Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Edison’s investors remained chary. Egisto Fabbri, the Drexel, Morgan partner, had journeyed down to Menlo Park while Fox was hanging about preparing his article. He had seen Upton’s and Edison’s plain wooden houses “illuminated,” as well as the laboratory, but Fabbri still harbored memories of previous overblown statements by the ever optimistic Edison. With the New York papers full of stories about the light and the New Year’s Eve official debut looming, Fabbri wrote Edison on December 26, “I suggest to you the wisdom & the business necessity of giving the whole system of indoor & outdoor lighting a full test of continuous work for a week, day & night, before inviting the public to come and look for themselves…. Any disappointment would be extremely damaging and probably more so than may appear to you as a scientific man.”22

  In truth, it was too late. With the Herald’s article, the word was quite out. Each subsequent afternoon and evening, flocks of electricity sightseers crowded off specially scheduled Pennsylvania Railroad trains or pulled up in the crudest of farm wagons and the most luxurious of broughams, carriages equipped with coachmen and gleaming pairs. There, as the freezing December evening enveloped the snow-clad Jersey countryside, and clouds scudded across the black night sky, the visitors would head through the dark toward the bright laboratory, there to push through and gaze in awe at the magical display. The official public unveiling was December 31, 1879, New Year’s Eve. And that evening, as the 1870s became the 1880s, three thousand people poured in to Menlo Park, ignoring the stormy weather, to see the miracle of incandescence.

  Despite Fabbri’s concerns about premature displays and humiliating failures, Edison’s light was a smashing success, a fabulous vindication. He had, as promised, divided the electric light. Reported a breathless New York Herald, “The laboratory was brilliantly illuminated with twenty-five electric lamps, the office and counting room with eight, and twenty others were distributed in the street leading to the depot and in some adjoining houses. The entire system was explained in detail by Edison and his assistants, and the light subjected to a variety of tests…. Many had come in the expectation of seeing a dignified, elegantly dressed person, and were much surprised to find [Edison] a simple young man attired in the homeliest manner, using for his explanations not high sounding technical terms, but the plainest and simplest language.” Inside the laboratory, important men sporting elegant evening wear, accompanied by women in fashionable silk gowns with short fur jackets and muffs, pressed through the crowds of country boys in checked suits and derbies to see the electricity turned on and off, to gaze in wonder at the glowing light captured in a pear-shaped glass bulb.

  The triumphant display of the new electric light impressed the New York investors sufficiently that they parted with a further $57,568 to underwrite Edison’s next phase. Now began the great push to transform Menlo Park’s jury-rigged system that dazzled crowds of electrical tourists for a couple of weeks into a truly commercial network that would function reliably in the demanding hurly-burly of New York and still compete in price with gas. Edison’s plan was to create a miniature lighting network in the still-frozen fields in and around his laboratory, there to test out his plan to generate electricity in a central station and then send it forth to the world via insulated copper wires buried just below the city streets in (still to be dug) sunken subways. Once those insulated copper wires reached a building, they would just be run through the existing gas pipes into existing gas lamps, where light bulbs would be attached. As the exhilaration of New Year’s Eve subsided, the hard truth of Menlo Park in the early days of January 1880 was the vast task before them, for every single component required major improvements. To that end, Edison again doubled his laboratory workforce, bringing it up to sixty men.

  Edison scholar Paul Israel notes that when Edison built his Menlo Park laboratory, it was the “largest private laboratory in the United States and certainly the largest devoted to invention.” Edison’s unique access to big corporate money—first through contracts with Western Union and then through Wall Street light bulb money—gave him an enormous advantage over his rivals. When Edison embarked on his electrical quest, Israel points out, he was very much a “traditional though highly ingenious inventor, working with two or three close assistants and a few skilled experimental machinists…. By the beginning of 1880, as he turned from basic research to the development of a commercial system … Edison had begun to resemble the modern director of research and development…. And like the modern research director, Edison depended on the support of corporate capital. While Edison the individual is celebrated as the inventor of the electric light, it is the less visible corporate organization of the laboratory and business enterprise that enabled him to succeed.”23 Edison was inventing not just the light bulb, but a new kind of relationship—however prickly and difficult—between corporate capital and scientific creativity.

  The first order of business was perfecting the light bulb, whose brightly shining carbonized cardboard filament may have thrilled young and old, rube and city slicker, but simply was not reliable for use day in, day out. The filaments generally burned out after only three hundred hours or so, a big improvement but still not enough. Moreover, rival light bulb inventor William Sawyer, when he saw Edison’s patent for the carbonized cardboard bulb, promptly filed an interference suit, pointing out that he had already filed a patent for a light bulb with a cardboard filament. So Edison had every reason to invent yet a better light bulb. “Now I believe that somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop,” Edison was said to have uttered, “there is a vegetable growth with geometrically parallel fibers suitable to our use. Look for it. Paper is manmade and not good for filaments.”24 Once again, the patient Batchelor sat hour after hour, night after night, at the lab table, testing all kinds of fibrous natural substances. Months passed with no definitive breakthroughs.

  Finally, on April 21, 1880, the digging of the electrical “subways” began. Spring had come to the lovely Jersey countryside, and the heavy clay soil had finally warmed up. Workmen wielding plows and shovels began excavating a system of long, narrow ditches that fanned out from the direct current generating station, ran along Menlo Park’s few muddy streets, and then headed out to the surrounding fields. For his next great public demonstration of his electric network, Edison planned to illuminate all of Menlo Park with four hundred incandescent lights arrayed along eight miles. (He had solved the problem of lights arrayed in a series—as they were in arc lighting—where one burned-out light would break the whole circuit, by rearranging the circuit into ladderlike parallels; this meant that the electricity could be routed along individual “rungs,” thus circumventing a light bulb that had been switched off or had burned out.)

  The subways carried the insulated copper wires cradled in narrow wooden conductor boxes, which were coated with tar to protect against moisture and decay and then enclosed with a top. Once the wires were laid, the conductor boxes were sealed and the trenches refilled. Day after day, the men dug and installed, as the days lengthened and the strange broiling heat of May gave way to a mercifully cool summer. By mid-July, the men had dug, installed, and covered five miles.

  At this point, Francis Upton began testing the lines, only to find “some of the circuits are very badly insulated and all more or less defective.” One of the newcomers to the lab wondered why in the world all this had been done by “inexperienced men” and “without being required to test a single circuit or wire until the entire work is finished.”25 Now all the ditches would have to be opened up. But the real problem was devising decent insulation, a top priority. Over the next few months, new insulation was twice reapplied and the wires twice reburied. Then Edison and his men would wait for the sky to darken and the next summer rain to come soak through the earth. And again, for a second and a third time, the insulation failed. Through it all, Edison was his usual sanguine self, wandering about chewing on his cigar, vest half-buttoned, solving this problem and that, conferring with Batchelor and Upton, keeping Lowrey informed.
He slept a few hours here or there. Edison’s goal was to have his Manhattan prototype ready for public display by the Christmas holidays.

  Always hanging over Edison’s head was the cost of copper, the biggest and most daunting expense for his central station plan. The cost of copper had inspired his invention of the high-resistance light bulb. But even that huge savings would not be enough if he was to match, much less undercut, the cost of gas lighting. In the summer of 1880, even as the “subways” were being laid out again and again, Edison had one of his profound breakthroughs, coming up with a “feeder and main” system of distribution that mimicked—under the streets—the new parallel circuits to be used within buildings. This brilliant new approach would cut copper costs to one-eighth the earlier estimates.

  Essentially, instead of one or two very thick (and costly) copper trunks carrying electricity forth and then branching off to each individual building, Edison proposed a network of much thinner multiple “feeder” copper wires coming from the central station DC dynamo and intersecting with many small mains that lit large clusters of lights, thereby eliminating the bulk of the copper. When this elegant and simple answer to problems of cost and maintaining pressure was demonstrated in England, someone asked the brilliant Glasgow physicist Sir William Thomson, knighted for his critical role in the practical success of the transatlantic cable, why no one else had thought of it. He said, “The only answer I can think of is that no one else is Edison.”26

  Meanwhile, the search for the ideal filament had been slowly advancing. During that weirdly hot spring, the lab was fully focused on the possibilities of bast, the woody outer layer of flax or hemp. Meanwhile, Edison was busy installing his light bulb factory in an old wooden barn across the railroad tracks, for he would need many hundreds of light bulbs for his New Year’s display. Soon thereafter, he would need thousands of light bulbs stockpiled for his future Manhattan customers. Then, on July 10, according to Edison lore and legend, while the ditch diggers were laboring away to finish their eight miles of trenches, Edison was sitting in the lab idly fanning himself against the still summer air with a bamboo fan. He looked at the fan, cut off a long thin piece for a filament, examined it under his microscope, and handed it over to be tested. The results seemed promising, and better-quality bamboo was obtained, carbonized, and tried. By August 2, the lab was fully focused on bamboo. Edison scholar Paul Israel debunks this legend as “plain wrong,” for the lab notebooks show an order of bamboo coming in July 7. Moreover, Edison had conducted careful literature searches, and it was these, not the heat, that put him on to bamboo.

  Throughout 1880, Edison’s experimental inventor’s laboratory had been steadily transformed into a production and testing facility for light bulbs, dynamos, conducting wires, and insulation. Each component of the new lighting network had to be designed, tested, redesigned, and retested. “Everything is so new that each step is in the dark,” Edison said. “I have to make the dynamos, the lamps, the conductors, and attend to a thousand details the world never hears of.” The truth was, this was completely new and complex technology, and no one really knew how long it would take to make it work or what it might ultimately cost. In Menlo Park, September had rolled around and vast flocks of birds at times darkened the broad country sky as they began heading south. Now, for the fourth time the workmen began to lay the wires in the eight miles of conduits. And at last, insulated with a compound that involved several layers of muslin and then “parafine, tar, Linseed oil and Asphaltum,” the wires remained sound when the rain came.27 On Monday, November 1, a blustery cold evening, the first Menlo Park streetlights began to glow, their subtle radiance coming from electricity generated by a “long-legged Mary-Ann” in Edison’s central station and then flashed through the copper wires buried in the subways. Soon Edison’s and Upton’s houses were connected to the central station, as were the miles of lights running up the hamlet’s central plank road and then far out into the golden autumn fields.

  The very next day was Election Day, and by the next night, when it was known that Republican James Garfield had won the presidency by a hairbreadth, Edison celebrated his party’s victory by lighting up a whole turnpike of lights near the passing railroad. President-elect Garfield was, like Edison, a self-made man who had overcome his family’s penury. A tall, handsome, affable scholar, Garfield had been president of Hiram College in Ohio and a member of Congress when the Civil War broke out. He quickly organized a brigade for the Union Army, becoming a war hero at the battle of Chickamauga. Elected a U.S. senator by the Ohio state legislature, Garfield resigned his army commission at President Abraham Lincoln’s request. By 1880 Garfield was a powerful and respected senator, but he was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate only on the thirty-third ballot. As Garfield prepared to enter the grand world stage, so did Edison. Each hoped to make an important mark on a fast-growing nation finally feeling prosperous again.

  Edison, despite two arduous years rife with setbacks, mounting skepticism, and pointed sarcasm about his being far behind his own original announced schedule of mere months, was his ever blithe, hubristic self. Thus he was able to write to his European business associate Theodore Puskas in October 1880—before the Menlo Park system was even up and running smoothly—that he could “safely say that the Edison Electric Light Company of America will have one station established and in full working order lighting the lower portion of the City of New York before the first of May 1881.”28 Such was Edison’s fame in those days that there were continual visitors wanting to meet the great man. So when the beautiful French tragedienne the “divine” Sarah Bernhardt performed in New York during a national tour, she, too, longed to meet “le grand Edison.” Edison investor and director Robert L. Cutting was more than happy to escort the glamorous Madame Bernhardt out to Menlo Park, arranging a special train after an evening performance. At 2:00 A.M. on December 5, she stepped off the private car into the raw rural cold of Menlo Park, thrilled by the soft glow of the incandescent lights lining the plank road. Edison, who showed little interest in women (including his own wife), was smitten by this glorious, vivacious creature in her exquisite French gown with its voluminous, swishing skirts. “She was a terrific ‘rubberneck,’” he would later remember. “She jumped all over the machinery, and I had one man especially to guard her dress. She wanted to know everything. She would speak in French, and Cutting would translate into English. She stayed there about an hour and a half.”29 In the comfortable library, Edison held her hand and explained the secrets of the phonograph. She recited favorite passages into it from Racine’s Phèdre and was amazed to hear her voice. When the great inventor flashed the hundreds of outdoor lights on and off in the pitch dark of the early morning, on and off, on and off, she clapped with pure Gallic delight. Finally, she and Cutting had to return to New York. “C’est grand, c’est magnifique!” she exclaimed in that world-famous voice.30

  Bernhardt was not the only important visitor Edison entertained that December. The moment was drawing near to conquer the Empire City, for Edison apparently envisioned few further delays. But before he could install an entire electrical system from scratch in crowded, noisy, dirty Manhattan, there were a few political details to master. The Edison investors knew the company needed to secure City Hall’s permission to dig up Manhattan’s streets, and with notoriously corrupt Tammany in firm control, one could not be certain what that might entail. The ever diplomatic Grosvenor Lowrey quickly arranged a posh and persuasive evening out in Menlo Park for the city’s Tammany aldermen, hoping to dazzle them into quick and friendly action with lights and Lorenzo Delmonico’s finest catered fare and copious champagne. Numerous reporters tagged along for the fun. The New York Times reported that as the group got off the train in “the bleak and uninviting place where Mr. Edison has chosen for his home,” the hundreds of electric lights illuminating the plank road to the laboratory and surrounding fields “cast a soft and mellow light … beautiful to look upon.” Edison, in a sealskin hat, awaited the
politicos at the brick office building and “grasped the hand of each one as he passed and smiled with all the frankness of a pleased school-boy.”31 The inventor spoke briefly and then led the visitors through the cold, well-lit December night to the laboratory. There he proudly introduced the new bamboo-filament light bulb, which he said should last six months with normal use. He then turned off and on various rows of lamps. Next, with one turn of a wheel he put out all the 290 outdoor lights aglow in the snowy streets and nearby pastures. Then, with a turn of the handle, Edison brought those 290 globes back to glowing life. For men who knew only gaslights that required individual lighting and snuffing, this was something astonishing indeed!

  After that radiant display, Lowrey and Edison escorted the Tammany crew back through the cold to the elegant brick building and Edison’s upstairs library, where the men settled in comfortably. Edison explained why his electric light would be as cheap as gas when it became available in the fifty-one blocks bounded by the East River, Spruce, Wall, and Nassau Streets. He boasted a bit about his 250-some patents granted for electrical innovations. Then, to liven matters up, he displayed his ever popular phonograph. The reporter from the New York Truth noticed that “by this time the city fathers had begun to look quite dry and hungry, and as though refreshments would have looked much more palatable to them than the very scientific display.”32 Perhaps their hearts sank when Lowrey proposed they revisit the laboratory. Instead, there beckoned a table as long as the room, groaning under Delmonico’s aromatic delicacies—turkey, duck, chicken salad, and ham, all to be washed down with the best wines and champagnes. Soon the aldermen were feeling much more jolly. The city’s superintendent of gas, no less, toasted Edison on his success. “Gas,” said the superintendent, “is dangerous. It is very easy for a man to go to his hotel, blow out the gas and wake up dead in the morning. There is no danger of a man blowing out the electric light.”33