Westinghouse also knew that at that very moment one of his employees, named Guido Pantaleoni, was in Italy due to the death of his father. He wired Pantaleoni to track down the inventors of this secondary generator, and in no time Pantaleoni found the two men responsible, Lucien Gaulard and John Gibbs. Though initial reports from Pantaleoni weren’t flattering, Westinghouse soon bought an option on the American patent and arranged for one of the transformers to be delivered, along with a generator that was meant to run arc lighting on alternating current.
November 1885 brought Gaulard-Gibbs employee Reginald Belfield to Pittsburgh with a crate containing a Gaulard-Gibbs AC transformer. It was in such horrible condition, though, that Guido Pantaleoni initially wanted to send it back to Italy along with his complaints. Westinghouse had another idea. Instead of having a new, unknown transformer in tip-top shape, they had a transformer in need of a rebuild, and in that, they had the opportunity to learn about the machinery inside and out. Along with Belfield, Westinghouse disassembled and essentially built a whole new design that featured H-shaped iron plates as its core. This decision—keeping the shoddy transformer and redesigning it—turned it into the modern-day transformer. He had created a machine that could receive high voltages that spanned wide distances and could reduce the power for safe use in all buildings and homes.
On January 8, 1886, George Westinghouse officially entered the electricity business by incorporating Westinghouse Electric Company. From the formation of his company, he was met with internal grumblings that AC was not the answer, and instead was a waste of time. A dangerous one.
Westinghouse stayed the course with alternating current, believing strongly that this system would revolutionize the field. To begin, he decided to do the exact opposite of the showman Thomas Edison. Instead of announcing to the world that he had an amazing system that would change the way the world was run, Westinghouse kept his initial experiments a secret. There was no pomp and circumstance as there had been with all things Edison.
For Westinghouse, the idea was to have his leading electrician, William Stanley, who knew the workings of AC and the transformer as well as anyone, introduce the system to his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Stanley had built his own laboratory. With little press and no overt announcement or public ballyhoo that Stanley was using a novel alternating current system, the experiment took off, and more and more customers were added daily. Townsfolk were quickly won over in a month’s time, and although the system had its kinks, the transformers were a success, indicating the time was right to officially launch Westinghouse Electric.
Westinghouse knew he needed to kick things off with a showplace, like Edison’s brownstone in Manhattan. The four-story all-trade store of Adam, Meldrum & Anderson in downtown Buffalo served as the perfect setting for Westinghouse and his new system. Buffalo was quickly becoming a booming town of innovation and commercial activity, and the new all-purpose store had garnered a lot of chatter and anticipation as it was set to open. What better way to launch the system than by linking it to the launch of a much-talked-about business?
On November 27, 1886, the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser announced that Adam, Meldrum & Anderson was showcasing many useful items, along with 498 Stanley lights run by the Westinghouse system. “We were the first business house in the city to adopt the plan of lighting our stores by incandescence,” the ad read. “Come and see the grandest invention of the nineteenth century.”
Back in New York, Thomas Edison was fuming. While his public statement to reporters was for them to “tell [Westinghouse] to stick to air brakes,” Edison knew this was the beginning of a competition that would require his complete energy and attention. George Westinghouse was lightning, and Edison knew thunder was soon to follow.
After all, this was George Westinghouse—the same person who, as a boy, would beat his head against the wall until he got his way—and Edison and his DC backers knew: this man would not simply go away. Not unless he was forced to.
10 THE RABID ANIMAL VERSUS THE FAWN IN THE FOREST
The entry of George Westinghouse into the field of electricity triggered a series of problems for Thomas Edison, resulting in one of the most trying years of Edison’s professional life.
The year 1887 began with Westinghouse’s alternating current system sinking its teeth into Edison’s electric pie, taking an immediate bite out of future prospects and profits. Despite Edison’s strong prediction that “just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size,” from the get-go Westinghouse rounded up customers and implemented his system, free of casualties. In fact, by the end of the year, Westinghouse Electric Company had 68 central stations under contract. Even worse, Thomson-Houston Electric—known for arc lighting and already a chief competitor of Edison’s—had partnered with Westinghouse, installing 22 Westinghouse transformers in 1887 alone. All told, after eight years in operation Edison Electric Company had 121 central stations, compared to close to 100 for Westinghouse in 1887 alone.
In one calendar year.
The numbers by themselves told Edison that George Westinghouse was a serious business threat.
One of the main issues, and a major contributing factor in Westinghouse’s swift movement and success, was the fact that Edison’s direct current system required multiple power stations as opposed to alternating current, which required only a single station on the outskirts of town. As Edison’s trusted friend and publicist Edward Johnson attempted to explain, “We will do no small town business, or even much headway in cities of minor size.” The system simply wasn’t set up to accommodate small-town America. Edison turned his deaf ear to Johnson’s warnings.
Thomas Edison continued to hear rumblings internally, along with some of his longer-tenured colleagues telling him he should switch systems immediately. Francis Upton, a Menlo Park veteran and trusted Edison employee, had firsthand knowledge and experience with the Hungarian ZBD alternating current system—named after inventors Károly Zipernowsky, Ottó Bláthy, and Miksa Déri—and made vehement pleas with his boss to buy an option and utilize the American rights. Edison bought the rights but refused to even consider using them. His purchase was more a ploy to keep possible competitors from using the ZBD system.
Instead, in October 1887, Edison and the brass of Edison Electric Light held firm publicly that producing and selling AC was an unwise business decision. As stated in the company’s annual report of 1887, AC had “no merit in itself” commercially, and in terms of its safety, the high pressure of AC made it “notoriously destructive of both life and property.” It was the company’s opinion that it was only a matter of time before alternating current destroyed itself due to its volatile nature. All Edison Electric needed to do was withstand the initial surge and wait for the flames to rise. Edison himself reported to his board of executives that “[Westinghouse] cannot compete with us or do us any permanent harm, and that a steady conservative policy will win the battle.”
Alternating current wasn’t the only problem that charged toward Edison in 1887. Copper prices also threatened to stomp holes in the very foundation of Edison’s direct current system, as a monopoly over copper goods had been attained by European businessman Hyacinth Secretan. With a firm grasp on the market, Secretan sent the ten-cent-per-pound price tag all the way up to seventeen cents per pound by late 1887.
Here again Edison owed blame to his direct current system’s limitations and flaws. With the necessity of multiple power stations and multiple wires per stream of current, copper wire was essential. In contrast, alternating current needed a third of the amount of wire that direct current required. Just when Edison was already being squeezed out of profit due to the early success of Westinghouse’s alternating current, now what profit remained was being sapped because of the system’s reliance on copper wire. Edison was at the mercy of this European copper king, a man who seemed unconcerned with anything other than making an extra buck.
I
n November 1887, when Alfred P. Southwick wrote a letter to Edison asking him to vouch for the use of electricity as a more humane method of execution than the barbaric hangman’s noose, Edison swiftly declined to get involved, making it clear that he was not in favor of capital punishment. But Thomas Edison, who once said, “No competition means no invention,” knew he was involved in a battle. He just needed to find his chance to turn the tide back in his favor. Perhaps this Southwick fellow was offering to create the ripple needed to bring the current back in his favor.
In December 1887, Edison did a one-eighty and wrote to Southwick that the best, most humane manner of execution could be “accomplished by the use of electricity, and the most suitable apparatus for the purpose is that class of dynamo-electric machine which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of those are known as ‘alternating machines.’” In his letter, Edison mentioned that the most prominent manufacturer of these machines was George Westinghouse, directly linking—he hoped—his main competitor with the death penalty. “The passage of the current from these machines through the human body even by the slightest contacts,” Edison maintained, “produces instantaneous death.”
With that, the year changed and so did the tide. Edison’s official endorsement of AC as a mode of public execution put him back in control, and he was certain that 1888 would be nothing like 1887.
* * *
With Dr. Alfred P. Southwick now serving as the driving force behind alternating current being used as the next method of execution, Edison decided to take a bold public stance against Westinghouse and his system. After all, Edison knew it would take some time for the legal channels to be navigated by Southwick and his team. He’d wait to be called on by Southwick when the moment came, but he knew there was an opportunity here to take advantage of.
In the form of eighty-four bound pages, with a bloodred cover surrounding the bold title A WARNING FROM THE EDISON ELECTRIC LIGHT COMPANY, Edison Electric let everyone know in no uncertain terms that the alternating current system was equal to an electric plague on humanity. With contributions written by prominent members of the company, the book was composed by company president Edward Johnson and distributed to reporters and executives of various lighting utilities companies who were deciding which system to use.
Five “cautions” highlighted the contents of the long warning, ranging from “caution 1” on patent infringement on his light bulb to “caution 4” on the known and unknown dangers of alternating current. Of course, while Edison Electric maintained that such a deadly system needed to be kept from the general public, Edison himself was supporting AC to be used for the express purpose of killing when it came to capital punishment.
Thomas Edison, the most respected name in the scientific field of electricity, was directly warning the common man of the lurking dangers associated with alternating current, namely the system employed by George Westinghouse. “It is a matter of fact that any system employing high pressure, i.e. 500 to 2,000 units,” it was explained in the red book, “jeopardizes life.” In fact, a detailed listing of AC-induced fires suggested the high currents were just tempting fate to turn a building into an inferno. He then graphically chronicled the many fatal—and horrific—deaths as a result of AC that had been reported in newspapers around the country. At the same time, Edison made it clear that there was “no danger to life, health, or person, in the current generated by any of the Edison dynamos … and even the poles of the generator itself, may be grasped by the naked hand without the slightest effect.” While alternating current was the rabid animal in the wild, direct current was the friendly fawn in the forest.
Pulling no punches, Edison was also urging “all electricians who believe in the future of electricity” to “unite in a war of extermination against cheapness in applied electricity.” It was their responsibility to champion the proper use of electricity, which was direct current, and outlaw the detrimental system of Westinghouse. Edison had volunteered, as evidenced by his book, to lead the charge against alternating current.
* * *
Meanwhile, the spring of 1888 brought not just the rebirth of nature’s beauty but also the reentry of Nikola Tesla into the scientific field. The Serbian genius had filed a slew of patent applications related to alternating current, and people were talking. Tesla held public exhibitions and gained praise from the scientific press, but Edison wasn’t concerned with this upstart scientist. Sure, he had been granted some forty patents in a short span of time. However, Edison had had intimate dealings with this man. Edison believed that although Tesla’s mind was sharp, when it came to business tact, Tesla was severely outmatched.
That is, until Tesla teamed up with George Westinghouse in July 1888, threatening to land a few good punches and turn this into a knock-down, drag-out fight.
11 DEATH IN THE WIRES
March 12, 1888
New York, New York
Towers of white. Two stories high in some places, these towers had been erected overnight in downtown Manhattan. Mother Nature had been busy while most residents of New York City had been asleep, stacking snowflake atop snowflake to create the mounds of white—some that had crept dangerously close to the spiderwebbed wires overhead.
Only two days prior, the temperature had been a mild fifty degrees and city dwellers were tempted by talk of an early spring. But a ferocious arctic cold front had dipped south from Canada and mixed with a strong Gulf airstream from parts south. On March 11, when these two systems slammed into each other and wound together in a tight combination, temperatures plummeted quickly, accompanied by a pounding attack of rain. By the time the clock struck midnight on March 12, the temperature had dropped quickly, transforming the precipitation into freezing rain and sleet. Soon after, the winds kicked up to near sixty miles per hour, turning the sleet into heavy sideways snow.
The Blizzard of 1888 led to the mandate that all wires in New York City be buried
While most people slept through the worst of the storm—what would later be termed the “Great White Hurricane”—all forms of travel had shut down by sunrise, and the towering snow had trapped those who had been caught in the storm. These unlucky souls would either be rescued by good Samaritans with ladders or rope or fall victim to the elements, like the four hundred people on the East Coast who lost their lives as a result of the storm.
Yet another problem that had come with the storm was the impact of the rain and snow—and the severe winds—on the overhead wires. Places like Manhattan had lost communication with the outside world when telephone and telegraph wires sagged. Low temperatures combined with the overwhelming weight of the snow and the high winds and went on to break many lines altogether and scattered the remnants on the white surface not too far below. For the next few days, all modes of mass transportation were suspended, later resulting in the idea and discussion that perhaps there was a need for a manner of underground travel. Less than a decade later, subways found their way into major cities.
Major publications like the New York Times took the baton from the great storm and brought forth a tempest of reports and editorials attacking the manner in which high-voltage wires had been carelessly spread above almost every square inch of the city. “The city is liable to be put into darkness and the consequent perils,” concluded the Times, urging—like many other papers—that all high-voltage wires be buried. The Times and a plethora of other periodicals focused on the inconveniences of electric wires, but this wasn’t altogether unusual, since the electric wires and the nuisance that came with them had been a major topic of discussion since late in 1887, when the Edison Electric Company’s many red books had been sprinkled around by one Thomas Alva Edison. Free of charge, of course.
This new wave of negative press for AC systems didn’t help George Westinghouse’s cause. Unfortunately for Westinghouse, it was only the beginning.
* * *
April 15, 1888
East Broadway, New York, New York
Moses Streiffer skipped his way do
wn East Broadway toward Catherine Street, fully enjoying the nice weather that had taken over from the tragic storm a month prior. The boy was a peddler, selling buttons and combs and other small trinkets from a nearby stand.
The fifteen-year-old Romanian immigrant noticed a dangling telegraph wire by his side. As the boy approached the broken wire hanging down from the cedar post high above, he grabbed it. The sun was going down and the arc lights were showering their artificial rays toward the street, mixing in with the faint rays of sunshine soon to retire for the night.
Witnesses later said Moses had immediately continued skipping around and around the pole with wire in hand, as if he was involved in an entertaining game. The game was cut short, as was the boy’s life, when a burst of sparks engulfed his body. After a flash of light, he fell to the ground and lay limp. Moses was dead.
Newspapers acknowledged the death of the Streiffer boy with articles and editorials, continuing their pleas to have the dangerous wires removed from overhead. In the end, the US Illuminating Company was charged with neglect for its loose wire, which had ended the boy’s life.
* * *
May 11, 1888
616–618 Broadway, New York, New York
It had been a long day for workers from Brush Electric Company. They had spent much of their time cutting away dead wires from buildings high above the traffic on West Houston Street. A team of linemen were currently tackling the tough task of clearing a second-story cornice of dead wires. Among the workers was Thomas H. Murray, who was dangling from the cornice.
The Electric War Page 9