Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  The New York Post observed in its story about the aldermen’s visit, “There are now six different companies at work introducing electric lights in this city, the lights being known as the Brush, Maxim, Edison, Jablochkoff, Sawyer and Fuller (Gramme patents) lights.” Most of these were arc-lighting companies, but rival inventor Hiram Maxim had boldly helped himself to Edison’s incandescent light bulb (and to Ludwig Boehm, who had defected to the better-paying enemy) and had raced ahead, displaying his new incandescent lighting system in the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company’s vaults and reading rooms. Maxim’s system had been up and running for two months already. Such timely competition did nothing to soothe Edison’s money men, who wondered what was keeping their man from getting his lights running.

  The very night the aldermen trooped out to Menlo Park, the Brush Electric Company had had its New York debut. At 5:25 P.M., the generators at its central station had roared to life and illuminated seventeen powerful new electric arc lights, lighting up Broadway for the three-quarters of a mile from Union Square up to Delmonico’s Restaurant at 26th Street. The New York Evening Post described the new arc lights as blazing “with a clear, sharp, bluish light resembling intense moonlight, with the same deep shadows that moonlight casts.”34 When the brilliant arc lights flashed to life in the cold night, the strolling crowds of fashionable holiday shoppers exclaimed and clapped in admiration. Suddenly, passing horses, streetcars, and omnibuses emerged from the usual gloom of gaslight, uncannily visible. One reporter was struck by the “artistic effects” created by this new light. “A pair of white horses attached to an elegant private carriage outside of Tiffany’s was illuminated with a brilliancy which, contrasted with the deep black outline, formed a picture. The great white outlines of the marble stores, the mazes of wire overhead, the throng of moving vehicles.”35

  Just before the aldermen’s visit, Lowrey had organized a new corporate structure, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, comprising much the same directors—Western Union and Morgan people—as did the Edison Electric Light Company. Thomas Edison had been telling Lowrey and his fellow capitalists for months that he now needed not thousands of dollars, but millions to light up lower Manhattan. But the Wall Street investors were loath to wade any further into Edison’s financial bog, where money swiftly disappeared, never to be seen again. Where was the lighting system that was to churn out all the profits? So, some years later Edison would explain, “We were confronted by a stupendous obstacle. Nowhere in the world could we obtain any of the items or devices necessary for the exploitation of the system. The directors of the Edison Electric Light Company would not go into manufacturing. Thus forced to the wall, I was forced to go into manufacturing myself.” To one of his New York investors, Edison declared, “Since capital is timid, I will raise and supply it…. The issue is factories or death!”36 To show he was not kidding, Edison had boldly established the light bulb factory out at Menlo Park, which by the end of the year was turning out several hundred bulbs daily. This was controlled and financed by Edison himself, who sold Edison Electric stock and borrowed wherever he could. Again, the nature of the new and little understood electrical science and its many unknowns were dictating these first groping corporate arrangements.

  In February of 1881, Edison and his key staff members began shifting, at long last, into Manhattan, joining the already legendary cacophony of the Empire City, what one guidebook of the era described as “the intense activity and bustle alike visible and audible in all the conditions of its street-life. The crush of carriages, drays, trucks, and other vehicles, private and public, roaring and rattling over the stone-paved streets; the crowds of swiftly moving men walking as if not to lose a second of time, their faces preoccupied and eager; the sidewalks encumbered, without regard to the convenience of pedestrians, with boxes and bales of goods—in a word, the whole aspect of New York in its business portions is a true key to the character of its population, as the most energetic and restless of people.”37 By the end of February, Edison had signed a lease for the handsome former Bishop Mansion at 65 Fifth Avenue, an ornate four-story double brownstone in the city’s most fashionable quarter, just below 14th Street.

  At the highly visible headquarters for the new Edison Electric Illuminating Company, Edison quickly rigged up a steam engine and generator and by mid-April had equipped its tall-ceilinged rooms with numerous “electroliers” (electric chandeliers) and other attractive light fixtures. Illuminated every evening and long into the wee hours, 65 Fifth Avenue was the glorious and radiant new electrical reality, where Edison held court most nights. The back parlor served as his campaign headquarters, complete with a wall-size map of Manhattan and his designated first lighting district. Long before moving into New York, Edison had thoroughly canvased his prospective “first district” central station electric customers and determined that 1,500 were coal-gas customers using twenty thousand jets. All this was indicated on the map, along with the planned routes of the subways, switches, and so forth. For his new role as businessman, Edison moved up sartorially from his old blue flannel suit to a seedy Prince Albert frock coat. He was in his usual ebullient spirits: “We’re up in the world now. I remember ten years ago—I had just come from Boston—I had to walk the streets of New York all night because I hadn’t the price of a bed. And now think of it! I’m to occupy a whole house in Fifth Avenue.”38

  Edison certainly liked to promote this Horatio Alger story that predated those popular books, describing himself as arriving in New York an almost penniless youth with a great talent for wireless technology and machines. He happened, so he said, to be in the first days of a lowly job at the Gold Indicator Company, which supplied Wall Street via ticker tapes with the fast-changing price of gold, when the equipment ground to a halt. As the officers began to panic, Edison examined the silent machine and observed that the trouble was a broken contact spring. Amid the hysteria, he quickly fixed the problem and was duly promoted to the important position of technician. And so was launched his prosperous career as an inventor and improver of telegraphy equipment. The reality, says Edison scholar Paul Israel, was that while Edison certainly started life with few advantages, when he first came to Manhattan he was already well connected and had a respectable—not lowly—job as an engineer, and any money problems were short-lived.

  When Edison returned to New York this time, he brought with him many of his main Menlo Park crew, each assigned new and greater responsibilities. In mid-February, John Kruesi, Edison’s trusted Swiss mechanic, the man who could fabricate and make almost anything work, had opened the Edison Electric Tube Company at 65 Washington Street. Kruesi was the general in charge of Edison’s toughest campaign—the manufacture and then physical installation (beneath some of Manhattan’s busiest, filthiest thoroughfares) of fourteen miles of underground distribution cables and wires. He would command a big gang of Irish laborers, many of whom viewed electricity as some evil sprite. They would share the nighttime streets with the city’s denizens of the dark, including the great army of rag pickers and their dog-pulled wooden carts, each licensed to root through the daily refuse for salvageable cloth. Kruesi’s longtime Menlo Park assistant, Charles Dean, was put in charge of the all-important Edison Machine Works, located in an old ironworks building at 104 Goerck Street near the East River docks on the crowded and noisome Lower East Side. Here in this grimy setting would be perfected and manufactured the workhorses of the Edison system—the generators. Meanwhile, back at Menlo Park, Francis Upton, the scientist, was running the light bulb factory, now churning out a thousand lights a day. These three enterprises were all organized and financed by Edison or his closest associates.

  Even as Edison himself settled into Manhattan, his other right-hand man, Charles Batchelor, sailed off to Paris to launch the Edison European branch. Business manager and sometime Edison promoter Edward Johnson headed to England to push the Edison light there. Both were to lay the groundwork for the electrical empire Edison had envisioned from the start. Edison w
as a famous commercial name already overseas, for he had conducted major European business with his previous inventions. He had existing partners and contacts, and now Batchelor and Johnson were to begin launching their famous boss’s biggest enterprise yet—central electric stations, as well as isolated or stand-alone electric plants for individual factories or buildings. The Edison Electric Light Company of Europe had already been formed in January of 1880. So even as Edison labored away in Gotham, Charles Batchelor was hard at work in Paris organizing the all-important Edison system display for that summer’s International Electrical Exhibition. Across the Channel, Johnson began building a demonstration central station that would light up the centrally located Holborn Viaduct.

  Back in New York, down on Wall Street, Edison’s investors were again questioning the necessity—and the ensuing huge expense—of burying the electric wires in “subways,” something Edison had been determined to do from the start. By the 1880s, anyone lifting his or her gaze above street level in the commercial blocks of American cities could barely see the sky for the ugly maze of hundreds of electric wires strung higgledy-piggledy between towering wooden poles. The wires crisscrossed the streets and were festooned from windows and rooftops as if huge crazed spiders had run amok. A range of fast-expanding industries now depended upon electricity (most of it still battery produced)—including the telegraph, telephone, stock tickers, fire and burglar alarms, and certain small manufacturers. In any city, numerous companies vied to provide these various services, and where they found customers, they installed more poles—some towering a hundred feet and higher. Firms came and went, but their wires remained, deteriorating, fraying, dropping onto one another, and creating short circuits. However, all these early electric-based services operated on very low voltage direct current derived from large batteries. These wires might cause a shock but would not electrocute a hapless passerby.

  All that changed with the coming of the new outdoor arc lighting in the 1880s. The extremely high voltage alternating current required to operate these lights—as high as 3,500 volts—made their outdoor wires potentially truly perilous. The Brush Electric Company had installed its first lights on Broadway between 14th and 34th Streets at the end of 1880, and their brilliant blue white light soon earned Broadway its sobriquet “the Great White Way.” New York City then contracted with Brush to light more of Broadway and several squares. Hotels, theaters, and other public spots installed arc lights. Brush built three central power stations and transmitted its high-power electricity—typically 2,000 to 3,000 volts—on wires strung among the existing low-voltage tangle. Edison wanted nothing to do with these mangled nests of live and abandoned wires and insisted that the Edison system, by burying its wires, would be both safe and reliable. The new Edison system operated on low-voltage direct current, which was efficient and economical only within a half-mile radius of the generator. Beyond that distance, the cost of copper wiring became prohibitive and the energy loss too great. However, Edison prided himself upon the low voltages of his system and believed its buried wires added a great margin of safety for the general public and his customers.

  In late April 1881, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company finally received city permission to begin digging its subways. In the meantime, the company had already wired about fifty first-district homes and office buildings and promised that current would be flowing by the fall, providing them lovely electric light just as the winter gloom closed in. The city’s permission came with one deeply worrying caveat: Five city inspectors—to be paid $25 a week by Edison—would monitor progress. Edison envisioned all kinds of trouble aimed mainly at extracting bribes. But in true Tammany “do no work” fashion, the inspectors appeared only on Saturday afternoon to collect their pay. Kruesi quickly broke ground with his Irish street crews, working largely at night when the city’s much maligned street-cleaning crews spread out to remove the two to three million pounds of equine manure left behind each day by the city’s 150,000 horses. Kruesi soon found that digging down two feet was far more time-consuming and arduous than expected. Edison and Kruesi personally had to install the connector boxes located every twenty feet. Worse yet, the suppliers of the copper wiring and the iron pipes (the latter substituting for the original wooden boxes) had stopped delivering. June was slow going, as it rained every day but one. Then, on July 2, the Edison men organizing the evening’s subway work heard shocking news: President James Garfield, waiting at the Baltimore and Potomac station for a train to the cool of the New Jersey seaside, had been shot twice in the back by an angry job seeker. Still alive, the president was carefully conveyed to the stifling heat of the White House. The nation prayed that Garfield would survive this terrible attack.

  At the time, Edison was scouting the worst slum streets of his first district, looking for a cheap but capacious building to house the heart and soul of his system—the central generators. That August, with the summer heat exacerbating the usual stench of horse piss and manure, great piles of garbage, and sour beer and sawdust from the ubiquitous bucket shops, Edison purchased 255-57 Pearl Street for $65,000. From this squalid block, Edison’s electricity would eventually gently hum forth a half mile in each direction, lighting up the all-important financial district centered on Wall Street and much of newspaper row. “The Pearl Street Station,” Edison later said, “was the biggest and most responsible thing I had ever undertaken. It was a gigantic problem, with many ramifications…. All our apparatus, devices and parts were home-devised and home-made. Our men were completely new and without central station experience. What might happen on turning a big current into the conductors under the streets of New York no one could say.”39 The Edison dynamos—powered by coal-fired steam engines—produced an initial alternating current electricity that was then gathered from the machine by “commutators” and brushes and turned into a direct current. One of the perennial problems with these early generators was that the constant friction against the commutators and brushes meant regular replacement. Every step of the way, myriad technical problems arose that had to be resolved. Again and again, the starting date was postponed.

  Summer ended and still President Garfield clung to life, a bullet lodged next to his spinal cord. From the start, reported the New-York Daily Tribune, his physicians had told him “he had one chance in a hundred of living. ‘Then we will take that chance,’ he said. All that mortal man could make of so slender a chance was made. His courage never faltered…. For seventy-nine days the agonizing struggle was prolonged.”40 On September 6, it was decided to move the president to Elburon, New Jersey, where he had been heading when shot. It was, therefore, no great surprise when on the night of September 19 New Yorkers heard church bells start to toll out a doleful dirge. The president was dead. Vice President Chester A. Arthur was hurriedly sworn in to the nation’s highest office at his Manhattan town house. Englishwoman Iza Hardy, then visiting New York, wrote, “The heart of the nation beat with one regret; the word on every lip was, ‘The President is dead.’” A week of mourning followed. “From the highest to the lowest, from Fifth Avenue mansion to the squatter’s shanty, each home hung out its sign of sorrow…. The star-spangled banner, generally looped with crape, floated in all sizes and of all materials from a thousand windows; from the little ten-cent paper flag to the imposing patriotic bunting waving from side to side of the road.”41 Garfield’s assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, was arraigned October 14, the trial beginning a month later. By the end of the year, as the trial dragged on, the New-York Daily Tribune described it as a “vulgar peep show” where Guiteau, determined to prove he was innocent by reason of insanity, dominated the courtroom with “his drivel, abuse, malevolence, and smudge.” The editors denounced the circus atmosphere as a “disgrace to the country” allowed by a “judge whose backbone seems to be made of tissue paper.”42

  Edison was deep into his own travails, as he struggled to get all the components of his central station up and functioning. The New York press had become far less friendly. On Dece
mber 2, 1881, The New York Times described in a brief, page eight article that the Edison company “have laid a considerable quantity of wire, but so far as lighting up the downtown district is concerned, they are as far away from that as ever.” Winter, snow, and frozen streets brought the digging to a halt. More months passed with little progress. In an article entitled “The Edison Dark Lanterns,” The New York Times reported, “Much grumbling has been done lately by businessmen and residents of the district bounded by Nassau, Wall, South, and Spruce streets because there seems no prospect of the Edison Electric Light Company putting in the lights they promised to have burning by last November.” A grumpy Edison official acknowledged that only half of the fourteen miles of subways were in place, in part due to sporadic delivery by suppliers of iron and copper and in part because of suspension of work while the ground was frozen. With the advent of spring, they were working at top pace again. When pressed repeatedly for a completion date, the Edison officer replied, “All we can say now about the prospects of lighting up is that we are doing our best to get the wire laid, immediately after which we will be able to light the lamps.” Of course, it was in this month that J. Pierpont Morgan’s Italianate brownstone on Madison Avenue was first lit up, much to his delight. But his was an isolated electrical plant, not part of the central station. He lived too far north for that service. On June 30, Guiteau, “this most despicable of assassins,” was hanged, and he turned his awful end at the gallows into a final frenzied display of shrieks and tears. By late August 1882, as the city steamed in the summer heat, Kruesi at long last led his Irish crews through the final and fourteenth mile.