Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Just as Westinghouse was getting enthralled with electricity, he had started this new natural gas venture and invented an entire delivery system (for which he secured thirty-six patents). This patented system depended on the natural high pressure of the released gas pushing through narrow pipes for several miles, whereupon it was lowered to a pressure safe for use in homes and factories by the gradual widening of the pipes as the gas flowed into the factory or house. And so, historian Steven W. Usselman points out, one sees a certain theme emerging in Westinghouse’s early enterprises: “First, they involved transmission over distance.” With air brakes, compressed air was transmitted; with railroad signals, electricity; and with natural gas, the gas itself through pipes. But Usselman’s second observation is, “Many of the technologies that George Westinghouse pursued involved a crucial linking mechanism that served to connect the long-distance transmission lines with the rest of the system. Often these devices incorporated feedback mechanisms that regulated the system.”21 It was little wonder that Westinghouse was finding himself drawn to the field of electrical power, for it meshed with his longtime inclinations and experience.

  However, even as Westinghouse eagerly awaited the arrival of Belfield and the Gaulard-Gibbs apparatus in the fall of 1885, his leading electrician, William Stanley, had become unwell (perhaps the unhealthful Pittsburgh smog?). He had expressed discontent even back in the spring, having written his new wife, “I think that I will surely get up and leave Pittsburgh for good.”22 Stanley had been through many jobs and situations before coming to Westinghouse, and his early employer, the inventor Hiram Maxim, had said that Stanley may have been “very tall and thin, but what he lacked in bulk he made up in speed. Nothing went fast enough for him.”23 Now, once more Stanley was chafing. He preferred inventing on his own. By summer, Stanley had decided to relocate with his wife to the far more healthful and bucolic Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, where he had vacationed as a child with his grandparents. He would, however, continue to work for Westinghouse. “My health gave out,” Stanley would say later, “and there seemed to be grave questions as to my ability to withstand Pittsburgh and its work.”24

  But now, at last, in the final days of November, Reginald Belfield had arrived and gotten right down to business at Westinghouse’s grimy Garrison Alley Works in Pittsburgh, there unpacking all that he had brought from its wooden crate. It was not an encouraging sight. “The Gaulard and Gibbs apparatus from England [the prototransformer] was sent in a very unsatisfactory condition,” he would later write. “The work in the various parts was very faulty; portions not properly soldered only held together by the flux. The impression this gave was so bad that Mr. Pantaleoni was going to telegraph to London canceling the arrangement that had been made. Here Mr. Westinghouse stepped in and with his well-known sympathy towards a new invention, gave me another chance, for which I was most grateful, so that I had to practically reconstruct the entire apparatus and build most of it anew. This made a great deal of hard work but the result was satisfactory, inasmuch as Mr. Westinghouse determined to take up the apparatus. During this period I was staying at Solitude, and had occasion every night to discuss the matter with him, and the future development of the system.”25

  The first transformer had actually been created by Michael Faraday, just as the first generator had. In a transformer, the “primary” is the copper wire that is fed electric current, generating a magnetic field. The “secondary” is the copper wire that intercepts the primary’s field of force. The two interact, self-inducing voltage. In an effective transformer, the two coils of copper wire must be coupled perfectly to create high self-induction. However, no one really understood the full potential of Faraday’s prototransformer back in 1831, any more than most electricians did in 1885. Faraday had coiled many turns of an insulated wire around a bar of soft iron and then taken a second insulated wire and coiled that around the first. When alternating current was sent through the first coil, the second coil would also begin to generate current. The voltage of the insulated wire was purely a function of how many times it was coiled around the iron bar. The greater the number of wrapped coils, the higher the voltage would rise. Send that same alternating current into another iron bar with fewer coils wrapped around it and the voltage would diminish. A very rudimentary transformer. William Stanley said later in life, “I have a very personal affection for a transformer. It is such a complete and simple solution for a difficult problem.”26 So simple, few appreciated it. Westinghouse and his engineers did. “It is to be remembered,” Stanley said later, “that at this time, that is, in 1885, there were no alternating current machines built in America. [There were European imports.] The only transformers or induction coils that I knew of were three or four or more of the Gaulard type that had been imported from England.”27 Moreover, these transformers worked only with alternating current—for the swift oscillations of AC electrons created a magnetic field around them as they coursed along that was the key to the transformer’s induction. If electricity was to travel far distances, that electricity could only be AC.

  The Gaulard-Gibbs transformer that Reginald Belfield rebuilt at the Westinghouse plant in late November, he explained, “consisted of a bundle of iron wire forming the magnetic circuit surrounded by a large number of copper discs, having a hole in their centers, one to each turn of both primary and secondary, and each soldered to its neighbor, this multitude of soldered joints, each a source of trouble, was most impractical and very expensive to make.” Historian Harold C. Passer notes that an English technical journal of the time dismissed Gaulard-Gibbs and their transformer because more famous electricians who had worked in the field already would not “have allowed this subject to dwindle away to mere nothingness had there been a chance of bringing the matter to a successful issue.”28 The two inventors themselves did not really understand the potential of their system, for they were using the transformer merely to step down voltages to individual light bulbs.

  George Westinghouse, as was his wont, thoroughly enjoyed examining the whole Gaulard-Gibbs apparatus and then disassembling it. He discussed it at great length with Reginald Belfield all during December at Solitude. Belfield later recalled, “Those who knew Mr. Westinghouse will fully realize the great energy he threw into this question…. In an astonishingly short time [by the end of the year] the absolutely uncommercial [Gaulard-Gibbs] secondary generator was converted into the modern transformer.”29 A whole new design emerged that could be cheaply produced by machines: H-shaped iron plates that could be machine stamped now formed the core. The horizontal part of the H would pass through copper wire coils that could be machine wound and would serve as the primary and secondary. The ends were closed by means of I-shaped plates. Voilà! George Westinghouse had developed the modern transformer. His greatest innovation was organizing the transformers in parallel, with the number of parallels allowing great increases in voltage. Nonetheless, Pantaleoni reports that his fellow electricians at Westinghouse were still firmly against high-voltage alternating current and using the new transformer to increase voltages as they left the generator and to step it back down as it entered buildings. “The opposition by ALL the electric part of the Westinghouse organization was such that it was only Mr. George Westinghouse’s personal will that put it through.”30 William Stanley, who was busy installing his first Westinghouse DC system that fall, seems to have been the only other enthusiast for AC aside from his boss. No one besides Westinghouse understood the tremendous breakthrough represented by the AC transformer: a machine that could take high voltages that had traveled long distances and step them down for safe use in entire factories or homes.

  Undeterred by the chorus of naysayers at his own company, Westinghouse renegotiated William Stanley’s contract, and Stanley now prepared his new Great Barrington laboratory on Main Street for AC work. Reginald Belfield would come north to the snow-covered rolling hills to assist. In preparation for the wintry cold, Belfield bought an “American ready-made cloth coat” at Kau
fman’s Department Store in Pittsburgh just before Christmas. The coat came with a complimentary Waterbury watch. When Westinghouse saw it, the ever curious magnate had to take it apart at once. Recalled Belfield, “Mr. Westinghouse was not satisfied with taking the watch to pieces once, but he took it to pieces many times and put it together again, and it speaks volumes for his mechanical ingenuity that the watch never suffered for the treatment.”31

  Now that George Westinghouse had his transformer, there was the real and thrilling prospect of leading an electrical revolution, something far beyond direct current incandescence. On January 8, 1886, Westinghouse entered the fray officially, incorporating his fifth company, the Westinghouse Electric Company, with stock worth $1 million. The Pittsburgh magnate assumed the presidency, initially holding 18,000 of the 20,000 shares valued at $50 each. In the coming months, Westinghouse sold almost 8,400 shares to finance his new venture. William Stanley received 2,000 shares of Westinghouse Electric stock, a salary of $4,000 a year, and $600 a month for laboratory expenses.32 Any Stanley inventions developed by Westinghouse for commercial use were the company’s. The next major move was to dispatch Guido Pantaleoni and a Westinghouse attorney to Europe to buy the American patent rights to the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer for $50,000. Pantaleoni would find that others in Europe were hot on the same technical trail.

  By early January of 1886, Belfield was in Great Barrington, busy constructing H-shaped transformers in Stanley’s old barn. Once these pioneering commercial transformers were ready, Belfield (presumably in his warm Kaufman’s coat) braved the February cold to string four thousand feet of heavy copper electrical wire onto ceramic conductors fastened to the huge bare elms of Barrington’s Main Street. Concerned about competitors seeing the six transformers, Stanley encased each one in a wooden box installed out of sight in the basements of those buildings to be lighted. A steam engine was readied to provide power to the generator. Stanley then left town for a fortnight’s vacation and rest.

  Upon his return in early March, Stanley was chagrined to find that the Edison people had gotten the jump on him, becoming the first to dazzle Great Barrington with the miracle of incandescent light. The Edison light was showcased in a local mansion, where the company had installed a conventional direct current isolated plant. On March 10, 1886, the Berkshire Courier reported breathlessly on the Edison light in an article headlined A BRILLIANT SPECTACLE. The story noted, “During the last few evenings the Hopkins premises have been brilliantly illuminated upon the balconies and piazzas of the homestead, while the interior of the new home was brilliantly lighted, as were the surrounding grounds.” In a forthright commentary on the very real fear of this brand-new technology, the newspaper also reported, “A fire engine … stands ready to promptly extinguish any fires that may break out upon the works.”33

  A week later William Stanley, twenty-eight, fired up the coal-powered 25-horsepower steam engine in the old barn by his Main Street laboratory. As the Siemens AC generator came to life, it began transmitting 500 volts of AC electricity out on the strung copper wires, which hummed along under the stately elms and into the basement of the store owned by his cousin R. I. Taylor, there to be stepped down through the transformer to 100 volts, which ran up through the interior wires to the incandescent bulbs. On March 17, the Berkshire Courier reported, “Last evening the interior and exterior of R. I. Taylor’s store was lighted by three 150 candle power electric lights of the Stanley system. Two of the lights in the store made it as light as noon-day. A large number of businessmen were present to witness the effect, and were unanimous in their praise thereof.”34 On that same day, Stanley reported back to Westinghouse in a letter that he had run a successful test: “All the converters [transformers] are under lock and key so that no one knows anything about them…. I might say a great deal about the system, but briefly, it is all right.”35 Within the week Stanley had also connected up a drugstore, another general store, and a doctor’s office. Hundreds of local citizens came out for a gala Saturday night viewing, strolling in the brisk March evening under the barely budding elms to see for themselves the much ballyhooed incandescent light. Said Stanley, “My townspeople, though very skeptical as to the dangers to be encountered when going near the lights, rejoiced with me.” The newspaper marveled how inside the stores the electric lights were “so powerful and so perfectly white, that green and blue can be readily distinguished though they cannot by gas light.”36 By the end of the month Stanley had several dozen new customers, including a handful of local doctors, the billiards parlor, the post office, a stove store, a shoe store, and L. B. Brusie’s restaurant. The Edison people were not sitting back, but they still had only half a dozen customers. They were limited by distance, as Stanley was not. Rarely had such a major technological breakthrough—one with such vast implications for the future of electricity—been introduced so quietly and discreetly.

  Stanley, of course, had stayed absolutely mum on the nature of the new AC system, so the local newspaper had made no distinction between his enterprise and the rival installations by the Edison people. Only a handful of people in America could appreciate the monumental nature of this pathbreaking new lighting system, among them the Pittsburgh visitors who arrived by train on April 6. George Westinghouse had eagerly traveled over from his factories with his brother Henry, along with Pantaleoni and inventor-engineer Franklin Pope, to see firsthand William Stanley and Reginald Belfield’s great electrical achievement. Here, for the historic first time in America, high-voltage electricity had been generated, transmitted, and then stepped down via newly designed transformers to a safe level for domestic consumption. No longer would electric central power stations, with all their coal and noise and smoke, have to be situated in walking distance of urban customers. Generating stations could be located far out of cities, nearer to their fuel sources, and their electricity dispatched quietly in great wire grids, humming across fields and rivers to deliver clean, quiet power. Several weeks later, the whole Westinghouse group returned yet again to admire and study the further expanded AC system at work. Stanley had designed a more reliable generator to replace the Siemens, which was really meant to run arc lights. Now every aspect of this new system had to be rigorously tested and improved, preparatory to invading the market and changing the world. Westinghouse directed that a new version of Stanley’s AC system be installed back in Pittsburgh at the Union Switch and Signal Company and an electrical line strung three miles out to East Liberty. Transformers were established at each end, and throughout the summer the system was run and tested repeatedly. By fall, Westinghouse was ready to begin seeking his own place in the new electrical firmament, as he offered the world its first commercial AC incandescent system. Unlike Edison, who launched his every new invention with maximum public ballyhoo, George Westinghouse introduced his lighting revolution very quietly. No press account heralded the tremendous breakthrough of AC, the bursting of the DC shackles. The AC revolution began quietly and almost invisibly.

  George Westinghouse’s inaugural customer in his low-key electrical revolution was the Buffalo emporium of Adam, Meldrum & Anderson, a gigantic four-story Italianate palace of manifold consumer delights located on that upstate New York city’s prestigious Main Street. Buffalo was growing rich as the transit point for immigrants flooding west on the railroads and for all manner of crops and goods—notably bumper midwestern grain harvests and gigantic herds of livestock—heading back east. The broad Buffalo waterfront was lined with monumental grain elevators, and there the mountainous piles of grain were bought, priced, and stored before being funneled onward to New York City and markets abroad. A wealthy Great Lakes port, terminus of the Erie Canal, and national railway crossroads, Buffalo was poised for commercial glory.

  Right after Thanksgiving, a front-page ad in the November 27, 1886, Buffalo Commercial Advertiser proclaimed that Adam, Meldrum & Anderson (despite month-long problems and delays) was now showcasing its incomparable selection of black cashmeres, carpets, draperies, bed and
horse blankets, cloaks and shawls, dolls, and so forth with 498 Stanley lights run by the Westinghouse system. “There is no odor, no heat, no matches, no danger. We were the first business house in the city to adopt the plan of lighting our stores by incandescence…. The appearance is brilliant in the extreme. The light is steady and colorless. Shades can be perfectly matched. Come and see the grandest invention of the nineteenth century.”37 Two evenings later, on a Monday, the mammoth store was open—not to retail any of its lovely lace handkerchiefs, gloves, silk umbrellas, finest black silks, or eiderdown quilts, but purely to show off the Westinghouse lights. “No goods were sold,” reported the Commercial Advertiser, “and the store was so thronged with visitors that it was difficult to get about.” The well-dressed crowds streamed up and down the four floors to ooh and aah over the lights, exclaiming how akin it was to pure sunlight, how truly you could see the colors in the India shawls and the weave in the draperies. The Adam, Meldrum & Anderson store was just one of numerous spaces in Buffalo now luminous with electricity, including arc lights and rival incandescent plants. Consequently, “The store was visited last evening by quite a number of gentlemen interested in the different lighting companies of the city, and others, and all expressed great admiration at this Westinghouse light.” Again, as in Great Barrington, the newspapers did not mention (or presumably know) that this new system marked a profound and momentous change in the commercial delivery of electricity. Nor did Westinghouse make any great public declarations. But AC’s virtues were swiftly appreciated by those who could not be served by DC. Westinghouse soon had orders from twenty-seven new customers in numerous locales.