The 1893 Fair signaled the shift from steam power to electricity and fossil fuels. The Electrical Building, designed by the firm of Van Brunt & Howe, was brilliantly lit at night. At the front entrance stood a statue of Benjamin Franklin with his kite as he “wrestled from the clouds the secrets of their lightnings.”
American scientific interest in electricity dates back as early as 1752, when Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite during a lightning storm. Electricity became a subject for study at Harvard and Yale and excited many students, including Samuel Finley Breese Morse. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791, close by Bunker Hill, where the famous battle against the British was fought 16 years earlier. Samuel’s father was a Congregational minister in the town and well known as the writer of geography texts. Samuel showed an early flare for drawing but went to Yale to study chemistry and philosophy. He attended lectures on galvanism and electricity and participated in an experiment in which he and his classmates linked hands and felt an electric shock pass from one to the other. In 1811 he traveled to London to study art and remained through the 1812–1815 war between England and the United States. Morse returned to America and found acclaim as a portrait painter. After the death of his beloved wife, he returned in grief to Europe, where he resumed his interest in the sciences, especially electromagnetism.
In 1832, approaching his 40th birthday, Morse was traveling back to America on board the ship Sully, when he conceived the idea that an electric signal might transmit and receive sound. After much effort Morse connected a battery to an electromagnet and successfully transmitted electricity along a wire circuit. Morse developed a code, known forever as the Morse Code, that transformed numbers and the letters of the alphabet into combinations of short and long sounds, dots and dashes, by pressing on a key. Morse patented his telegraph machine in 1837. Six year later, with financial help from the U.S. Congress, the first telegraph line was constructed linking Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Telegraph fever swept the country and soon telegraph wires, mounted on wooden poles, stretched from Washington to New York and Boston and beyond. Telegraph companies such as Western Union extended the network to the West and the South. A telegraphic message sent from one city over the wires was speedily decoded at a Western Union office in the far-off city. Telegraph boys, dressed in smart Western Union uniforms, then delivered the messages. After European countries adopted Morse’s electric telegram and his code, cables were laid across the Atlantic Ocean linking Europe and America by telegraph. Messages that took months to arrive by sailing ship, and weeks by steam ship, now reached their destinations in a matter of hours. Samuel Morse’s telegraph machine spread the news to large cities and small towns across the world. Morse lived in New York surrounded by wealth and acclaim until he died at age 80.
The success of Morse’s telegraph turned many an inventive mind to the field of electricity and telegraphy. The telegraph could relay only one message at a time. Was it possible to transmit speech over the wires instead and get a more immediate response? Among those trying to extend the technology beyond the telegraph and its code was Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922). Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father taught elocution. After Alexander’s mother became deaf, Bell Sr. devised a method of communication for her and other deaf people. When Alexander was 23 he emigrated with his family to Canada, where he and his father taught their system of speech for the deaf. In 1873, father and son were invited to Boston to demonstrate their system at the Perkins School for the Blind and the Deaf. Bell Sr. returned to Montreal but Alexander remained in Boston and took up the post of Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University’s School of Oratory. Bell, along with his able assistant Thomas Watson, experimented with a variation of the telegraph to transmit the human voice. Their efforts were finally rewarded when Bell used his apparatus to call his assistant in the next room. The telephone was patented in 1876, the year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In time Bell’s “electrical speech machine” superseded Morse’s telegraph to transmit messages. Now sounds, words, and tone of voice traveled back and forth over the wires at the speed of light.
The electric-powered Movable Sidewalk operated by General Electric carried visitors along the 2,500-foot main pier to the admission gates at the Peristyle.
In 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was established and the company’s telephone wire linked Boston to nearby Somerville. The following year, a telephone exchange was set up in New Haven, Connecticut, and soon Boston and New York were linked by telephone. The first telephone directory had only 50 names. A telephone was installed in the White House and, by 1880, 50,000 telephones were in use in the United States. The American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) was established in 1885. The New York to Chicago telephone grid, linking the nation’s two largest cities, was completed in time for the 1893 World’s Fair. The American Bell exhibit boasted that the company had over 10,000 employees, 440,000 miles of wire, and 552,000 telephones in use. American Bell set up a telephone call center at their exhibit, where rows of attractive “Hello Girls” facing their switchboards, connected Chicago callers to friends and family in the East. The telephone link from the East and Midwest to the west coast had to wait until 1915.
Electric power was fast replacing steam power and gaslight. In the factories, the hum of pulleys and overhead leather belts powered by steam yielded to the silent power of the electric current drawn from an outlet at every workbench. With a flick of a switch, electricity lit up the homes, shops, offices, and streets and activated the engines. The icebox was replaced by electric refrigeration and the hydraulic lift gave way to the electric elevator. Thousands of horses used by the town trolley systems were replaced by trolleys drawing electricity from overhead power lines. After 1890, the stables, grooms, blacksmiths, and trolley horses faded into history.
The most famous of the electricity pioneers was Thomas Alva Edison, who held 1,093 patents and was among the first to commercialize this new form of energy. Edison epitomized the entrepreneurial genius that lifted America to be the world’s leading economy during the last third of the 19th century. His ancestor John Edison was a British loyalist who fled to Nova Scotia. Three generations of the Edison family lived in Canada before Samuel Ogden Edison Jr., his wife Nancy, and their children moved to Milan, Ohio, where Thomas, the last of the seven Edison children, was born in 1847. The town benefited from the Milan Canal and was, for a brief time, a major grain-shipping port. Soon after Thomas’s birth, the railroad diverted the grain away from the town, forcing the economy into a steep fall. When Thomas was seven, the family left Milan and moved to the thriving lumber town of Port Huron, Michigan (Israel 1998). Thomas remained only a few months at school and received the rest of his early education from his mother. Starting as a teenager, Edison worked as a telegraph operator for the railroads and for Western Union. In 1868, he was in Boston working in the main Western Union office. He joined the scientific community and came to know Thomas Watson, the assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Eager to prove his ability as an inventor, Edison moved to New York and later New Jersey, where he was offered financial backing for his experiments.
Edison was aware that the sounds emitted from the telegraph transmitter resembled the spoken word. This observation aroused his interest in recording telephone messages. By attaching a needle to the diaphragm of a telephone receiver Edison was able to record his first message: “Mary had a little lamb.” He called his discovery the Phonogram and it brought him instant fame and success. In 1878, he established the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company to sell the dictating machine to the business community. Edison hired brilliant assistants who made many discoveries, including improvements in the telegraph, telephone transmission, an early projector of moving pictures, and advances in electricity. Chief among his discoveries was the incandescent light bulb. Edison became known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park” after the town in New Jersey where he set up his laboratory. In 1880 he est
ablished the Edison Lamp Works in Menlo Park with 43 employees. A year later, the enterprise had grown to 100 employees.
On September 4, 1882, the nation’s first electric power station opened at 255–257 Pearl Street, in Lower Manhattan. The wiring to carry electric current to customers was buried under the city streets. Because of the transmission problems of direct current, the coal-fired utility on Pearl Street initially served only 59 nearby customers with 110-volt current. With the partial success at Pearl Street, other Edison electric utilities were built to service businesses and private homes. In 1883, incandescent streetlights, using overhead electric wires, lit up the town of Roselle, New Jersey. In 1886 Edison moved to Schenectady and employed 450 workers in a large factory. His next successes were the electric trolley engine and a camera to take moving pictures. The first American motion picture shows Fred Ott, an Edison employee, in the act of sneezing.
When Charles Albert Coffin came to Lynn, Massachusetts, it had 130 shoe and boot factories employing 8,000 workers. Coffin was born in Somerset County, Maine, in 1847 and moved to Lynn in his teens to work in his uncle’s shoe factory. Within a few years he was running his own company, Coffin & Clough. Charles Coffin and other forward-looking shoe manufactures of Lynn were concerned over the growing competition in the shoe trade and the risks of remaining a one-industry city. In 1883, these Lynn shoe men formed a syndicate and offered the American Electric Company, a struggling electricity company in New Britain, Connecticut, the opportunity to move to Lynn. Coffin agreed to give up his shoe company and become the manager of the electrical business. The company moved to Lynn and was renamed the Thomson-Houston Electric Company after its founders, Elihu Thomson and Edwin J. Houston. Coffin’s management skills and the inventive genius of Elihu Thomson, brought success to the new enterprise, which was soon competing with Edison and Westinghouse. Elihu Thomson and Charles Coffin guided their Lynn company into the electrification of the trolley car systems. They began in Dayton, Ohio, in 1888 and two years later electrified the entire 150 miles of track of the Boston system.
The prohibitive cost of research and marketing forced Edison to seek financing from the New York money men. In 1892, Charles Coffin started negotiations with the financier J. Pierpont Morgan and Thomas Edison to combine the Edison Electric and Thomson-Houston companies into the General Electric Company, with headquarters in Schenectady, New York. At Morgan’s insistence, Coffin became the chief executive officer, much to the chagrin of Thomas Edison, who afterwards had little contact with General Electric. After the merger, General Electric shifted from direct to alternating current for its power generators, street lighting, and electric railroad systems. Coffin ran General Electric to great success from 1892 until his retirement in 1913. General Electric was among the original 12 companies that made up the Dow Jones Industrial Average and is the only one of the 12 to remain on the list to the present.
The Intramural Railway gave visitors a 3.6-mile elevated journey around the fairgrounds. The railroad was powered by General Electric using generators built by E. P. Allis and McIntosh & Seymour (at left). Here, the train is passing the windmill exhibit.
Elihu Thomson was born in the great textile-manufacturing city of Manchester, England, in 1853. When he was five his family settled in Philadelphia. He attended the famed Philadelphia Central High School where he excelled in the sciences and was much influenced by Edwin J. Houston, one of the teachers at the school. After graduating, he remained at the school as a teacher of physics and chemistry. In the 1870s, Thomson and the older Houston began experimenting with arc lamps and the design of dynamos. In 1880, Thomson and Houston were approached by a group of businessmen from New Britain, Connecticut, with an offer to establish a lighting system business in that town. From the start Elihu Thomson was the creative genius and Edwin Houston gradually fell into the shadows. The Thomson-Houston Electric Company built arc lamps and electricity generating systems, but the business was close to bankruptcy. Thomson, who had little aptitude for business, readily took the offer to move to Lynn. Thomson delighted in being part of the academic set. He attended Yale College and obtained his Ph.D. from Tufts University. He was associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as its acting president. Thomson was awarded 696 U.S. patents and showed his creativity even late in his life. Thomson remained with General Electric for the rest of his working life and served as its chief scientific advisor. His achievements brought him wealth and status. He lived in the wealthy town of Swampscott, a few miles from the General Electric plant in blue-collar Lynn.
At the Fair, General Electric powered the Movable Sidewalk, which carried passengers from the steamship landing at the pier to the turnstile entrance in front of the Peristyle. The Sidewalk—a platform with seats—moved at a gentle speed of three miles per hour and at a cost of 5¢ a ride. Another favorite was the Intramural Railway that took passengers on a 3.6-mile elevated tour. The railway traveled at 12 miles per hour between stations and took 20 minutes to complete a loop around the fairgrounds. The price was 10¢ for any distance. The railway was designed and built by the General Electric Company at its Schenectady plant. Five oil-fed direct current generators varying from 268 to 2,000 horsepower drove the system. Two of the generators were built by the E. P. Allis Company of Milwaukee, and one each by McIntosh & Seymour, the Providence Steam Engine Company, and the Lake Erie Engineering Works. Twelve trains of four cars each were in constant service from 8:00 a.m. until closing time at 11:00 p.m. The journey carried passengers around the Anthropological Building and the stockyards, skirted the Machinery and Transportation Buildings, and continued around the state buildings, the foreign pavilions, and the huge Manufactures Building, with views of Lake Michigan and the lagoon. On July 4 the system carried 63,000 passengers. General Electric offered its opinion that the Intramural Railway “demonstrates conclusively and beyond per-adventure, that the steam locomotive can no longer hold supremacy in the problem of heavy and rapid transportation.”
Inside the Electrical Building itself, the General Electric Company displayed its railway motors, power generators, dynamos, incandescent lamps, search lights, pumps, drills, and marine and mining equipment. The vast General Electric exhibit showed how “electricity can replace in every way the use of steam or compressed air.” At the center of the General Electric exhibit was the 82-foot “Tower of Light,” crowned by a prismatic bulb made up of 30,000 pieces of cut glass, in the shape of Edison’s incandescent lamp. The glass bulb alone weighed 1,000 pounds. At night, the shimmering tower displayed thousands of points of light in red, white, and blue, a sight to linger forever in the memory of the visitor (White & Ingleheart 1893). Nearby Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, an early motion picture show, and his Phonogram, which reproduced speech and music, dazzled the crowds with their novelty.
Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, but it was George Westinghouse who developed the transformer to carry the electric current from the central generating plant into homes and businesses. Westinghouse was born in a railroad town in upstate New York in 1846. He was a year older than Thomas Edison and seven years older than Elihu Thomson. As a boy of 15 Westinghouse left home with his two brothers to fight in the Civil War for the Union cause. After the war, he focused on locomotives and invented an improved braking system using air pressure that reduced the appallingly high rate of rail accidents. In 1869, he established the Westinghouse Air Brake Company in Pittsburgh, and quickly made his fortune. He developed equipment to control the flow of natural gas, and then an improved telephone switchboard. His success with these ventures led him to the next great industry—electric power. Westinghouse transformers reduced the high voltage electricity carried along wires into low voltage electricity for use in homes and factories. In 1886 he established the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and installed the nation’s first alternating current power system driven by a hydro-power generator. Westinghouse bought the patent rights to Tesla’s work on magnetic fields and launched the small electric
motor for power tools. 11
The giant Westinghouse was the largest engine in the power plant, in the annex of the Machinery Hall, used to generate electricity for the whole of the fairgrounds.
Perhaps the most brilliant and original of the quartet of electricity pioneers was Nikola Tesla. He was born in the Balkans in 1856, one of five children of Serbian parents. Tesla attended the Polytechnic College in Graz, Austria, where he studied electric engineering. He later moved to Paris and found work in the French branch of Thomas Edison’s company. In 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States to work directly for Thomas Edison, but soon left over scientific and money differences. He built the alternating current induction motor used to generate electric power from Niagara Falls. Tesla sold the rights of many of his inventions to George Westinghouse. Severe obsessive-compulsive symptoms and perhaps psychosis tinged Tesla’s creativity. He died a forgotten man in New York, but years later his ashes were taken to the land of his birth and placed in the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade.
America at the Fair Page 15