Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  On May 22, the committee once again summoned Westinghouse by telegram, and once again he climbed aboard the Glen Eyre for the twelve-hour journey across Ohio and Indiana. Many friends urged him not to undertake this vast and perilous job, one where failure was a high and public probability. But sanguine as ever and wreathed in his electrical dreams, Westinghouse arrived at the Rookery the next afternoon. The lawyers had ruled in his favor, but now the committee was proposing to split the contract in two. George Westinghouse “said he was the lowest bidder,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “has first-class apparatus and should get the entire job.” He was not a man of half measures. When the truculent Captain Griffin again raised the light bulb patent issue, the committee asked if Westinghouse would ease their minds by providing a $1 million bond guaranteeing the contract. Certainly, Westinghouse said genially.

  Once more, the committee withdrew to wrangle. Hour after hour ticked by. Outside, the sky grew dark, and the noise of LaSalle Street down below subsided. Many cigars were smoked, and the room grew stale and stuffy. The electric lights came on in the Rookery. Finally, the committee agreed at 7:30 P.M. to vote. Quickly and unanimously, they bestowed their shimmering prize on George Westinghouse and his Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company. A sore loser, Captain Griffin responded angrily, immediately threatening that when the light bulb patent ruling went their way, Westinghouse would “be entirely in our power. He will not be able to make his own lamps and he can only buy from us. We will not injure the fair, but we will not let him continue his contract.”11

  As for Westinghouse, he did not gloat but picked up his black umbrella and prepared to leave, telling the newsmen only, “I shall put in ten or twelve dynamos of 12,000 lamp capacity and furnish a clean-cut, first-class system. I have about 100,000 lamps, either completed or partly so, at the works, and there will be no difficulty in furnishing material. I am required to have between 5,000 and 10,000 lamps installed by the 1st of October. This is an easy task. There will be no difficulty in furnishing the entire plant by the time of the opening of the Exposition.”12 An easy task, Westinghouse said with his signature insouciance. Electrical Engineer wondered if Westinghouse would really go through with this latest reckless endeavor. After all, he first needed to ante up another $500,000 for his $1 million bond. “Mr. Westinghouse may not care to put up so large a bond, and the amount does seem rather heavy, but he is not the kind of man to stop short after having gone so far.”13 Amen.

  The morning after George Westinghouse’s return from Chicago, the “Old Man,” as his workers called him, went straight to the company’s machine shop and summoned E. S. McClelland, a top draftsman, to the front office. His employee of a dozen years appeared armed with a pad and pencil. McClelland, who had been amazed when his boss sailed off in the Glen Eyre for Chicago to seek this great electrical prize, now learned for the first time that his boss had—to everyone’s astonishment—won the great contract. He also was learning what would be wanted for this gigantic Chicago World’s Fair contract:

  “Mr. Westinghouse: ‘I want an engine.’

  “Reply: ‘Yes, sir.’

  “‘1,200 brake horse power.’

  “‘Yes, sir,’ with considerable trepidation.

  “‘200 revolutions per minute.’ (Engines of that size usually run about 75 R. P. M.)

  “‘Yes, sir,’ with considerable consternation.

  “‘150 pounds per square inch boiler pressure, non condensing.’

  “‘Yes, sir.’

  “‘Splash lubrication.’

  “‘Yes, sir.’

  “‘Must go in such and such space.’

  “‘Yes, sir.’

  “‘I will be in again at 2:00 o’clock to see what you have.’

  “Exit Mr. Westinghouse,” said Mr. McClelland, “leaving me in a daze. It is hard to describe the feeling of consternation that request caused. We were building 250 horse power engines [then]…. A 1200 brake horse power engine to operate at 200 revolutions per minute seemed to me to be entirely out of all reason. Yet this was the task set before us. Mr. Westinghouse needed such an engine.” In fact, he needed many. The response of McClelland’s boss in the drafting department was that Westinghouse was “asking for the impossible and he just won’t get it.” Yet all the draftsmen knew somehow they must produce some kind of an engine design by the afternoon, so they set to work. At 2:00 P.M., Westinghouse called to say he would not be by till the next morning. McClelland and another man stayed on in the drafting room till 2:00 A.M., striving to devise something they could show Westinghouse. The next day at dawn, very early, they all reassembled to look at this drawing, turning the drawing board on its side for a better view. “This setting of the board on end, strange as it may seem, gave us the solution to the problem…. As a vertical engine there was space to spare. When this solution flashed upon our minds the leading engine draftsman seemed to be electrified and became wildly enthusiastic.” Soon George Westinghouse strode in “with his usual good-natured alertness and expectancy,” viewed the work with approval, and said, “How soon may I have four of them?” So the work began on “new and untried electrical machines and steam engines of a totally new design.”14

  During the bidding in Chicago, George Westinghouse had laughed in Captain Griffin’s face at the Rookery when the GE vice president predicted Westinghouse would have no light bulbs at all, much less ninety-two thousand to light up the fairy-tale White City. But that was a very, very real possibility. In truth, “matters were critical, not to say dangerous,” says his friend and biographer Henry Prout. “The Westinghouse Company was committed to the contract for lighting the Chicago’s World’s Fair. It had already equipped many plants which must have lamps for renewals. Unless a non-patent-infringing lamp could be furnished, the company could sell no more incandescent-lighting material. The need for such a lamp was immediate and urgent.”15

  Westinghouse knew as well as the GE men that he desperately needed a noninfringing light bulb. What they did not know was that he was actually making steady progress on that dire problem. Back in the smoky precincts of his Pittsburgh factories, Westinghouse had been revisiting his patents for an old Sawyer-Man “stopper” light, personally working and tinkering on it for some months, striving to reach the point where he could mass-produce it in the gigantic quantities needed. Unlike Edison’s one-piece bulb, Westinghouse’s had two pieces with a low-resistance filament sitting in an iron-and-glass “stopper” that was fitted like a cork into a glass globe filled with nitrogen and then sealed. The stopper could be removed and burned-out filaments replaced. With the World’s Fair looming and GE’s hostility palpable, Westinghouse now set up a glass factory in a section of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company in Allegheny and went there daily to teach the operatives running the grinding machines how to make the stoppers perfectly snug for the lamps. His World’s Fair manager, E. E. Keller, marveled at Westinghouse’s “own enthusiasm at having overcome a great obstacle. He was bubbling over like a boy. He explained the operation of the grinders and I saw that the men … seemed imbued with the idea that this was a game to beat an opponent who held all the aces, and that they were having a lot of fun doing it. He had a sort of magnetic influence on the workmen…. It certainly was a great delight to realize that, in spite of what seemed a hopeless situation, ‘the boss’ was going to furnish lamps without paying tribute. He certainly lifted the worry from me.”16

  By the time Edison’s light bulb patent was upheld in the federal court of appeals on October 4, 1892, Westinghouse coolly professed to The New York Times that while he, the plaintiff in the case, obviously thought the court decision wrong, it was of no import to him. “Having anticipated it, we shall not be hampered by it,” he said. “Our business has been arranged with a view to this happening. The patent sustained has almost expired anyway, and furthermore, such developments have been made in the electrical world in the last year or two that the decision is shorn of much of its effect.”17

  The very next issu
e of Electrical Engineer carried the first Westinghouse ad for its “stopper” lamp, and the magazine, in an editorial comment, noted that because the new-style lamp could be almost entirely machine-made, it would be cheaper than an Edison lamp. This was a good thing, because the “stopper” lamp did not last as long as an Edison bulb. As a stopgap it would do until the Edison patent expired. Meanwhile, the regular Westinghouse light bulb factory continued to churn out Edison-style bulbs, for the Edison case was now on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  GE was no longer content to quietly await their final victory, and in mid-November they struck again, asking a federal court to stop Westinghouse from making Edison-style bulbs. George Westinghouse, knowing the growing public fury over the power of the new trusts, a corporate form that had been mushrooming, struck back hard. In court papers, he accused GE of being “a most vicious trust” that was doing their damnedest to drive honest competitors like him out of business. He urged that GE be investigated under the two-year-old Sherman Anti-Trust Act.18 Westinghouse demanded that the court force GE to sell their competitors light bulbs. The judge declined to do anything for either side. Just over a month later, on December 15, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the long litigated Edison light bulb patent. The Seven Years’ Incandescent Light Bulb War was over. GE’s wrath would indeed be forcibly tempered by certain judicially imposed moderations, and much of the electrical fraternity breathed a collective sigh of relief. However, all those who actually manufactured the infringing bulbs were forced out of business.

  But this was not the end of the corporate warfare. George Westinghouse and his wife and son were in Manhattan for the 1892 Christmas season. On the afternoon of December 23, Westinghouse had completed some business with his friend and legal counsel Charles Terry, and the two had just boarded the uptown elevated when they encountered longtime chief counsel for the Edison Electric Light Company, Grosvenor P. Lowrey. Despite their epic legal battles, the men were all friends, so the two Pittsburgh men sat down with Edison’s lawyer in the swaying cars. As they were chatting, Lowrey jovially mentioned that one of his many co-counsels, Frederick Fish, was away in Pittsburgh. Westinghouse’s ears pricked up and he casually tried to find out why. Lowrey realized he’d said too much. At the next stop, 14th Street, Westinghouse indicated to Terry that they should get off. As soon as the doors shut and the train began steaming away from the platform, Westinghouse asked Terry, “What is Fish doing in Pittsburgh?”

  As they walked down the station steps into the bundled-up crowds and passing horsecars, Westinghouse said, “I can’t conceive what would call him there except to make new trouble for us. We shall have to act quickly to head it off, whatever it is.”

  They alerted by telegram a Westinghouse lawyer in Pittsburgh to be at the federal court the next day, the morning of Christmas Eve. And there indeed the following morning stood GE’s Mr. Frederick Fish in his sober black suit. He eyed the well-known countenance of the Westinghouse lawyer, who was holding a packet of papers. Now that the final decision had come from the U.S. Supreme Court, GE was stealthily striking again. But this time the firm hoped to get a restraining order, not for the old bulbs, but for Westinghouse’s new Sawyer-Man “stopper” bulb, claiming that it, too, infringed on their now rock-solid patent. GE knew that if they could shut down Westinghouse’s Allegheny “stopper” lamp factory, even for a few weeks, they might well sabotage his whole World’s Fair contract. But with the Westinghouse lawyer on hand, Judge Acheson was not inclined to make any drastic rulings. After the New Year, the judge quickly concluded that the “stopper” lamp was “no infringement of the Edison lamp patents.” Wrote Westinghouse biographer Francis Leupp, “Although more or less harassing warfare was kept up afterward, this unexpected proceeding in court so far cleared the way for Westinghouse that he was able to proceed with the manufacture of his lamps and carry out his great undertaking at Chicago.”19

  The Westinghouse engineers were now building from scratch the biggest AC central station yet installed in America, a plant capable of powering 160,000 lights as well as many motors. Up until now, a big-city AC plant powered at most 10,000 lights and, of course, no motors. But at long last, the electric company was making real headway and expected to exhibit a whole Tesla AC system at the fair, including an AC motor. The fashionably dressed Nikola Tesla came forth from his Manhattan laboratory, where the eccentric inventor was steadily advancing into the uncharted terrain of high-frequency electricity, to consult with the Westinghouse engineers at the noisy Allegheny works. Westinghouse wanted to promote two-phase AC, with an eye to showing the glories of his soon-to-be-available Tesla induction motors. Longtime Westinghouse engineer Benjamin Lamme, who did much of the engine work, recalls, “It was at Mr. Westinghouse’s suggestion that the machines for the lighting plant at Chicago were each made with two single phase alternators, side by side, with their armature windings staggered 90 degrees.”20 Two of these were combined to create Tesla’s two-phase current. Each double unit could light thirty thousand “stopper” lamps. Westinghouse was building in plenty of insurance. If a generator shorted, no fairgoer would ever notice, for another would kick in immediately. They would be powered by one great 2,000-horsepower Allis-Chalmers engine, as well as numerous 1,000-horsepower engines, all fueled with oil (supplied by Standard Oil) rather than coal. The White City would have no smoky pall.

  In late January of 1893, the Electrical Engineer could report that many electrical visitors had traveled to Pittsburgh to see the twelve almost completed towering generators of seventy-five tons each. The rotating armatures alone weighed twenty-one tons. “With the 12 1,000 h.p. engines required to drive them they will constitute the largest single exhibit of operating machinery ever made at any exposition, and probably the most extensive exhibit in the Fair.”21 Despite Westinghouse’s airy talk of “easy tasks,” these huge Westinghouse machines arrived in Chicago only weeks before opening day. They were being installed in the south nave of the vast interior steel-and-iron spaces of Machinery Hall, one of the Court of Honor palaces, at the end of April. Opening day was Monday, May 1.

  The afternoon before, on Sunday, the very earnest Englishman Reverend F. Herbert Stead ventured forth to the not-yet-opened fair to report what he saw for the highly respected Review of Reviews. He took the tramway out as windblown torrents beat down. At Jackson Park, his umbrella open against the chilly, gusting downpour and his high-button shoes sinking in squishy cold mud, the Reverend Stead said, “I found the World’s Fair en deshabille. . . . The roads within the gates were even more miry than those without…. The disjecta membra of a whole host of statues lay about … helmeted heads, bare arms, and greaved legs of heroes in profusion … swarms of workmen gave the same impression of gross incompleteness.”

  But that first impression was soon swept away. Just as Chicago’s cacophonous energy and dirty ugliness stunned visitors, so did the White City, but as the antithesis of all things Chicago. From a balcony high on the majestic gold-domed Administration Building, Reverend Stead forgot his cold, soaked clothes and gazed wonder-struck down through the sheets of rain and drifting fog. There he beheld the classical Court of Honor around the Great Basin, its placid waters patterned by pelting rain, and beyond that, the lovely meandering waterways and all that Burnham and his troops had wrought. Reverend Stead was driven, as so many would be, to wax horribly poetic: “It was a poem entablatured in fairy palaces…. It was a dream of beauty which blended the memory of classic greatness with the sense of Alpine snows…. It was a vision of the ideal, enhaloed with mystery.”22 The rain eased, and trailing clouds wisped in and around these astonishing alabaster palaces and glistening waters, rendering them even more mutely ethereal.

  Mirabile dictu, on opening day the leaden blanket of rain lifted and by midmorning sun blazed down through the vanishing clouds. Reverend Stead arrived with the multitudes squeezing off the packed trams, trains, and Lake Michigan ferries. The good Englishman made his way to the Court of Honor and installed himself with th
e restless crowd of sweating journalists on benches below the speaker’s platform. Soon all was an undulating sea of dark derbies and broad-brimmed millinery, brightened only by the occasional light blue dab of the uniformed fair police. The sun sweltered. Up on the balcony of the gold-domed Administration Building seventy-five American Indians in full war paint and headdresses watched this celebration of the conquest of their lands. Yells and cheers rippled through the crowd as at last President Grover Cleveland, fully three hundred pounds, ascended to the elevated stage, followed by a retinue of dignitaries. Stead approved President Cleveland’s “simple morning dress of the ordinary civilian, without ribbon or medal” and his speech, for “he alone of all the speakers made himself heard by any portion of the crowd. His person, which boasts a somewhat extensive periphery, claimed attention. His office commanded it. His voice retained it.”23 Then, the huge choir burst into the “Hallelujah Chorus,” and Cleveland’s large presidential finger pressed firmly down on a gold-and-ivory telegraph key.

  A thousand feet away in the vastness of Machinery Hall, an anxious group of Westinghouse engineers crowded about on the wood-plank floor, holding their collective breath as the 2,000-horsepower Allis-Chalmers steam engine slowly roared to life at this touch from the president. The great machine powered the Westinghouse generators, which now pulsed electricity out to the fairgrounds. The engineers knew all was well when they heard the crowd unleash a delighted roar—the three huge fountains at the Court of Honor were working, sending splashing plumes of water soaring a hundred feet. A giant Stars and Stripes slowly unfurled and was caught up by a breeze, followed by a rainbow of other flapping flags and pennants, brilliant banners of flashing color. As the water sprayed, the crowd, cannon, boat whistles, and jangling fog bells combined into a jubilant caterwauling that rolled through the shimmering heat and across the lake.