Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  More extensive exploitation of the power of Niagara would prove to be an extraordinarily complex undertaking that would take almost a decade of concerted effort, enormous capital, and an investment in untried technologies. It began in 1886, when Thomas Evershed, the divisional engineer of the New York State canal system, conceived a plan to build a waterwheel power system at the falls upstream from the preserved land. He envisioned a series of lateral canals, which would turn numerous waterwheels in an industrial complex of mills and factories. A two-and-a-half-mile tunnel that ran directly underneath the town of Niagara would return the water to the river just below the falls. But even if Evershed could sell power to several hundred businesses clustered near the falls, it wouldn't carry the cost of the endeavor. To make a profit, he would have to find a way to transmit Niagara power over twenty miles to Buffalo—a city, then, with a population of a quarter of a million people—where it could provide electricity for manufacturing, the trolley system, and public and domestic lighting. At the time, neither alternating current nor direct current could send electricity over more than a few miles.

  Evershed had trouble attracting investors to his risky endeavor, and three years later, finding himself strapped for funds and unable to raise money, he turned over the project to Edward Dean Adams, a New York banker. Rather than building a series of lateral canals, Adams envisioned constructing a central station along the falls, from which electricity would be sent to industries in the area and then eventually to Buffalo. Although the plan was just as untried as Evershed's, Adams was a respected financier and managed to attract the interest and investments of some of the richest businessmen of the time, including J. P. Morgan, John Astor, and William Vanderbilt.

  In October 1890, Adams began work on the tailrace, which would carry water away from the turbines and would be necessary for any approved design. Everything about the endeavor was massive: "Thirteen hundred workmen were blasting their way, day and night, through the solid rock, 160 feet below the town," notes Niagara historian Pierre Berton. "The horseshoe-shaped tunnel, eighteen feet wide, twenty-one feet high, and seven thousand feet long, would displace 300,000 tons of rock; it would require twenty million bricks to line it and two and half million feet of oak and yellow pine to shore it up." Yet even as construction was proceeding, Adams had no solid idea as to how to transport the power over a long distance. He conducted an international competition of electricians and engineers in an attempt to find a means for transmission. Plans proposing the use of alternating and direct current were submitted, but no feasible proposal came of the challenge.

  To efficiently and cost-effectively transmit power over long distances, any system would have to rely on high voltages: the flow of current would increase, but the resistance would remain constant. High voltages—too high to run lights or motors—have to be transformed: that is, they have to be stepped up to higher voltages when leaving the generators and entering the lines, then stepped down to lower voltages before arriving in homes or factories. Whereas direct current could not be transformed (transformers rely on an oscillating magnetic field, and direct current flows only one way), alternating current could. Although a transformer for alternating current had already been developed, alternating current was still virtually untested for long-distance transmission. The only proof of its feasibility lay in an experimental system built in 1891 in Germany, which had transmitted power from Lauffen to Frankfurt—a distance of more than a hundred miles—to run machinery and lighting at an electrical exhibition, and at the Gold King Mine in Telluride, Colorado, where a Tesla polyphase motor transmitted power two miles to run a motor in the crushing mill.

  In late October 1893, in part because of the success of alternating current at the World's Columbian Exposition, Adams awarded George Westinghouse a contract to build the first generators at Niagara. And Westinghouse turned to Tesla. Niagara had been in Tesla's mind since he'd seen a steel engraving of the falls as a teenager. He later wrote, "[I] pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind."

  By 1895 Adams had installed, within a cavernous brick powerhouse designed by Stanford White, called the Cathedral of Power, three 5,ooo-horsepower Tesla polyphase motors (those powering the White City had been 1,000 horsepower), each weighing eighty-five tons. They endured countless tests and were repeatedly calibrated and reset, and in August of that year "the inlet gates at the canal opened, the river water flooded into one of the penstocks, the turbine whirled, and so did Dynamo No. 2, flashing alternating current off to the Pittsburgh Reduction Plant [a nearby aluminum manufacturer]." Upon the successful transmission of power, Tesla predicted that "the falls and Buffalo will reach out their arms and will join each other and become one great city. United, they will form the greatest city in the world."

  The next year, at one second after midnight on November 16, 1896, the switches were pulled at the power station at Niagara, and the current, stepped up through transformers, ran along twenty-six miles of cable and was then stepped down and delivered to the streetcars of Buffalo. "Electrical experts say the time [it took] was incapable of computation," remarked one reporter. "It was the journey of God's own lightning bound over to the employ of man." Within months, Niagara began to supply current that lit Buffalo's streets, homes, businesses, and industries.

  Here was power untethered from its source, freed from the lay of the land and the flow of rivers, abstract and seemingly without limit. "Wherever mankind wishes to go," one observer later wrote, "copper wires can go, too." But the technical ability to send energy across long-distance wires also brought with it all kinds of new challenges. Electric companies would need to refine the process by which they delivered power and adapt to the demands of its users—or force users to adapt to their desires. Societies would need to confront the disadvantages experienced by those beyond the reach of electric power, and people everywhere would have to come to terms with living with the inexplicable. "Yoked to the Cataract!" the Buffalo Enquirer proclaimed, which also meant yoked ever increasingly to something not even the great inventors understood. "What is electricity?" one writer of the time inquired. "That is a question no man can yet fully answer.... The men who make the dynamos and the men who operate them know how to produce electricity, but Mr. Edison himself, standing by an Edison dynamo, could only tell you the 'how,' and not the 'why.' Yet, for thousands of years this great power has been in the universe, waiting for nineteenth-century man literally to find it out."

  Even Tesla was never able to adequately explain electricity:

  Now, I must tell you of a strange experience which bore fruit in my later life. We had a cold [snap] drier than ever observed before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail. [As I stroked the cat] Macak's back, [it became] a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks. My father remarked, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see on the trees in a storm. My mother seemed alarmed. Stop playing with the cat, she said, he might start a fire. I was thinking abstractly. Is nature a cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded.... I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous sight on my childish imagination. Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.

  Here was light taken on faith and perhaps replacing faith. Man of letters and historian Henry Adams understood the true significance of the dynamo: "To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring." And why wouldn't it? One moment our world was dark, and the
next brilliant. That almost no one understood how this was accomplished, and that this light, unrelated to the eons of tallow and coal; this light, requiring nothing of us—no fussing over a flame or wick, no worry over the quality of the oil; this light, with its own particular trajectory tied to the precision of the industrial age—timed and tuned, and pitched and keyed, all rhythm and exactitude; this light, conjured by wizards—as both Edison and Tesla with their varying temperaments were called; this light, with its constancy and brilliance, was nothing if not the evidence of things unseen.

  What it did require, of course, was that we go forward on trust. What culminated at Niagara was only the beginning: the electric grid would come to be considered the greatest technical accomplishment of the twentieth century. New wizards would detach us even more from the things of this earth, and we would need to trust also that our data, words, and life's work would not in an instant disappear from before our eyes. H. G. Wells understood that something fundamental had shifted as he stood looking at the falls in 1906. Not only had the spiritual been fused to the industrial, but it also seemed that some glory had been taken away from Nature herself. He wrote:

  The dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company, for example, impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than that accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel-pit ... has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines.... The dazzling clean switch board, with its little handles and levers, is the seat of empire over more power than the strength of a million disciplined, unquestioning men.

  PART III

  So if we moderns were to enter into an interior of the past, we would very soon feel uncomfortable. However beautiful it might be—and it was often wonderfully so—what for them exceeded sufficiency would not be enough for us.

  —FERNAND BRAUDEL,

  Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800

  10. New Century, Last Flame

  In our households we talk of dynamos, motors, trolleys, electric lamps, telephones, and batteries, quite as freely as we do of bread, butter, butcher's meats, milk, ice, coal and carpets.

  —EDWIN J. HOUSTON,

  Electricity in Every-Day Life (1905)

  THE TALK IN HOUSEHOLDS may have included all manner of things electric, but when H. G. Wells stood at Niagara in 1906, electricity was still confined to dense urban areas, and within those areas it was available almost solely to businesses, manufacturers, and wealthy homeowners. Even so, city dwellers had grown accustomed to electric light in public, and although most still used non-incandescent lamps at home, almost all light was measurably cheaper and more efficient than it had been in the past. Gas, for instance, sold for $2.50 per thousand cubic feet in 1865. By the end of the nineteenth century, it cost about $1.50 per thousand cubic feet. And kerosene, which sold for about 55 cents a gallon in 1865, dropped to as low as 13 cents a gallon by 1895. Only commercially produced tallow candles—rarely used in the late nineteenth century—had become more dear. Whereas in the early nineteenth century, they could be purchased for 20 cents a pound, in 1875 they cost 25 cents a pound.

  Consequently, most American households at the turn of the twentieth century were much brighter than those of the past. In 1800, in the United States, $20 a year would light a house for three hours in the evening with a luminosity equivalent to 5 candles, or 5,500 candle hours per year—and many householders would have considered that much light an extravagance. By mid-century, $20 would purchase 8,700 candle hours per year; in 1890, 73,000 candle hours. By 1900, for $20 a year, on average people lit their homes (exclusive of electricity) for five hours a night with a luminosity equivalent to 154 candles, or 280,000 candle hours. That miners once worked by the phosphorescence of putrescent fish and lacemakers produced intricate designs by the light of a flame magnified through water must have seemed incomprehensible to them.

  It's worth remembering that this rapid increase in the ease and brilliance of light was limited to industrialized countries. Millions throughout the world knew nothing of electricity, gaslight, or even kerosene. Their illumination, both in substance and meaning, had changed little since ancient times. Perhaps nowhere did traditional lighting hold more meaning than in the high latitudes where the Eskimo, Inuit, and other northern peoples—their villages dispersed across the snow and ice, and they themselves outnumbered by the animals—lived for months at a time with scarce daylight. Richard Nelson describes the Koyukon people of the Alaskan interior:

  Houses were lit by burning bear grease in a shallow bowl with a wick, or by burning long wands of split wood, one after another. Bear grease was scarce, and the hand-held wands were inconvenient, so in midwinter the dwellings were often dark after twilight faded. Faced with long wakeful hours in the blackness, people crawled into their warm beds and listened to the recounting of stories.... The narratives were reserved for late fall and the first half of winter because they were tabooed after the days began lengthening. Not surprisingly, the teller finished each story by commenting that he or she had shortened the winter: "I thought that winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it."

  For those in the northernmost coastal villages of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska—where in the heart of winter, the only natural light comes from the stars, the moon, and the aurora borealis and the only source of fresh water is locked in snow and ice—stone lamps were utterly essential for survival: among the Inuit of Greenland, "the constellation of the Great Bear is called... pisildlat, lamp foot or stool upon which the lamp is placed."

  Above the tree line, where only occasional driftwood might be available for fires, people relied almost entirely on seal oil, a more efficient fuel than reindeer fat or the fat of other land animals. Women carefully gathered every last bit of it from the carcass, scraping the skin with an ivory scoop, and they saved any oil that might drip from the lip of their lamps, which were carved of soapstone. The exact size and shape of the lamps varied from village to village, but most were elliptical—a foot or two long—with a thick edge. A wick of dried moss, catkins, or peat—rubbed between the palms with a bit of fat—would be laid in a thin line along the edge. The lamp could be tipped to feed more oil to the wick. Sometimes a slab of seal blubber hung over the bowl and fed more fat to the lamp as it melted.

  If more than one family shared a snow shelter, as often happened, each possessed its own lamp, which kept family members warm and cooked their food. Its heat also dried their clothes and boots and was used to tan hides. Steam rising off the cooking pots helped the people to bend straps of wood and pieces of bone, from which they fashioned snowshoes and boxes. Most essentially, it gave them water to drink. Humans can't eat snow—it isn't high enough in water content to prevent dehydration before it lowers the core body temperature to fatal levels. So those living in the farthest north had to melt snow for their drinking water, either directly over the flame or near it, where a chunk of snow or ice might lay on an inclined slab, its meltwater slowly running into a container.

  As the lamp burned, it warmed the cold air coming through the entryway of an ice house; the heat rose and escaped through a vent in the ceiling. The walls continually thawed and froze, thawed and froze. When people placed animal skins over the interior walls to keep them from dripping, the lamp might throw enough heat that family members could sit shirtless in the house. In small, low ice houses, the lamp might smoke as the family slept, and they would wake covered with soot, suffering from headaches, and starved for oxygen. In the late 1960s, when scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research examined the mummified remains of an Aleut (Aleutians also used seal oil lamps), they found the lungs to be coated with a thick, black substance. One of the scientists said, "Had he smoked
I would have called him a three pack a day man."

  However smoky, the lamp meant so much to families that in lean times, so as to have enough fuel for the fire, they were willing to go hungry. The fire was almost always kept alive, most often carefully guarded and tended by the woman of the household. She spent much of her day alongside it, cooking, preparing hides and skins, sewing winter clothing, and drying clothes. The flame, a few inches high, was difficult to keep clear and smokeless. In the late 1800s, anthropologist Walter Hough noted: "Lamp trimming only reaches perfection in the old women of the tribe, who can prepare a lamp so that it will give a good, steady flame for several hours, while usually half an hour is the best that can be expected. In an Eskimo tradition a woman takes down some eagle's feathers from a nail in the wall and stirs up the smoking lamp, so as to make it burn brightly." Elsewhere he wrote, "The Eskimo have no phrase expressing a greater degree of misery than 'a woman without a lamp.' After the death of a woman her lamp is placed upon her grave."

  For those living in the early-twentieth-century cities of Europe and America, the regard the inhabitants of the circumpolar regions had for their soapstone lamps might have been as hard to fathom as the meagerness of the flame. In these cities, any open flame, however bright, had become easy to disparage and at best carried a hint of nostalgia. All the improvements—the twisted rag becoming a plaited wick, Argand's steadying of the flame, the clarity and brilliance of kerosene and gas light—would soon be no more than history, and the lamp's mysteries would be memory's mysteries, as essayist and critic Walter Benjamin knew. In the 1930s, Benjamin remembered the lamp of his childhood, a lamp that,