Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Back in Manhattan at 65 Fifth Avenue, Thomas Edison smoked his cigar and stewed, deeply incensed to learn that the Westinghouse Electric Company was invading the field of incandescent lighting, turf pioneered by Edison. The Brush Electric Company specialized in arc lights, but Edison disdained that product as an interim solution doomed to extinction. Edward Weston had developed an incandescent light bulb, but as far as Edison was concerned, Weston had simply stolen his light bulb and come up with a workable but inferior DC system. He was no great threat. Thomson-Houston was just another patent pirate, though they certainly hustled. Edison’s patent lawyers were after them in the courts. But Westinghouse was altogether another matter, a formidable rival with immense achievements and access to major capital. He was not a man to scoff at, deride, or dismiss. The Pittsburgh industrialist was reputed to be a real fighter who, once decided, pursued a course of action full bore. And while Westinghouse flourished in the golden age of the robber barons, he very definitely was not one himself. In an era of flagrant venality and corruption, he remained a tremendous idealist and genuine democrat, completely dedicated to making the world a better place through engineering and machines. Whatever new project he launched, he was looking to be the best. Like Edison, he thoroughly enjoyed working in the noisy, dirty shops among his men, inquiring about the state of their projects, and infusing everyone with his own zest.

  Understandably, then, Edison was concerned when he heard that a man like George Westinghouse was scaling his, Thomas Edison’s, electrical Olympus. Moreover, the Pittsburgh magnate was entering the electrical arena equipped with something new, something potentially revolutionary. Edison was feeling deeply bitter about this new competition. He wrote darkly to Johnson: “Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a [AC] system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically. It will never be free from danger.” Edison was utterly perplexed by how the whole AC business could be practical, writing in the same report, “I cannot for the life of me see how alternating current high-pressure mains—which in large cities can never stop—could be repaired. Whereas the main of the direct current would not produce death if a man received a shock.”38 Here were the first angry rumblings in the coming hostilities that would come to be known as the War of the Electric Currents, a war between two titans whose technology was so potent, it was already changing the world.

  New Street looking to Wall Street, New York City, during the blizzard of 1888

  CHAPTER 6

  Edison Declares War

  As most of Manhattan slept on Monday, March 12, 1888, a howling rainstorm engulfed the city. Its freezing downpour inflicted sodden misery on the armies of the poor huddled atop steam grates and curled up in the nooks and crannies of piers and alleys. The deluge coarsened into sleet, then thickened into driving snow. All night, the storm roared on. By dawn, its sixty-mile-an-hour winds were shoving the deep snow into drifts as high as second-story windows. When middle-class New Yorkers arose Tuesday morning, they were indignant to find they had no morning newspapers at their snowbound doors, no fresh milk from the milkman, no hot rolls from the baker. Instead, there was only an icy tornado of white screeching up the avenues. The temperature was a bone-numbing five degrees. Everywhere the great spiderwebs of electric wires sagged and collapsed, broken by the weight of the ice.

  Reported The New York Times, “Before the day had well advanced, every horse car and elevated railroad train in this city had stopped running; the streets were almost impassable to men or horses by reason of the huge masses of drifting snow; the electric wires—telegraph and telephone—connecting spots in this city or opening communication with places outside were nearly all broken; hardly a train was sent out from the city or came into it during the entire day; the mails were stopped, and every variety of business dependent on motion or locomotion was stopped…. Probably if it had not been for the blizzard the people of this city might have gone on for an indefinite time enduring the nuisance of electric wires dangling from poles.” The newspaper once again urged the electric wires all be buried, citing the very specific hazards: “The city is liable to be put into darkness and the consequent perils. There is also the danger of conflagration through the failure of the fire alarm wires.”1 Nowhere was mentioned the possibility of people being electrocuted. The blizzard of 1888, with its twenty-two inches, stood for sixty years as the city’s worst snowstorm.

  It was just about a month later that the great public fear of electrical “death by wire” began. On the cold, clear Saturday night of April 15, 1888, a youth in high spirits was heading along East Broadway toward Catherine Street, skipping and leaping. The snow was long gone, and most of the thick webs of electric wires had not been buried but were once again restrung on the forests of cedar poles. That crisp April evening, carriages were rolling by, their shiny cabs and sleek horses gleaming in the bright street arc lights. Passersby noticed the bounding boy seize one of the broken telegraph wires dangling down from high above. Wire in hand, he playfully skipped around and around the towering telegraph pole, when amid a spurting shower of sparks, the boy staggered back and fell reeling on the dirty sidewalk. A crowd quickly gathered and the ambulance corps soon galloped up to take the boy, later identified as Moses (or Meyer) Streiffer, to the Chambers Street Hospital. But he was dead.

  The New-York Daily Tribune editorialized, “It is almost a pity that it wasn’t a millionaire or other leading citizen that was killed by the electric light wire on Sunday morning. If it had been, the community would have been startled, and its indignation might have brought the wires underground. But it was only a poor boy peddler—a little fellow fifteen years old, a Rumanian, a stranger in this great city, selling collar buttons and pocket combs from a modest tray to help support his mother and eight brothers and sisters. A wire had been swinging for months from a pole near where the boy took his stand, he happened to touch it, gave ‘a sort of a quack,’ the policeman said, and was dead.” The U.S. Illuminating Company, which ran its arc lights off high-voltage wires strung along the avenues, was charged with neglect for allowing dangerous wires to dangle.2

  In the spring of 1888, “death by wire” became, for the first time, a great preoccupation of the New York papers. “Overhead cables suddenly leaped into prominence not only as eyesores but as a public peril,” notes Westinghouse biographer Francis Leupp. “Leading newspapers which till then had confined their discussion to the expediency of exchanging gas for electricity, began, with astonishing unanimity, to make a display of every happening that could be used to excite animosity in the popular mind toward the [high-voltage] alternating current.”3 The newspapers’ rising indignation mirrored that of Thomas Edison, long a darling of the New York press. Suddenly alert to every casualty and fatality caused by high-voltage electrical wires, the press now gave full attention to the scandalous, tangled state of Manhattan’s overhead electrical wires and the dangers posed by high-voltage arc light wires.

  Less than a month after the peddler boy Streiffer died, there was another electrical victim. On Friday, May 11, a lovely spring day, a Brush Electric Company worker was up cutting away old wires on a second-story cornice at 616-18 Broadway, high above the thick port traffic below on West Houston. An employee inside one of the buildings “saw smoke curling in the window and heard a spluttering sound. He found Murray dead and one of the electric wires partly cut through and the insulating material burning at the point where it was cut.”4 The lineman for the arc light company had failed to wear his heavy gloves and was electrocuted. Rescuers trying to pull the body in through the window were promptly shocked. Finally they obtained some rubber sheets and, after wrapping the corpse in those, pulled the poor charred fellow off the cornice and took him over to the Tenth Precinct Station House. For six years, arc lights and their wires had been viewed as an eyesore and a nuisance in Manhattan. But now, the citizenry would begin to associate high-voltage electricit
y with danger and death, just as did Thomas Edison.

  Ever since George Westinghouse had turned on the lights in the Buffalo emporium of Adam, Meldrum & Anderson, Thomas Edison had been plagued by a steady stream of bad electrical news. In late 1886, Edison had jauntily written off his new rival, George Westinghouse, claiming, “None of his plans worries me in the least,” albeit conceding that the “only thing that disturbs me is that Westinghouse is a great man for flooding the country with agents and travelers. He is ubiquitous and will form numerous companies before we know anything about it.”5 Indeed, with each passing month, Westinghouse was proving a more and more formidable threat to Edison dominance.

  The hard-charging Westinghouse, after but one year in business, had constructed or had under contract 68 AC central stations. He had come from nowhere to loom as Edison’s biggest competitor. Thomson-Houston, which had flourished primarily as an arc light company, had also taken up installing AC central stations just that spring, using Westinghouse transformers. They had already up or under contract 22 AC central stations. At the end of 1887, from the seat of his eight-year-old empire in Manhattan, Edison had built or had under contract 121 DC central stations in places as far-flung as Birmingham, Alabama, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Edison Electric Light Company’s executives, in their 1887 annual report issued in late October, put a brave face on the AC situation, denouncing this electrical alternative as “from a commercial standpoint, having no merit in itself and, being of high pressure … notoriously destructive of both life and property.”6

  Edison was especially galled that Westinghouse had installed a big AC central station in New Orleans. Edison already had a plant in that steamy Louisiana port and viewed it as his exclusive incandescent turf. The 1887 Edison annual report chortled over the many Westinghouse woes there—constant breakdowns, transformers ruined by lightning, no AC motors for those who wanted to use their electricity for more than lighting. The report quoted W. T. Mottram, their Edison manager, as saying he was “thoroughly convinced that the Edison system is unassailable … they cannot compete with us or do us any permanent harm, and that a steady conservative policy will win the battle.”7 Brave words, these, and fine for the public, but meanwhile Edward Johnson was tartly rebuking Edison that without AC “we will do no small town business, or even much headway in cities of minor size.”8 What were the Edison salesmen to say to city fathers who needed electricity for homes and factories more than half a mile away from the DC central station?

  Out in the far-flung marketplace of new central stations, the Edison camp was encountering continual and embittering setbacks. If a town bought a DC plant, it might well serve only half those who wanted electric lights. Those who lived more than half a mile away had to contemplate buying individual isolated plants or a whole other central station. In stark contrast, one AC station could serve the whole place and could be expanded as necessary to accommodate continued growth. So Thomas Edison’s rancor toward Westinghouse continued to fester and grow with each passing month of 1887.

  It was not that Edison did not have ready access to his own AC system. Even as Westinghouse was installing his first AC plant in late 1886, Edison’s own people had been giving thorough consideration to buying a European-developed AC system that was causing a sensation on the Continent. Francis Jehl, a longtime Edison employee, had been in Europe on business in early 1885 when he was asked to travel to Budapest, with its famous castle and cafés, to look at the Ganz Company’s new AC system. It was dubbed ZBD for its Hungarian inventors, Charles Zipernowsky, Otto Titus Blathy, and Max Deri. Jehl later recalled that in Budapest, “at the exhibition grounds I found 1,000 or more incandescent lights operating from an alternator running at a pressure of 1,300 volts. It was an ‘eye opener,’ for the pressure was reduced to that required by the lamps by means of poleless induction coils for which the Hungarian inventors called or coined the word transformers.”9 Jehl, who had once pumped the air out of the early incandescent bulbs at Menlo Park, described all the young European electricians as abuzz over AC.

  The first ZBD customer had been none other than the Edison Company in Milan, run by John Lieb, former chief electrician of the Pearl Street Station. Lieb, who went down in history as the man who stood on his tiptoes to first pull the Pearl Street switch, had successfully launched the Milan branch. Wishing to light up a new customer, the Theater dal Verm, which was beyond the reach of the existing Edison DC mains, he had used the new ZBD system. So all through 1886 Lieb sang the wonders of AC, pleading with Edison to buy the ZBD patents. One of the ZBD inventors, Dr. Otto Titus Blathy of the Ganz Company, was equally anxious to hook up with Edison, for the Edison imprimatur would be the ultimate electrical accolade, a surefire guarantee of instant luminous glory and dominance. When Edison waffled and stalled, the good Hungarian doctor sailed to New York to personally lobby the great inventor, arriving in September of 1886. Edison still agreed to nothing, but he dispatched to Paris Francis Upton, who now ran the lamp company and had once supplied the math and physics back in the Menlo Park days. As Westinghouse had struggled to get its first AC system installed and functioning in the fancy Buffalo emporium, Upton had arrived in Paris, inspected the ZBD system, and strongly recommended the Edison Company buy an option on the American rights for $20,000.

  When Edison had consulted Siemens and Halske of Berlin, they criticized the ZBD system as expensive, troublesome, and dangerous. They had, of course, given similar advice to Pantaleoni when he was considering the Gaulard and Gibbs apparatus for George Westinghouse. Pressed on all sides by his top men, Edison had reluctantly taken the option on the ZBD patent, well aware that Westinghouse was already launched. Yet he stubbornly and proudly refused even to consider using this AC system. Historians W. Bernard Carlson and A. J. Millard believe that Edison genuinely “feared that poorly designed and installed a.c. systems would impede the broad adoption of electric power.”10 One suspects a further cause—stubborn pride of authorship. Every aspect of the Edison DC system had been created from scratch by Edison or his colleagues. It is easy to imagine him obstinately balking at incorporating the inventions of others, especially if he could convince himself that their technology was dangerous.

  The year 1887 was thoroughly trying to Edison. Not only was Westinghouse challenging Edison with his AC systems, the price of copper was also suddenly on the rise. This was worrisome for all electricians, for copper, with its peerless qualities of malleability and conductivity, was a major and critical component of their business. In December of 1887, the Journal of Engineering and Mining had explained the sharp rise—from ten cents a pound to sixteen cents a pound—as the work of “a powerful combination in Europe who have managed the whole business in a very skillful manner.”11 And indeed, across the wintry Atlantic in the business precincts of Paris could be found the mastermind of the copper corner: a bald-headed little executive named Hyacinth Secretan, who had built up the Société des Metaux into Europe’s largest manufacturer of gleaming brass and copper goods. Closely attuned at all times to the copper market, Secretan traced the metal’s every flutter and dip. In late 1886, when one of his tremendous orders for copper ingots had briefly elevated prices, Monsieur Secretan concluded the moment was propitious to quietly corner copper, drawing on lessons learned during a previous failed attempt to manipulate tin.

  So the foppish Secretan began contracting with the principal copper mines of the world for their whole production (subject, of course, to restrictions) at thirteen cents a pound, a very nice profit for them. He then offered this copper on the world market at steadily escalating prices, hitting sixteen or seventeen cents a pound by late 1887, a very nice profit for him. Monsieur Secretan had little trouble signing up a host of European financial luminaries for his copper syndicate, including the Rothschilds, Credit Lyonnaise, and the Comptoir d’Escompt, France’s second-largest bank. Seeing swirling around them the proliferation of the copper-reliant electric light, trolley cars, and the telegraph, all these financiers expected to ride
the copper corner to even greater fortunes. The world’s appetite for this metal could only grow.

  No one knew better than Thomas Edison the critical importance of copper’s cost. Not long after his fateful visit to William Wallace’s hissing arc lights aroused a great ambition to “get ahead of the other fellows” and light the world with incandescent light, Edison had seen what all others had been blind to. Drastically reducing copper use was the key to creating a practical incandescent lighting system, one that could compete financially with the coal-gas illuminating American cities. And Edison had, through his genius, lowered the amount of copper needed to a tiny fraction of original estimates. But in the winter of 1887, the copper problem returned to harry Edison with a vengeance. As the Electrical Engineer noted by mid-February of 1888, “If the advance in the price of copper proves to be more than temporary in its effect, one of its incidental results will be to handicap seriously the low potential system of electrical distribution [Edison’s DC], in their efforts to compete commercially with the high potential systems of more recent introduction [Westinghouse’s AC].”12