The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  The test started. Engineers said all was ready. Watson picked up the telephone on his desk. At first, dead silence. Then came a click, a faint electrical buzz, and after a tantalizing pause, out of the earpiece came a voice.

  “Hello, Mr. Watson,” it said, in the familiar, scrupulously modulated, tones of an educated Scotsman. “Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you perfectly,” Watson replied to his former chief.

  “Mr. Watson,” Bell went on, a smile playing in his voice, “come here, I want you.”

  Thomas Watson, still on the far side of a partition, but one now three thousand miles wide, was quick on the uptake. Maybe the moment was rehearsed, for there were many cameras and reporters present. He smiled, and spoke into the receiver: “I could—but this time it would take me a week to get to you.”

  The gist of America’s first transcontinental telephone conversation, in other words, was that most impeccable of social lubricants—a joke. It was an exchange that would set the tone for how the most recognizable and universal technological instrument on the planet would most commonly be employed. It would be used for business, of course, and to transmit the perfect information required for efficient capitalism. But most of all, it would transmit the quotidian ebbs and flows of common chatter, which could now be conducted as easily across the country as across the room.

  “Making a Neighborhood of a Nation,” said Southwestern Bell’s advertisements that announced the new service. But the angelic country-spanning operator who is pictured beside the slogan, holding in each hand a telephone, one on the East Coast, the other on the West, has a single word on her headband, suggesting the real hero of the moment: Science.

  Alexander Graham Bell, scientist, though a kindly and considerate man and a philanthropist of the first water, was also an adroit businessmen, and he and his heirs became extraordinarily rich. When offered a share in Bell’s company, the chiefs at Western Union at first scoffed at his invention, dismissing it as no more than a toy. A year later, they realized their mistake and offered $25 million for the patent rights. The offer was too late and, by then, far too small. The telephone was fast becoming a success of epic proportions. Everyone wanted one. By the time Bell died and was laid to rest in Nova Scotia, there were thirteen million in America alone. Today there are more telephones in the United States than there are people. And while it would be idle to suggest that telephony is universal—billions of people, in Asia and Africa most commonly, still have little access to clean water or basic sanitation, let alone to even the plainest of telephone instruments—the statistic is undeniable: there are currently six billion cell phones in the world, a number that is increasing rapidly as long-distance conversation becomes almost a basic human right.

  As soon as the telephone had been invented in 1876, offering people the opportunity to have conversations from home with people far away, the instrument became fantastically popular. Small forests of poles soon sprang up in cities, to hold up the wires running between subscribers and exchanges, as here on New York’s Broadway.

  Small wonder that US Patent No. 174,465 is said to be the most valuable patent ever awarded, though it might not have changed the universe quite as thoroughly as did Morse’s Patent 1,647. No one would say of the telephone, as people had said of the telegraph, that it caused the old world to be tossed into the ashcan and a new one to be born. For many years, the telephone’s newfangledness was feared by those who came to it late—especially, for some reason, Midwestern farmers, who saw it as an instrument that brought only bad news, usually in the middle of the night.* More commonly, though, the instrument came swiftly to be seen as seen a device with lasting commercial class and mercantile clout. Alexander Graham Bell has long been regarded fondly as an archbishop of the capitalist cathedral, especially by the millions around the country who were prudent or prescient enough to own telephone shares. As the glum Western Union chiefs must have said to themselves a year after they turned down his offer, Some toy!

  WITH POWER FOR ONE AND ALL

  It was a crisp blue morning in mid-September, and I was standing on Battle Pass, in southern Wyoming, mugging for the camera with one foot on each side of the Continental Divide. There was a dusting of early frost on the peaks of the Snowy Range, fifty miles to the east, but here, even at 9,900 feet, it was still comfortable, and the air was scented with warming pine needles. For a few moments, it was serenely peaceful, with just the occasional eagle swooping in the thermals. But then from behind a rock, with the tinny sound of a lawn mower engine, there appeared a stripped-down tractorlike vehicle, with two men aboard. “Hunters!” I cursed. So nice a day! Let’s go out and kill something!

  But they turned out to be a perfectly pleasant father and son from Laramie, the lad a poster boy for the joys of hunting and paternal bonding. The pair had skipped their respective work and education for the day and had come up into the high hills for the formal start of the antelope season. When they heard what I was doing—researching the old American Western trails—they both pointed down to the west, where a small gleam of silver shone in the morning sun. “Battle Lake,” they said in near-unison. “Where Edison invented the lightbulb.”

  Well, perhaps. Not quite. There is a plaque on the roadway above the lake, which is on the western side of the Divide, and it suggests rather modestly that Thomas Alva Edison had indeed come to Battle Lake in July 1878 and that being there had something to do with inspiring him to think of using burned bamboo to help make light for the nation’s households.

  He had traveled to this corner of what was then Wyoming Territory, along with a team of astronomers, to observe an eclipse of the sun while standing on the very same high pass where I had encountered the father-and-son hunters who told me the story. Once the phenomenon was duly observed and done with, he went downhill to fish in the lake, and, so the story goes, he slipped and let one of his bamboo fly rods fall into his campfire. The bamboo was reduced to fronds and filigrees of filaments, which glowed brilliant white with heat. Edison wondered if such a filament could perhaps be made hot artificially, with an electric current running through it, and by becoming hot emit a fine white and useful light. The filament would be fragile, of course; but its lifetime could perhaps be extended and preserved by enclosing it in a vacuum in a specially blown glass bulb.

  Thus was born—allegedly, supposedly—the idea of the incandescent lightbulb, in the up-country wilds of Carbon County, Wyoming Territory, in the summer of 1878. But skeptics abound. Most suggest that the nation’s inventor-in-chief experimented in his laboratory in Menlo Park with scores of potential illuminating candidates—strands of burned baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo among them—before finally settling on the carbonized cotton thread from which he made his famous first-ever patented lightbulb in 1879. Bamboo was but one of some six thousand vegetable products that he tried. To find the longest-lasting filament, “I ransacked the world,” he said.

  But whether or not Wyoming is due any pride-of-place laurels, Edison’s incandescent lightbulb spawned a need that neither the telegraph nor the telephone had created: a need for power. The telegraph and the telephone drew their sustenance from battery cells in the exchanges, but the electric light was different. Its sheer popularity presented the world with a brand-new challenge, for there were soon far too many of them to power in any conventional way.

  Once working models of lightbulbs were put on the market, they quickly began to replace the oil lanterns and gaslights of Victorian households—but the number of bulbs required to light even a modest house or the smallest town demanded a change in the way power was distributed. It made no economic sense to equip each bulb or each household with a battery pack, nor could any battery array at some central plant possibly illuminate as many bulbs as were now hungering for power.

  It was necessary that electricity be made, or generated.* Once made, it would then be necessary to distribute it along wires to the waiting communities, and from there send it on to businesses and indivi
dual houses, lighting the bulbs in the streets and inside the buildings.

  Thomas Edison worked out just how to do this. He was a man of many achievements, with no fewer than 1,093 patents to his name, from the phonograph to the stock-market ticker to the movie camera to the electric chair, and of course the incandescent lightbulb; but his creation of the new science of electric power generation and distribution is the signal unifying achievement that arguably outshines them all.

  It all began on Christie Street, in what was once the town of Raritan, New Jersey. (Since the early 1950s, it has been the township of Edison.) The street Edison chose as the first in America—or anywhere in the world, for that matter—to be lit by incandescent electric lamps ran for half a mile outside his laboratories. The lamps were switched on, connected to batteries inside the laboratory, on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1879.

  Today most of the houses on Christie Street are just as one might expect of a prosperous bedroom community—neat, mostly ranch style, with clipped lawns, basketball hoops outside the two-car garages, garbage containers ranked outside according to the latest recycling rules. There are a good number of sodium vapor lamps to illuminate the street, all of them now powered not by batteries but by solar panels. Then, at the street’s southern end stands something quite phenomenal: an enormous model of a domestic lightbulb, 13 feet high and made of segments of Pyrex, sitting on top of a tower nearly 120 feet tall that is decorated with eight columns of concrete mosaic, with each topped by a floodlight aimed at the great bulb in the sky.

  Every evening the light, a gigantic model of Edison’s first domestic lightbulb, beams out over the suburb, illuminated from within by a giant incandescent filament (soon to be replaced by light-emitting diodes, which the great man did not invent) and lit from below by the floods. Huge loudspeakers set into the concrete then crackle during the daytime with recordings of Edison’s words or else with barely discernible music, mostly sounding like wasps trapped in a milk bottle, spun from his early gramophone recordings. On his birthday each February, the speakers sound with encomiums to the man who, as they say in these parts, “invented today.”

  The motto of Edison Township is “Let there be light,” and not without reason. During the summer of 1879 he saw to it that lamps were erected along the byways of the township’s thirty-six acres of Menlo Park, where he had sited his laboratory. They were an exhibition of his abilities and his vision, an exhibition he would employ to persuade those who mattered in New York to allow him to use the city as his first test market for lightbulbs and for the generation and distribution of the electricity to illuminate them.

  Not that Manhattan was exactly wanting for electric light. For the previous decade, many of the city’s streets, parks, docks, and factories had been lit by thousands of arc lights, devices which poured cascades of brilliant, unforgiving, harsh white light from between a pair of pointed carbon electrodes. They emitted gas that caused headaches, smelled bad, and left a grimy, oily residue on ceilings. The electrodes also burned out rapidly, the drain on batteries was immense, and the quality of light was intolerably extreme. Their makers, knowing they were unpopular, offered the argument that by erecting tall arc-light towers from which illumination could be directed across entire neighborhoods, light would be offered to all equally and democratically, in a very American way. But it was an argument that cut little ice with New Yorkers. Although everyone agreed that the security the lights offered to businesses and people late at night promoted the twenty-four-hour economy that still defines Manhattan today, no one liked arc lighting, not one bit.

  Edison hoped New Yorkers would turn instead to his smaller, softer, more human-scale incandescent vacuum-tube illuminations—bulbs his company promised would offer “milder” light. He consequently invited all manner of grandees over to Menlo Park to demonstrate what he had in mind.

  It was quite a show. On his thirty-six-acre spread, he had laid out whole streets, each lined with wooden poles topped with glass lanterns, inside each of which was an incandescent bulb. Imaginary houses, designed to look like those in lower Manhattan, were also staked out, and they were lighted, too, and this whole unreal New York City was connected to an array of batteries with feeder cables (which took the power to the streets), mains wires (which took it into the houses), and service wires (which went to the individual house lamps). Edison’s basic plan for electric distribution—generator, feeder, mains, service—remains today the standard model for all distribution everywhere.

  Once he threw the switches, his display burst into a frenzy of glitter. It immediately and mightily impressed the city’s Blue Book visitors. The Vanderbilts, prominent from their railroading fortune, were the first to back Edison’s efforts. Then a portfolio of barons—J. P. Morgan, Baron Rothschild, and Henry Villard among them—followed suit, commingling between them sufficient funds to allow Edison to forge ahead.

  Early in 1881, Edison gave a formidable dinner party, catered by Delmonico’s—with Sarah Bernhardt performing—where he showed New York’s aldermen and commissioners what he had in mind: a power station in lower Manhattan and conduits with cables running beneath the streets from it to connect buildings to his new electric service. It must have been a wild party, because less than three weeks later, the city’s new mayor, the Irish chemical magnate William Russell Grace, granted permission for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company to build its first power station in a dilapidated industrial building at 257 Pearl Street.

  Thomas Edison’s eagerness to have electricity generated in power stations and distributed by wire to private consumers led to the sudden popularity of outdoor “electric shows,” where lights were erected in fields and parks and switched on and off to the amazement of visitors. Soon, Edison promised, power would be so cheap only the rich would burn candles.

  Edison somewhat grumpily paid $155,000 for the property, which he complained was a slum and smelled richly from the fish market nearby on Fulton Street. City bureaucrats initially opposed his plans for digging up the streets, threatening to tax every foot of digging. But he argued fiercely for the system’s efficiency and before long began a positive orgy of trenching, his teams working through the hot August nights to place fifteen miles of thick copper mains lines deep in the macadamized roads, insulating them with beeswax and linseed oil and thick asphalt that had been especially ordered from the tar pits in Trinidad.

  Six giant steam-powered generators then arrived from Philadelphia, weighing thirty tons each and known as Jumbos. They were coupled to the devices that actually created the electricity, strange-shaped dynamos known as Long-Waisted Mary Anns; following this, giant water tanks and boilers were bolted to the floors, chimneys were raised, and fuel supplies were gathered in. Finally, on the evening of September 4, 1882, the stokers lit the fires, steam began to push pistons, the engines started to turn, the dynamos began to run. The armature of coils turned within its blanket of magnetism, and in accordance with a basic principle of physics, direct current began to flow into the wires, snaked out of the Pearl Street building, poured along the underground copper cables in their conduits, surfaced out of manhole covers and into the mains cables of some forty households, and from there was sent to the server circuits and terminals of the first eight hundred bulbs that had been installed.

  In one golden instant, lower Manhattan came ablaze with a soft, uninterrupted light, all coming from vacuum bulbs that neither polluted nor glared nor gave headaches to those who read, dined, walked, or dozed beneath them. The promises of illumination made across the Hudson River in Menlo Park, New Jersey, had now been made good in New York City, and the success of the trial took hold with a speed that astonished even the city itself.

  Scores of plutocrats became early adopters; mansions lit up from Central Park to Chambers Street. The Stock Exchange installed electroliers, as they were known, massive chandeliers with sixty-six bulbs each, to throw light across the trading floor. Industry of all kinds suddenly sprouted in the city, with machines that sewed cloth
ing, spun sugar, carved pianos, and printed books and newspapers, all of them suddenly illuminated in a way that no longer carried, as previously, the terrible risk of fire. Theaters put up advertising marquees studded with bulbs—enough of a blaze for Broadway to be christened the Great White Way. The electric elevator was invented: with heights no longer limited by the number of stairs their occupants could reasonably be expected to climb, buildings began to rise high into the sky.

  Electric billboards were hauled up into that same sky—one of them a four-hundred-square-foot monster with fifteen thousand bulbs that flashed on and off under the direction of a man sitting in a hut on a roof nearby. H. J. Heinz put up an electric sign with bulbs all painted green in the shape of a forty-five-foot pickle. Nightclubs flourished, in which pretty girls waved customers to low-lit tables with electric-powered wands and winking lights created seductive effects on the dance floor. A prostitute would advertise her wares, her availability, and her address with a small red electric lamp. The elevated trains now had stations gleaming with incandescence, and the docks and boulevards beside the water also gleamed. People who came to New York loved what they saw: the today that Edison promised electricity would bring was now taking Manhattan by storm and would soon spread like an uncheckable fire from New York City throughout the entire country beyond.

  There were small problems. The generators broke down or speeded up for no apparent reason and exploded. J. P. Morgan had his walls and carpets scorched by a sudden outrush of power. One of the Vanderbilts got so cross with short circuits that he went back to gas, although the rest of the family kept the faith in their investment. Once in a while, electricity leaked into the street. A man peddling tinware directed his horse across an intersection near Wall Street, whereupon it seemed to go suddenly mad, its ears stood bolt upright, its tail rose skyward, and it ran crazily off toward the East River; a few moments later another team of animals crossing the same spot all fell to their knees and refused to budge. Workmen, it turned out, had punctured one of the copper feeder lines, and the manhole cover was live with current.