
13.
“The Doom of Gas.”
CHAPTER 2
“Endeavor to Make It Useful”
1.
J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Berkeley: Univ
ersity of California Press, 1979), p. 171.
2.
Ibid., p. 244.
3.
Ibid., p. 314.
4.
Ibid., p. 318.
5.
Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking Press, 1938), p. 158.
6.
Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 15.
7.
Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, p. 158.
8.
Ibid., p. 159.
9.
Ibid., p. 159.
10.
Ibid., p. 161.
11.
Pera, The Ambiguous Frog, p. 14.
12.
Ibid., p. 18.
13.
Sanford P. Bordeau, Volts to Hertz (Minneapolis: Burgess Pub. Co., 1982), p. 47.
14.
Ibid.
15.
Hal Hellman, Great Feuds in Medicine (New York: Wiley, 2001), p. 25.
16.
Ibid., p. 27.
17.
Bordeau, Volts to Hertz, p. 53.
18.
John M. Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution (New York: Adam Hilger, 1991), p. 5.
19.
Bordeau, Volts to Hertz, p. 64.
20.
Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution, p. 16.
21.
Ibid., p. 40.
22.
John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1961), pp. 22–23.
23.
Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution, p. 43.
24.
Herbert W. Meyer, A History of Electricity and Magnetism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 61.
25.
Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution, p. 96.
26.
David Gooding and Frank A. J. L. James, Faraday Rediscovered (London: Stockton Press, 1985), p. 63.
27.
Ibid.
28.
Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution, p. 1.
29.
Ibid., p. 121.
30.
Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Plea for Gas Lamps,” in Mike Jay and Michael Neve, 1900 (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 58.
31.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 221.
32.
Bordeau, Volts to Hertz, p. 147.
33.
“Electric Lamps,” St.-Louis Daily Globe Democrat (n.d.), sent on August 23, 1878, to Thomas Edison by Professor George Barker. Thomas A. Edison Archives website, Rutgers University.
34.
Stevenson, “A Plea for Gas Lamps,” p. 59.
35.
Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: Wiley, 2000), p. 165.
36.
Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 178.
37.
Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, p. 166.
CHAPTER 3
Thomas Edison: “The Wizard of Menlo Park”
1.
Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: Wiley, 2000), p. 120.
2.
Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 134.
3.
Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, p. 11.
4.
Ibid., p. 17.
5.
Charles D. Lanier, “Two Giants of the Electric Age,” Review of Reviews 8 (1893), p. 48.
6.
New York Daily Graphic, April 2, 1878.
7.
Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, p. 165.
8.
“Edison’s Newest Marvel,” New York Sun, September 16, 1878.
9.
Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, pp. 169–70.
10.
Editorial Page, New York Sun, September 16, 1878.
11.
Robert Friedel and Paul Israel with Bernard S. Finn, Edison’s Electric Light: Biography of an Invention (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), p. 22.
12.
Ibid., p. 26.
13.
Francis Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, vol. 1 (Dearborn, Mich.: Edison Institute, 1937), p. 232.
14.
Ibid., p. 197.
15.
Josephson, Edison: A Biography, p. 196.
16.
“Edison’s Electric Light,” New York Herald, March 27, 1879, Thomas A. Edison Archives website, Rutgers University.
17.
Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, p. 71.
18.
Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, p. 182.
19.
Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, p. 101.
20.
Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 338.
21.
Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, p. 109.
22.
Ibid., p. 111.
23.
Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, p. 167.
24.
Ibid., p. 196.
25.
Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, p. 179.
26.
Josephson, Edison: A Biography, p. 231.
27.
Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, p. 180.
28.
Ibid., p. 181.
29.
George S. Bryan, Edison: The Man and His Work (New York: Knopf, 1926), p. 152.
30.
Josephson, Edison: A Biography, pp. 244–45.
31.
“The Aldermen Visit Edison,” The New York Times, December 22, 1880, p. 2.
32.
Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, p. 182.
33.
“The Aldermen Visit Edison.”
34.
“Moonlight on Broadway,” New York Evening Post, December 21, 1880.
35.
“Lights for a Great City,” The New York Times, December 22, 1880, p. 2.
36.
Josephson, Edison: A Biography, p. 248.
37.
George T. Ferris, ed., Our Native Land (New York: Appleton, 1886), p. 551.
38.
Josephson, Edison: A Biography, p. 252.
39.
Ibid., pp. 263–64.
40.
“Summary of Events for 1881,” Index to the New-York Daily Tribune (New York: Daily Tribune, 1882), p. v.
41.
Iza Duffus Hardy, Between Two Oceans (London: Hurst & Blackwood, 1884), pp. 94–95.
42.
“Summary of Events for 1882,” Index to the New-York Daily Tribune (New York: Daily Tribune, 1883), p. vii.
CHAPTER 4
Nikola Tesla: “Our Parisian”
1.
Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (Williston, Vt.: Hart Bros., 1982), p. 66. Originally a series in Electrical Experimenter magazine, 1919.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995), p. 132.
4.
Tesla, My Inventions, p. 36.
5.
Ibid., p. 29.
6.
Ibid., p. 31.
7.
John T. Ratzlaff, ed., Tesla Said (Millbrae, Calif.: Tesla Book Company, 1984), p. 284 (“A Story of Youth Told by Age”).
8.
Tesla, My Inventions, p. 54.
9.
Ibid., p. 57.
10.
Ibid., pp. 59–60.
11.
Ibid., p. 61.
12.
John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (New York: McKay, 1944), p. 49.
13.
&nb
sp; Tesla, My Inventions, p. 65.
14.
Andreas Bluhm and Louise Lippincott, Light! The Industrial Age 1750–1900 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 31.
15.
Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: Wiley, 1998), p. 214.
16.
Tesla, My Inventions, p. 66.
17.
Ibid., p. 67.
