Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  As part of the new, upgraded electrical lighting of the Morgan residence, Johnson decided to improvise “an arrangement for giving light on Mr. Morgan’s library table by means of concealed wires in the floor and contact spuds fixed in the legs of the table to penetrate the heavy and costly rug which covered the floor.” The next morning quite early, Johnson received another summons to the Morgan manse. As he headed swiftly toward Madison Avenue and 36th, he had a queasy feeling something had gone awry. Upon entering Morgan’s magnificent mosaic vestibule and removing his derby, he took one whiff of the air and his worst fears were confirmed. “The house was pervaded by a strong smell of wet, burned wood and burned carpet.” The servant who had answered the door escorted Johnson to the library. “The library floor was torn up in several places; and in the centre of the room was the partly burned desk and burned rug and other charred objects piled in a heap…. One of the spuds [beneath the library table] had become bent or broken and an imperfect contact was made and a fire ensued completely wrecking the beautiful room. The family were at the opera at the time.” Johnson surveyed the soggy, blackened detritus, his spirits sinking rapidly. For while J. P. Morgan did not yet fully dominate American finance as he eventually would, he was still a famously impatient and ill-tempered man and growing ever more influential among the all-important New York money men. Years later, that moment was still vivid to Johnson. “It was a dismal scene…. Suddenly I heard footsteps and Mr. Morgan appeared in the doorway with a newspaper in his hand and looked at me over the tops of his glasses.

  “‘Well?’ he said.

  “I had formulated an explanation, and was prepared to make an elaborate excuse. Just as I opened my mouth to speak, Mrs. Morgan appeared behind Mr. Morgan, and as I caught her eye she put her finger on her lips and then vanished down the hall. I said nothing but looked at the heap of debris.

  “After a minute’s silence Mr. Morgan said, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

  “I answered, ‘Mr. Morgan, the trouble is not inherent in the thing itself. It is my own fault, and I will put it in good working order so it will be perfectly safe.’

  “He said, ‘How long will it take to fix it?’

  “I answered, ‘I will do it right away.’

  “‘Alright,’ he replied, ‘see that you do.’”8

  Morgan’s son-in-law wrote that the banker was subsequently so delighted with his electricity that he “gave a reception, and about four hundred guests came to the house and marveled at the convenience and simplicity of the system.” Two of the guests, California gold rush millionaire Darius Ogden Mills and his son-in-law, New-York Daily Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid, promptly contacted the Edison Electric Illuminating Company to have their own houses electrified. Mr. Mills, his shrewd face wreathed with his signature white muttonchop sideburns, also appeared the next morning at Drexel, Morgan and ordered his broker there to buy him a thousand shares of Edison Electric stock. Morgan, who always kept a keen eye on the office’s comings and goings, intercepted Mills as he was leaving. He inquired why Mills, who was a much admired investor, was there. When he heard, Morgan, whose firm was Edison’s lead banker, began then and there to match every order Mills made for Edison stock with an equal order of his own personal stock. Wrote Satterlee of Pierpont’s pivotal role, “His faith in the new industry, his advice, and his constant financial support were the factors that led to its spectacular development; otherwise it might have taken many more years for it to reach its tremendous proportions.”9

  So pleased was Morgan with his electric alternative to what Edison gleefully damned as “the vile poison” gaslight that he had Johnson install electric lights in the rectory of his church, St. George’s, as well as in the church gym, to make it easier to use in the winter. He also had a family friend’s school for young children wired. Explained Satterlee, “Pierpont sent Johnson around with his mechanics and electricians, in the same way that he would send a basket of his best peaches or grapes from ‘Cragston’ to those who did not have orchards or grapevines of their own. Nothing in life pleased him more than giving luxuries to friends who could not have them.” Morgan had his own mansion rewired several times. “He never seemed to care how much the walls and floors of the house were torn up,” wrote Satterlee, “so long as the latest and most up-to-date devices were put in before other people had them.” Morgan once joked, “I hope the Edison Company appreciate the value of my house as an experimental station.”10

  Satterlee’s affectionate portrait fondly conveys Morgan the enthusiast, who put his money and considerable influence behind the new electric light. But there was a far darker side to Morgan. As a conservative financier, he was deeply uncomfortable with the roller-coaster chaos and competition of aborning industrial capitalism. As the years passed, Morgan concluded that he much preferred the predictability of monopolies he controlled. And, in truth, Morgan’s conservative soul flinched again and again in the early years at the huge and risky amounts of capital the radical new technology of electricity would turn out to require. In truth, it was not Morgan but Thomas Edison who took the biggest risks when it came to building the first central station in Manhattan. All this made Morgan even more determined that the early natural monopoly of Edison Electric Light and its handful of manufacturing companies should be sustained. As Morgan’s power grew, so did his passion for control, and it would govern much of his ruthless strategy in the coming bitter struggle over electricity.

  For the very reason that electric lighting in the early 1880s was still such an expensive and exotic novelty, it immediately became a status symbol for the very rich and the adventurous. And there was no one richer in 1881 than William H. Vanderbilt, president and majority owner of the powerful New York Central Railroad. Vanderbilt would eventually be, along with certain Drexel and Western Union partners, one of Edison’s significant (but later) backers in electric lighting. A big, stolid man with luxuriant curling muttonchops framing a bland face, Vanderbilt had earned the sobriquet “Colossus of Roads.” Having inherited $100 million from his notorious skinflint father, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the mild-mannered William had handily doubled this sum by his own sagacious flair for railroads and stocks. Vanderbilt had been out to Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory in 1880 and admired the soft glow of the light bulbs in the cold New Jersey evenings. More impressive yet was Edison’s splendid new office at 65 Fifth Avenue, electrically ablaze with numerous ceiling electroliers and lamps. One day in the spring of 1882, Vanderbilt himself came to “65” and was quite taken with its amazing effulgence of incandescence. Always the eminently practical businessman, Vanderbilt desired to experience himself this new technology that he was being asked to invest in. With his deluxe mansion nearing completion, Vanderbilt had offered his house (before Morgan did) as the first in New York to be illuminated with electricity. The emblems of status may shift, but human nature generally delights in being first.

  Even before its completion, William H. Vanderbilt’s new “box house” was one of the most talked-about structures in the United States, a mansion as monumental as the owner’s fortune. And the fortune was, in turn, a testament to the new and mighty railroad corporations, private industrial entities whose size, complexity, power, and potential for profit dwarfed all that had come before. Vanderbilt, quite used to being boss of thousands of rail workers, thought nothing of engaging a seeming army of six hundred workmen and sixty foreign artists and craftsmen, who swarmed about Fifth Avenue and 51st Street, building and ornamenting with antlike alacrity a palatial triple mansion, a luxurious edifice of excess (such as Morgan found quite vulgar). For two years, New Yorkers had watched agog as the mansion was completed in record time. (Word was it had cost $6 or $7 million, at a time when four-fifths of the nation earned $500 or less a year.) Entered through towering Italian sculptured bronze doors, Vanderbilt’s dream house featured everything from Venetian-style rooms with jewel-encrusted wallpaper to a subdued bamboo-lined Japanese parlor. William, with his great belly and lux
uriant muttonchops, would live with his beloved wife in fifty-eight-room opulence in one-half, while two daughters and their families each occupied the two adjoining mansions. So the self-assured Edison and his people had eagerly bustled in in the spring of 1882, pleased as punch to be showcased amid such grandeur. They installed a stand-alone generator and wired the huge mansion, as well as its two-story skylighted art gallery hung with large, expensive French pastoral scenes.

  Why, then, a reporter from Saint Louis asked the ever loquacious Thomas A. Edison not long after, as the inventor confidently regaled him with the imminent downfall of the gas industry, was the Vanderbilt mansion now lit with gaslight? “He never tried our light,” asserted Edison. “The first night when the engine ran it made a noise, as all new engines will, and Mrs. Vanderbilt complained of it, and that settled it.”11 In fact, Edison later elaborated, “Mrs. Vanderbilt became hysterical…. We told her we had a plant in the cellar, and when she learned we had a boiler there she said she would not occupy the house. She would not live over a boiler. We had to take the whole installation out.”12 But was it not true, pressed the journalist, that the electric wires had also started a fire? “There is nothing to it except just this: In running temporary wires in different directions just to show Mr. Vanderbilt the effects, one of them came into contact with a burglar alarm wire, and this one, being overheated, charred some of the gold-thread wires of the cloth wallpaper which it ran into—that is all.”13 While Edison belittled such high-profile incidents and even implied, it seemed, that the nation’s richest citizen might be a bit henpecked and lily-livered, his rivals in the gas lighting industry made sure the press knew the sorry details of this failure of the newfangled electric light.

  This “Vanderbilt incident” was why chroniclers of the electric light were careful to describe Mr. Morgan’s house as the first in New York to be successfully wired for electricity. Both these stories—the burnt Morgan library, the small Vanderbilt fire—were seen as telling commentary on what made Morgan—as opposed to Vanderbilt—such an important figure in the early years of the electric light. Morgan was lauded as courageous and persevering in the face of serious setbacks, a true pioneer who put the full force of his financial and personal influence behind the new technology (though nowhere near enough, if you asked Edison). In contrast, Vanderbilt had retreated from personal endorsement at the first sign of trouble, but later, when success seemed more certain, he came in as a major but passive investor.

  Both stories take us back to that shimmering moment when electricity—now an utter commonplace—was introduced into the gaslit household. Wealthy, cultivated women in floor-length, rustling dresses delighted in showing their friends how if you just turned a knob on the wall, the room’s clear incandescent bulbs began almost magically to glow, casting an even, clear light. Unlike candles, the electric light did not burn down or become smoky. Unlike gaslight, there was no slight odor, no eating up of a room’s oxygen, no wick to trim or smoked-up glass globes to be cleaned. Many months went by before the light bulbs burned out. But the introduction of electricity in the home was also fraught with the peril of electric shock or fire, which gave a certain delicious frisson to the whole exotic, expensive enterprise. In the early 1880s, electricity was still a wondrous and “mysterious fluid” resonant with glamour, status, and danger.

  But for the visionary capitalist, electricity possessed other, more practical allures. Already this astonishing invisible “agency” had birthed two radically new technologies—the telegraph and the telephone—that had forever compressed and altered the age-old realities of time and distance. The perspicacious were already reaping fortunes. The most farsighted were tantalized by even greater electrical prizes. Who would further harness electricity to light the nation’s streets, its dim factories, and all those millions of households, dramatically transforming man’s age-old sense of day and night? He who could bestow more hours to the day—for work, for play—would be wonderfully rewarded. Of even greater moment in these commercial times, who would harness electricity to operate work-saving machines, mechanisms artfully reinvented to liberate humankind from the hard toil of farm and factory? He who could unleash the full, only-dreamed-of potential of electricity and control this awesome invisible power would become wealthy and powerful indeed. Was it any wonder the War of the Electric Currents would be so fiercely waged?

  Michael Faraday

  CHAPTER 2

  “Endeavor to Make It Useful”

  The elusive, invisible mystery of electricity became the subject of specific, recorded inquiry in the dawning days of the Golden Age of ancient Greece. In 600 B.C. Thales, erudite philosopher and astronomer in the thriving Ionian port of Miletus, observed the special qualities of the rare yellow orange amber, jewel-like in its hardness and transparency. If rubbed briskly with a cloth, Thales showed, amber seemed to come alive, causing light objects—like feathers, straw, or leaves—to fly toward it, cling, and then gently detach and float away. Amber was similar to a magnet in its qualities, yet it was not a lodestone. As a youth, Thales of Miletus had studied in the sacred Egyptian cities of Memphis and Thebes. Perhaps it was there, under the burning sun, that this earliest of Greek philosophers first learned from the priests about the prized amber, with its seeming possession of a soul.

  In the myth of Phaeton, handsome mortal son of Apollo the sun god, the Greeks explained amber’s magic. Phaeton aspired to drive his father’s lustrous golden chariot on his own through the shimmering sky, and his father, to prove his love, rashly agreed. Soon after Phaeton took the reins, Apollo’s formidable steeds sensed his youthful alarm and veered rebelliously off course, racing first far into the darkest heavens and then too near the earth, scorching the land, setting whole cities and nations afire, turning fruitful Libya into desiccated desert, roiling the oceans, and splitting open continents. Jupiter, enraged by such hubris and wanton destruction, hurled a fatal thunderbolt at Phaeton, who fell lifeless from the sky, his burning hair blazing like a shooting star across the darkened sky. His sisters, the Heliades, gathered about their dead brother, mourning so bitterly that finally Jupiter, taking pity, turned these lissome girls into ever sighing poplars and their tears into translucent amber that tumbled into a passing stream. This bittersweet myth explained amber as a mysterious godly gift. We now know that gleaming amber is but prosaic fossilized tree resin. But amber’s rare qualities—the creation of static electricity—were sufficient to pique human curiosity and yield up the tiniest clue about the mysterious power of electricity.

  Almost two millennia would pass before Thales’s original observations about amber were enlarged upon. In 1600, the much esteemed London physician and philosopher William Gilbert was appointed chief doctor to the strong-willed and aged Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. Gilbert not only replicated Thales’s amber experiments, he went far beyond them. An admired officer of the conservative Royal College of Physicians, Gilbert was also actively engaged in scientific investigations. However, he held off publishing his challenging treatise, De Magnete, until the pinnacle of his career, when he was president of the Royal College and firmly ensconced as the popular elderly queen’s personal doctor. The full title (translated into English from the original Latin) was On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth; a New Philosophy Demonstrated by Many Arguments and Experiments. Gilbert praised his own “new style of philosophizing,” his bold and “unheard-of doctrines,” and warned that his great life’s work was not for “smatterers, learned idiots, grammatists, sophists, wranglers and perverse little folk.” The earth’s interior, posited Gilbert, was “a pure, continuous magnetic core, which orients our globe in the heavens just as it swings a compass needle to the north.”1 This explained many actions of magnets, including their noticeable “lines of force.”

  These were not idle intellectual inquiries Gilbert was pursuing, but questions of tremendous commercial moment. England was a dominant sea power in avid pursuit of the wealth of nations, and Queen Elizabeth wa
s seeking to improve the arts of navigation. Therefore, anything that shed light on the nature of magnetism and compass reading was important. A famous painting shows William Gilbert, arrayed in white ruff and dark velvet robes, at his handsome London residence, Wingfield, demonstrating electrics and magnetics for his sovereign monarch and her court. The seated Queen Elizabeth, who favored exquisite jewel-encrusted, fur-trimmed gowns, watches intently, as do two of Her Royal Majesty’s most famous explorers and navigators, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. Gilbert is standing before them, showing the strange attractions of amber, magnets, and various substances. The very word electric was coined by Gilbert, who played on the Greek word for amber, elektron, to come up with a term to describe amber’s attracting qualities for certain materials.

  Like a good philosopher and experimenter committed to truly observing and explaining factually what happened in nature, Gilbert did not rest with amber, but tested all kinds of materials, finding that glass, rock crystal, sulfur, sealing wax, and some minerals, when rubbed, also became “electric.” This was Gilbert’s great electrical discovery and contribution: that numerous hard materials—not just amber—could be electrified when rubbed. (What Gilbert could not know, of course, was that his rubbing created charged electrons—positive or negative—that attracted like or repelled opposite. When these charges flow along a conductive material, they become an electric current.) He used a pivoted (nonmagnetic) light gilt needle, his “versorium,” or electroscope, to study which materials had electrostatic attraction. (The needle swung toward or away, depending on whether the charge was positive or negative.) Moreover, his further inquiries into these “electrics” delineated how the weather, water, olive oil, and so on affected their “electricity.” The good doctor deduced that what activated the numerous motions of attracting and repulsing was an invisible watery substance he termed “electrical effluvia.” In 1603 Gilbert’s great patroness, Queen Elizabeth, died, and the author of De Magnete soon followed. His legacy was the discovery that electricity could be generated and his admonition that philosophers must “seek knowledge not from books only but from things themselves.”