by Jill Jonnes
A night view of the Court of Honor, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
CHAPTER 10
The World’s Fair: “The Electrician’s Ideal City”
In mid-May of 1892, George Westinghouse was hurtling along in his private railcar, the Glen Eyre, crossing the spring Indiana prairie bright with wildflowers. Ahead lay the sprawling metropolis of Chicago, the booming city that Pullman porters admiringly tagged the “Boss Town of America.” The Pennsylvania Railroad’s powerful locomotive began to clang its bells urgently, for it was speeding into “an industrial amphitheater bigger and blacker than Pittsburgh—endless reaches of factories, marshaling yards, slaughterhouses, grain elevators, and iron mills, and slag heaps and coal piles that looked like small mountains. Soot-covered cable cars and long lines of freight wagons waited at crossings for the train to shoot by, and everywhere, covering everything, were wind-driven clouds of black and gray smoke.”1 As the train slowed, Chicago’s already fabled two dozen skyscrapers came briefly into view, modern architectural temples to the city’s determined energy and imagination. This fast-moving commercial New World crossroads and hub of three dozen railroads had already created more than two hundred millionaires. Now the most ambitious of them were organizing the next great World’s Fair. And George Westinghouse wanted its biggest electrical contract.
George Westinghouse had in the spring of 1892 become the darling of the Chicago newspapers, hailed as the electrical white knight sallying boldly forth at the last moment from distant Pittsburgh to joust with the contemptible knaves of the Thomson-Houston and Edison “electrical trust.” These arrogant princes of eastern commerce had submitted one extortionate bid after another to light Chicago’s upcoming World’s Fair. Charles Coffin of the new General Electric Company had thoroughly misjudged the hard-eyed Chicago dreamers, the city’s business elite hell-bent on putting their raw but mesmerizing metropolis on the international map, a metropolis hailed by English journalist George Warrington Steevens as “Chicago, queen and guttersnipe of cities, cynosure and cesspool of the world! Not if I had a hundred tongues, everyone shouting a different language in a different key, could I do justice to her splendid chaos.”2 Now its great men were building at lightning speed the most spectacular of all World’s Fairs—the Columbian Exposition, set to open May 1 of 1893 (a year late in deference to the presidential election) as a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. The fair would showcase the industrial and cultural might of marvelous Chicago, the United States, and foreign nations as disparate as Germany, Brazil, Egypt, and Samoa.
The Chicago fair directors were not amused to be mistaken for rubes and crooks by the hard-charging Coffin, who, seeing that Westinghouse was not in the bidding, demanded sky-high rates. In mid-March, General Electric had submitted to the fair a bid of $38.50 per arc light for six thousand lights. In vivid contrast, just the previous October, World’s Fair officials had paid a third that rate, $11 per arc light, to Chicago Edison (before Morgan’s “trustification”) to light the fair construction site for night work. The fair committee, not liking to be gouged, promptly sidestepped Coffin and worked out cheaper arrangements—$20 an arc light—with several smaller firms that were not part of the new “electrical combine.” The local papers gloated: CANNOT ROB THE FAIR, and CUT A HIGH BID IN TWO; ELECTRIC LIGHT COMBINE HUMBLED, and EUCRED THE TRUST; EXPOSITION DIRECTORS AHEAD. But Coffin did not blink, and he next submitted an equally outrageous bid for dynamos—$15.78 per horsepower. Again the irritated fair directors simply improvised and went around him, contracting with a smaller local concern for $2.50 a horsepower.
By early April, the committee was ready to award the most important of the fair’s electrical contracts—the ninety-two thousand outdoor incandescent lamps that would set aglow the fairgrounds for six months. All the big lighting companies, save for Westinghouse, were now wrapped up with the trust. So on April 2, when the fair directors opened the big iron bid box, there lay only two bids—General Electric’s bid of $18.50 per lamp, or $1,720,000, and that of the little South Side Machine and Metal Works, for $6.80 a lamp, or $625,600. Southside’s proprietor was an unknown Chicago businessman named Charles F. Locksteadt. “The big concerns stood aghast,” recalled Westinghouse biographer Francis Leupp. “Who was this intruder? Could anyone of consequence vouch for his responsibility? Who would manufacture the apparatus for him?” The answer was not long in coming. “Mr. Locksteadt approached Mr. Westinghouse, hoping to interest him in the situation, and in due course the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company advised the officials that it would undertake to carry out the Locksteadt bid.”3 The officials, seeing a possible savings of almost $1 million, naturally welcomed Westinghouse into the fray.
And so was launched, in this roundabout way, the next great battle in the War of the Electric Currents. From the very beginning, George Westinghouse had envisioned an entire nation, and ultimately a whole globe, powered by the potential of cheap alternating current. Thomas Edison’s malign campaign to banish AC had thus far come to naught, save to cause Edison’s own undoing and the loss of his beloved electric company to the fast-talking but talented former shoe salesman Charles Coffin. During the past year and a half, George Westinghouse had been too preoccupied with simply preserving his own electric company to contemplate bidding upon the fair. But now the fiscal storms had cleared, his coffers were flush with Boston and New York capital, and a most interesting electrical proposition was at his door: Join forces with the feisty Locksteadt and provide ninety-two thousand incandescent lights for what promised to be the grandest showcase in American history. The stakes were not immediately about money, but about the unparalleled opportunity to display to an unsuspecting world for six months the true glories and possibilities of electricity, specifically alternating current. The competition was no longer with Thomas Edison, but with Charles Coffin and General Electric.
At the grimy Garrison Alley Works in Pittsburgh, said draftsman E. S. McClelland, “Mr. Westinghouse startled us by informing us that he was going to Chicago, Illinois, to get the contract for the lighting of the Columbian Exposition to be held in that city in 1893. No one took him seriously in this venture. None of us dreamed that he would be successful in this mission.”4 But Westinghouse was utterly serious. Later, the boss returned to the Westinghouse Building downtown and summoned his public relations man, Ernest H. Heinrichs, to his spacious office. Westinghouse was sitting as usual at his immense table desk. Six magnificent upholstered chairs were arrayed around its sides, while a valuable Persian carpet covered the floor. Off in one corner stood a big bookcase containing copies of the Patent Office Gazette and various engineering journals. A plain wooden clock ticked the time above the fireplace. Westinghouse looked up at Heinrichs, the former industrial reporter for Pittsburgh’s Chronicle Telegraph, and asked, “Do you know any newspapermen in Chicago well?” Heinrichs said he did not, but Westinghouse told him to go to Chicago anyway, connect up with the local reporters, and press their side of the story.
Heinrichs cogitated and then called the Pittsburgh Associated Press man, an old friend named Colonel W. C. Connelly. The colonel just happened to be traveling to Chicago himself, and the two took the train together to the sprawling nerve center of the Midwest. “For the next three days the Colonel remained with me,” wrote Heinrichs, “taking me from one newspaper office to another and securing for me an introduction and a hearing…. In the meantime, Mr. Westinghouse himself arrived at the Auditorium Hotel, [and] no time was lost in taking the newspapermen to see him. His magnetic personality, his affability, his genial manner and straightforwardness, completely won the entire press.”5 And so, the Chicago reporters, already well steeped in their dislike of the unregenerate “electrical trust,” embraced George Westinghouse and hailed him as the city’s most excellent knight and champion.
The moment Westinghouse charged gaudily onto the World’s Fair field to offer a lower bid, GE too returned to the lists, shamelessly sla
shing its original bid of $18.50 a light down to $6. Coffin always sent his surrogates, men whose entitled, moping manner only further annoyed the hostile Chicago press. This particular electrical tournament entailed numerous jousts spread over many spring weeks, accompanied by much hue and cry and plaints of foul play. Fair president Harlow Higinbotham, an upstanding partner in the palatial Marshall Field’s department store, was proud of both his probity and his mercantile ability to drive a good bargain. He elected to allow an entirely new and final round of bids for early May. The Chicago Times rejoiced at this news, declaring, WILL UNDERBID THE TRUST: MR. WESTINGHOUSE PROMISES TO MAKE ELECTRICAL FUR FLY.6 So it was that in mid-May, during a brief spell of lovely weather, Westinghouse was arriving once again in the great smoky hurly-burly of Chicago. Tall, commanding, wearing his usual formal dark vested suit and carrying the ever-present umbrella, his muttonchop whiskers and walrus mustache bristling, Westinghouse stepped off the plush quiet of the Glen Eyre into the cacophony of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s cavernous Chicago depot with its vaulting steel-and-glass roof. There the arc lights blazed and hissed, gleaming locomotives belched great billows of steam, porters trundled steamer trunks and suitcases, and newsboys in knickers hawked one or the other of the city’s twenty-seven newspapers. Westinghouse and his longtime friend and counsel Charles Terry threaded their way toward the street. They had been summoned by telegram to discuss their new bid to furnish and light all ninety-two thousand incandescent lights needed for the exposition’s outdoor illumination. The Thomson-Houston and Edison men of General Electric would also be present to argue their case, even as the Chicago press jeered at the precipitous drop in their original greedy bid.
While the World’s Fair directors had been thrashing through the complexities of launching this world-class exposition, including the important and costly electricity contracts, seven thousand men had been laboring away for more than a year out at the desolate fairgrounds of Jackson Park, a bleak, swampy bog seven miles south of the city on Lake Michigan. Through bone-chilling gales and snowstorms, stifling heat and dust, the men and great armies of mules had wrested from this forbidding six-hundred-acre swamp a fairy-tale transformation: an utterly unlikely, elegant Venetian-style landscape of canals and lagoons whimsically envisioned (for a $15 million fee) by the venerable landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. All around the long rectangular Great Basin, the most central of the placid and lovely waterways, was being built the neoclassical White City, a fantastical Court of Honor of colossal and chimerical palaces, each to serve as a splendiferous exhibition hall of modern wonders. Passengers and crew on passing Lake Michigan steamships could only exclaim at these dreamy, surreal palaces they saw rising from the dust, appearing half-hewn from the most ancient creamy Parian marble, all linked by their mythic nobility and the simple device of common roof pediment lines.
Yet these classical structures with their Ionic columns, slender arches, grand domes, towers, turrets, and spires were but skillful dreams and illusions, the “marble” exteriors being nothing but “staff.” This dextrous combination of plaster of Paris and hemp was clad sturdily but ever so beautifully onto gigantic iron-and-steel structures, the exteriors ornamented with the most elaborate of architectural details. Chicagoans were so fascinated by the spectacle that thousands slogged out daily, undeterred by winter’s frigid mud or summer’s sweltering dust, to gawk at the swarms of fast-moving construction crews building faux ancient palaces. The shrewd fair directors quickly turned it into a tidy tourist business, charging entry.
If there was one man in Chicago who could claim credit for this strange, ethereal classical dream arising from the mire of Jackson Park, it was Daniel H. Burnham, one of the city’s preeminent architects and designers. Burnham, forty-four, was a handsome, vital man who, with his partner, John Wellborn Root, had designed and built several of the city’s most admired skyscrapers. Burnham was the fair’s director of works, the dynamo with the jutting jaw and steely will who pushed mercilessly to complete what many said could not be done. In February of 1891, Burnham had installed himself out in the great wastes of Jackson Park, his command post a rustic log cottage with a massive stone fireplace and an excellent store of wine and aged Madeira, consolation against the howling winds whipping off the lake and the sheer brute grind. There the man known to his construction troops as the “Commander in Chief” spent part of each week.
Most of the engineers and the great army of workers lived in huge barracks. The whole construction site was fenced off with barbed wire to keep out labor organizers, the gates manned with guards. The weather was relentless, but ice or blistering heat, Burnham pushed the men and himself to the brink, seven days a week. Said one observer, “The life of the Director of Works and his staff was like that of soldiers on the field. They seldom went home, their entire energies were put into the work, and there was no cessation day or night.”7 Starting the previous October, another shift of men had begun working the cold wintry nights, something possible because the Edison electric plant now powered bright arc lights. The Edison electricity also ran fifty motors that were speeding work along by operating dredges, crushers, tool sharpeners, sawmills, pumps, the hoists for the heavy beams and trusses, and eventually the electric spray painters that made the “staff” so like pearly white marble.
On Monday, May 16, George Westinghouse and Charles Terry arrived at the World’s Fair’s offices in the Rookery, a Burnham building on LaSalle Street, where almost two dozen men had assembled. Some were already nervously smoking cigars. Chief Burnham and the other members of the Committee on Grounds and Buildings were installed at a long table, where sat the sealed iron bid box. Sitting in other chairs were Captain Eugene Griffin, a second vice president for General Electric, and the firm’s two local managers. Once Westinghouse and Terry were also seated, all waited expectantly as the bid box was unlocked and unsealed. Cigar smoke drifted about amid the low whispering. The final electrical joust was about to begin. Once again there were only two bids. General Electric’s was read aloud first. Their new DC-only bid was $577,485, their new AC-only bid $480,694. As every man sitting in that Rookery office was well aware, these new General Electric bids were a shameless one-third the company’s original $1,720,000 bid. There were various murmurings and men glancing at one another. Then, as the new Westinghouse bids were taken up to be read, silence descended, only the street noises filtering through. Westinghouse’s bid for a combination of DC and AC was $499,559. The GE men squirmed and looked unhappy. Westinghouse was undercutting the trust. Westinghouse’s AC offer for all ninety-two thousand lights was $399,000, $80,000 below the trust’s best bid. Daniel H. Burnham, fair construction director and a forceful man of definite opinions, said promptly that the contract should go to Westinghouse. But the other committee members balked. One later memoir claimed that some were “stockholders in the General Electric Company” still determined to see Coffin prevail.8 The committee retreated to a locked office. Hour after hour passed. The lights in the nearby buildings had gone dark. At 7:00 P.M., when the janitors began cleaning the halls and offices, the exhausted committee men agreed to reconvene the next morning. As they all left, Westinghouse said to a Daily Interocean reporter, “There is not much money in the work at the figures I have made, but the advertisement will be a valuable one and I want it.”9
And so, Tuesday morning, as the lovely spring weather held, the joust resumed at the Rookery. Captain Griffin of GE sulkily insisted that George Westinghouse could not possibly carry out the contract, because, reported the Chicago Tribune, “his patents … were involved in litigation. [GE] had injunction proceedings instituted against the use of the lamp which Mr. Westinghouse proposed to furnish.” Westinghouse laughed affably, responding, “There wasn’t the slightest question about his ability to furnish the lamps desired.” Another fair director complained in exasperation to the Daily Interocean, “For many years the Edison Company contented itself with flooding the country with circulars trying to ridicule the Westinghouse s
ystem. One morning it suddenly awoke to find it had a competitor. Now it says that if the contract is given to Westinghouse an injunction will head him off…. One moment’s thought will show how great a bluff is made.”10
However breezy Westinghouse might be, the issue of the Edison light bulb patent was deadly serious. The bitter legal war was in its final appeals, and every well-informed electrician, including Westinghouse, fully expected GE to win. What no one could know yet was whether GE would be judicially obliged to sell Edison bulbs to anyone but their own customers. Burnham agreed they should put off awarding the contract for a few days while they consulted the fair lawyers.
In this Chicago battle of the War of the Electric Currents, Westinghouse was motivated not just by his longtime electrical dreams, but by his great dislike of GE’s chief, Charles Coffin, an animosity that was completely mutual. One could easily imagine that Westinghouse would take great pleasure in denying Charles Coffin and GE the World’s Fair contract, even at the lowball bids they were both now making. After all, if Coffin had been less grasping and gouging, the whole huge contract would have been his back in early April.