Insull’s electrical companies had an established policy of not doing business with the faraway farms. Almost none sent their wires out onto the windswept prairies of America’s heartland, a fact that sorely tried Roosevelt and led him, once he was securely in the White House, to act swiftly to apply government right, as he saw it, to a monstrous capitalist wrong.
Everyone in the Thirties—and especially, from mid-decade onward, the readers of Life magazine, which took a keen interest in America’s dispossessed—seemed to know that with the combination of Dust Bowl and Depression, the lot of the people of the prairies was grim indeed. Everyone also knew their lot could be mightily improved by the arrival of electricity. Only one farm in ten had access to mains power in 1934—a statistic that made a mockery of the claims that the telegraph, the telephone, and electricity were unifying the country. Electricity might be doing great things for Manhattan and Malibu, but for tiny settlements in Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas, the lack of electric power meant that America was divided still, into those on the grid with electricity and those who survived beyond it.
For those without, life could be a trial. The government published a catalog of the woes of the powerless, a lengthy book that began
Because there was no electricity, a farmer could not use an electric pump. He was forced not only to milk but to water his cows by hand, a chore that, in dry weather, meant hauling up endless buckets from a deep well. Because he could not use an electric auger, he had to feed his livestock by hand, pitch-forking heavy loads of hay up into the loft of his barn and then stomping on it to soften it enough so the cows could eat it.
He had to prepare the feed by hand: because he could not use an electric grinder, he would get the corn kernels for his mules and horse by sticking ears of corn—hundreds of ears of corn—one by one into a corn sheller and cranking it for hours. Because he could not use electric motors, he had to unload cotton seed by hand, and then shovel it into the barn by hand; to saw wood by hand, by swinging an axe or riding one end of a ripsaw.
Because there was never enough daylight for all the jobs that had to be done, the farmer usually finished after sunset, ending the day as he had begun it, stumbling around the barn milking the cows in the dark, as farmers had done centuries before.
Washing, ironing, cooking, canning, shearing, helping with the plowing and the picking and the sowing, and, every day, carrying the water and wood, and because there was no electricity, having do so everything by hand by the same methods that had been employed by her mother and grandmother and great-great-great-grandmother before her. . . .
Because there was no electricity.
And then came FDR and his memorable promise of July 1932: “I pledge you—I pledge myself—to a New Deal for the American people.” And one by one there then came from Washington the ingredients for the great alphabet soup of federal agencies, the mass of government bodies, known still by their initial letters, that were created in a fierce whirlwind of anti-Depression activity mounted by Roosevelt during his first hundred days in office. There were as many as a hundred such bodies, some of them so small and hidden from view as to escape government audit; some massive, with gigantic budgets that were rammed through Congress by presidential fiat (and later found to have been unconstitutional—except that by then they had done their job of helping lift America out of the Depression).
The bigger of the alphabet agencies ranged from the AAA, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a vital part of FDR’s farm-relief program, down to the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. For eight years, the WPA provided gainful employment for millions of jobless Americans, undertaking all manner of public works. Writers wrote government-supported books, poets performed in government-backed slams, and artists and musicians were commissioned to beautify hitherto unadorned corners of federally administered property.
Buried deep within this thick catalog of big government is the one agency that amply settled the hash of such profiteers as Samuel Insull. Founded in 1935 as the REA, the Rural Electrification Administration, it became a godsend to the families of the prairies. It was the government body that lit up those parts of America that capitalism forgot.
The key player, long forgotten, was an engineer named Morris Llewellyn Cooke, who’d had a bee in his bonnet about electrifying America’s farmland since the 1920s. Just like his new president, he thought it wildly unfair that the very people who made the nation’s food were so ill served, without access to the one utility that could make their lives easier and their work more efficient. Not only did the power companies refuse to connect faraway farms; they charged extortionate rates to anyone who dared to live in the countryside where lines did exist. Such imprudent inequity, Cooke declared, would have to stop. Roosevelt himself had long been particularly vexed; when he got his own first electric bill for his small cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, he was irritated beyond measure to discover that the local power company was charging him four times the rate he paid in New York.
Cooke did his best to alert the president and his Cabinet as to what he had in mind to solve the Insull problem. He prepared a formal proposal, now renowned in bureaucratic history for being boldly bound in black-and-white zebra stripes and illustrated with attractive watercolors of bright red barns, with a note on the cover stating, “This report can be read in 12 minutes.”
Cooke’s flamboyance did the trick, as did his compelling argument. There were currently six million farms in America, Cooke wrote, and of them only 650,000—one in ten—was connected to electric power from the national grid. However, it should be possible to electrify almost all of these farms quickly and at almost no cost to the American taxpayer, providing that a network of cooperatives were set up, which farmers would pay to join. Each one would buy power from existing makers, and it, with government help, would build the lines to supply its farmer members.
The secretary of agriculture promptly read the document in the allotted twelve minutes and hired Cooke—“the big boy from Philadelphia,” as he came to be known—to direct the program, then arranged for Congress to pass the necessary legislation to get the show on the road.
On May 11, 1935, under the authority of Roosevelt’s historic Executive Order 7037, the REA was in business. It took offices in a Victorian mansion in central Washington that resembled nothing so much as the Bates Motel in Psycho. Six hundred administrators were hired. Orders went out to hire many hundreds of unemployed electricians, as well as thousands of junior technicians in overalls, and to buy scores of thousands of white-pine utility poles, millions of yards of wire, and tens of thousands of porcelain insulators. Agents then fanned out across the country, checkbooks to hand, ready to lend REA moneys to rural co-ops that were willing to build the lines, connect the farms, negotiate to buy the power from the generating companies, and then arrange to distribute it and sell it to the farmers.
The first such plan was put into place in November 1935 with the establishment of the Piqua Municipal Light plant in Miami County, in the flat countryside (and Eighth Congressional District) of western Ohio. The REA loaned this co-op a quarter of a million dollars to start building. Advertisements went up—with images of linemen, the countryside heroes of the New Deal, suspended and safety-belted high up on poles, working to connect the glittering wires. Serried ranks of these poles soon went up, marching away from the Piqua plant in all directions toward the distant Ohio horizons of farmhouses, barns, cattle, and stands of corn, where everything was still worked by calloused hand, where everything was dark, but for a few oil lamps, each time dusk had settled on the plains. “It’s Coming!” the advertisements blared. “Electricity for You!”
And farm by farm, quarter section by quarter section, dirt road by dirt road, the co-op won over the customers. They paid $5 apiece. “Sign up and get the REA” was the slogan. The REA salesmen liked to have the farmer’s wife around when trying to sell the co-op idea. They were instructed to look meaningfully at her as they explained the advantages, especially if her
husband was busily examining the dirt under his nails and protesting that he didn’t want to “owe nuthin’ to the guvmint.” Back in 1935, after all, $5 was no mean sum.
Once agreement came—and it usually did—the REA workers moved in, digging holes for tall poles, uncoiling spools of wire, raising it high, then tightening it and linking it together. And then the men of the connection teams came right into the farmhouse, to the bewilderment of all within, and put in the fuse box; climbed up on ladders to fix the ceiling sockets; put in the big rubberized cables for the 60-amp circuit for the kitchen range, then the smaller wires for the 20-amp circuit for the rest of the still-to-be-bought kitchen equipment, and the 15-amp circuits for the lights; then put in the switches, and the sockets on the walls for an occasional table lamp or maybe for that most important piece of equipment that soon would be an even more powerful national unifying force, the radio.
The Public Works Administration, part of FDR’s New Deal, promoted its myriad projects with this 1935 map showing the variety of tasks to which it was officially bent. All told, the PWA undertook some thirty-four thousand projects, including dams, bridges, and reservoirs, which still dominate the American landscape today.
Finally, it was all done. The moment usually came at dusk. “I wanted to be at my parents’ house when the electricity came,” wrote one REA customer. “It was in 1940. We’d all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn’t come on yet. When they finally came on the lights just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks.”
The moment is still recalled by old-timers in some of the more distant parts of the country. “The night the lights came on” was as significant a moment as a birthday, often more so. The REA’s celebratory volume, published half a century later, is filled with affecting reminiscences, such as this one from Kentucky:
We’d heard the government was going to lend us money to get lights, but we didn’t believe it until we saw the men putting up the poles. Every day they came closer, and we realized it was really going to happen. So Dad went ahead, and had the house wired.
It was almost two months later before they finished the job and turned on the power. I’ll never forget the day—it was late on a November afternoon, just before dark. All we had was wires hanging down from the ceiling in every room, with bare bulbs on the end. Dad turned on the one in the kitchen first, and he just stood there, holding the pull-chain. He said to me “Carl, come here and hang on to this so I can turn on the light in the sitting room.”
I knew he didn’t have to do that, and I told him to stop holding it, that it would stay on. He finally let go, and then looked kind of foolish.
It was like that all across the land.
By 1942, half of all American farms were connected to the grid; by 1952, they almost all were, less than a century after Thomas Edison threw that first switch on Christie Street in Raritan, New Jersey, in 1879. And though it still took some time to bring electric power from central generating stations deep into all the American Indian reservations, it can fairly be said now that all who want electric power in America today either have it by right or by right can get it.
It was swiftly accepted that electricity was a public good—a marketable public good, to be sure, a good with a price tag, but something that should be accessible to all as a hallmark of a civilized society. When Thomas Edison threw that first switch, neither he nor anyone else thought electricity would ever enjoy such a status, but now the country was fully connected, united in 110-volt, 60-cycle-per-second concert, city and countryside humming together as one.
THE TALK OF THE NATION
It was a host of Europeans, not Americans, who invented the means of transmitting information invisibly through the air, not with smoke signals or semaphore flags or heliograph flashes but with electromagnetic signals sent wirelessly. Most of the pioneers’ names—Maxwell, Hertz, Popov, even the majestically named Italian Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti—are now familiar only to specialists in the field. But Guglielmo Marconi, who cracked the final technical problems and can be called the true inventor of wireless telegraphy, is more properly memorialized. The precipitous cliffs overlooking the entrance to the harbor at Saint John’s, Newfoundland, where Marconi first discerned the faint Morse signal for the letter S being tapped out by his assistants thousands of miles away across the ocean in Poldhu, Cornwall, have become a pilgrimage destination. To gaze out over the boiling Atlantic waves below and imagine the sound of a radio signal borne across them from the tip of the Old World . . . Signal Hill is a wildly romantic place, in a wildly romantic story.
But what these wireless signals carried were then only clicks, the dots and dashes of Morse code. It was not then possible to employ Marconi’s wireless transmitters and receivers to carry the sound of the human voice. Not, that is, until Christmas Eve 1906, when from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, there came over the ether a cacophony of never-before-heard noises, all sounding (over the clutter of atmospheric static) quite unlike Morse code. They announced the arrival of a new star on the radio scene, a Canadian-born former chemistry professor and electrical engineer named Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, the man who, some claim, made radio come alive. And while it was in Europe that the idea of radio germinated, it was in America that the technology was first employed to transmit the human voice and allow people to begin to talk to one another not just individually, as on Mr. Bell’s telephone, but en masse, in their millions.
The basic principle behind the early wireless transmitters was simple enough. It is based on the discovery that each time an electrical spark is generated, it produces an invisible pulse of electromagnetic radiation. The more sparks generated each second, the higher the vibrational frequency of the pulse of transmitted radiation. Tune a piece of receiving apparatus (first made by a Frenchman named Édouard Branly and initially called a coherer) to the same frequency of the pulse that is being generated by the transmitter, and the pulse can be reproduced exactly as it was sent.
Moreover, this reproduction can be achieved—it can be seen on a meter or heard through an electrically driven signal-to-sound transducer in a speaker or in headphones—without the use of any wires and across a distance that varies according to the power of the transmission and the frequency of the pulse. A low-powered, high-frequency pulse will go far, and the signal can even be made to bounce off the ionosphere and cross continents. Modifying the signal by briefly opening and closing the circuit with a keyed instrument allows a coded signal to be sent and received by someone far away. This was what Marconi (or Tesla: there remains some controversy) discovered and perfected; the keyed instrument was essentially the same Morse tapper that was used to pass signals over the now old-fashioned telegraph wires. The wireless equipment, now having been tried and tested over the previous decade, was the kind of equipment that was being used by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden when he joined the staff of the United States Weather Bureau in 1900.
The bureau had set up a chain of wireless stations along the American East Coast, and from them it sent weather information to ships at sea. Fessenden’s contract called for him to test and improve the system—he had been trained by Edison, so he knew his stuff—and to allow the bureau use of anything he might invent along the way. This he did, in spades. His years working for this American government agency produced a flurry of inventive energy that mightily accelerated the already fast-moving progress of radio technology.
Most notably, he experimented first by sending out a continuous, very-high-frequency radio wave from a rotating transmitter that produced thousands of sparks each second. He then connected an ordinary microphone, just as you might find in the mouthpiece of a telephone, to the apparatus to modulate this signal, to increase or decrease what might be called, if it were audible, its volume.
The critical aspect of Fessenden’s idea was that the modulation, not the basic signal, contained the information that was to be sent. The high-frequency radio wave simply carried the informat
ion that was encoded in this modulation. (Because he was modulating the volume, or amplitude of the carrier wave, his system was known as amplitude modulation, or AM radio. The later development of frequency modulation led to the creation of FM radio.) All one did at the receiving end, using one of Branly’s coherers, was to strip away or ignore the high-frequency radio signal, the carrier wave, and what remained was the information that was being sent out from the transmitter.
The truly magical aspect of this system was that a modulated signal need not be restricted to the dots and dashes of a code. It could be made to carry anything. It could carry music. It could transmit the sound of the wind or the rain or the crashing of waves—or the human voice. Anything that was sound, and had a measurable frequency, could be turned by a microphone into patterns that could modulate the amplitude of the carrier wave and ride on its back wirelessly out to anywhere.
The first time Reginald Fessenden—a big, bearded, bluff man, quite full of himself and relentlessly self-promoting—is said to have tried doing this was on December 23, 1900. He was at a weather station on Cobb Island, one of the outer banks of the lower Potomac estuary, in Virginia. He started the carrier wave going, attached a carbon microphone, and spoke into it, hoping to attract the attention of a colleague listening in a building about a mile away. “One—two—three—four. Is it snowing where you are, Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?”
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers Page 36