Edison
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Christmas marked the tenth anniversary of his marriage to Mary. She celebrated by reopening their house and hosting a dance party. It was elaborate enough that Insull asked the Pennsylvania Railroad to make special arrangements for guests traveling back to New York in the small hours.176 Edison’s deafness prevented him from enjoying such occasions as much as she did. But the Patent Office had a gift for him on 27 December: the award of a patent, U.S. 251,545, on his electrolytic meter, a coilless device so simple that it measured current without needing any to operate itself.177
Much as his future lighting customers were going to dislike it, the meter was, with the possible exception of his big dynamo, his most important invention of the year. Without a reliable tally of power consumed or power saved month by month, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York could never function profitably. There was no shortage of other devices almost as ingenious, such as an “electrical knockdown chandelier” that could be pulled apart and reassembled without tortuous rewiring. Edison was in the midst of a phenomenally fertile period, executing, on average, one new patent every four days.178 His total of successful applications in 1880 had been fifty-nine; this year would see another ninety, and next year well over a hundred. Over the entire decade he would average one patent a week (starting with the electric light and ending with a hydraulically regulated phonograph), while combining the duties of manufacturer, engineer, entrepreneur, publicist, plotter, executive, and family man in a torrent of hyperactivity to be stopped only twice, and temporarily, by das Ewig-Weibliche.
DESIGNED TO FLASH DAGGERS
When Chief Sitting Bull, one of the celebrities who chose to drop in on Edison unannounced, saw the jumbo dynamo destined for London, he allowed that it was “damn big.” That was also the opinion of William H. Preece, consulting electrical engineer to the British Post Office, who had boggled at its predecessor in Paris. In an address at the Royal Society for Arts, he informed his colleagues that “those who are interested in this machine, and everyone should be, because it is a decided step in advance—will soon have an opportunity of seeing it at work at 57, High Holborn.”179
Preece was referring to the Edison central station system that Edward Johnson was installing in London as a curtain-raiser to the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition on 25 February 1882. Although the station was not intended to be permanent (it was part of a test incandescent-lighting project organized by the London County Council) and would illumine only half a mile of the Holborn Viaduct, there was no question now that it, and not 257 Pearl Street in Manhattan, would be the true cradle of incandescent street lighting.180
It could be finished quickly because Johnson did not have to go underground to wire up the buildings lining the viaduct (despite its name, nothing more than a broad thoroughfare elevated above Farrington Bridge Road). All he had to do was string his mains and feeders under the supporting stonework, along conduits already hollowed out by the city’s gas utility.*34 John Kruesi had no choice, meanwhile, but to wait for the subsoil of downtown Manhattan to thaw and permit the completion of his distribution system. If he could get that done by midsummer, there was a good chance that the First District could be lit up before the fall.
Johnson was an eager, honest, torrentially garrulous promoter of whatever business he happened to be in at any given time. He had begun his career selling telegraph equipment out west and would end it selling milk cartons in upstate New York; currently he was working with absolute devotion on behalf of Edison’s telephone and lighting interests in Britain. “There is but one Edison,” the London Daily News remarked, “and Johnson is his prophet.”181
With the help of Hammer and Jehl, sent over by the Electric Light Company as consultant engineers, Johnson literally dazzled the British press on 19 January with a coruscation of four hundred Edison lights along the viaduct, and 250 more at a black-tie dinner in the Crystal Palace. It went without saying that any lamp display in that building was bound to reflect in many directions. But the chandelier Johnson hung in the concert room, with its own crystals multiplying the bulbs ten times over, was designed to flash daggers into the heart of any gas industry executive present. Both installations were expanded in the weeks that followed, as extra dynamos ramped up their voltage. The viaduct system eventually reached a capacity of three thousand lamps, and the Crystal Palace one thousand—some of which were rigged by Hammer to spell out the letters E-D-I-S-O-N, making his boss the first man ever to have “his name in lights.”182
Edison’s hopes of illuminating all of London, however, were dashed when Parliament adopted an anticommercial Electric Lighting Act, effectively discouraging central franchises. This did not prevent him from forming a British subsidiary, the Edison Electric Light Company, Ltd., in March, to join a number of European start-ups, proliferating like branch feeders in the afterglow of his Paris triumph. In France alone he organized the Société industrielle et commerciale to manufacture lamps under the management of Charles Batchelor, the Société électrique Edison to build central stations locally, and the Compagnie continentale Edison to do the same across Europe. One of the most successful of these licensed plants was the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft in Berlin. Edison lamps shone in the railroad station at Strasbourg and the grand foyers of the Paris Opéra and La Scala in Milan. Teams trained by Batchelor installed isolated systems as far away as Finland.183
Joseph Swan, competing strongly, put a system of his own into the Savoy Theater in London, well before Francis Jehl wired up a municipal theater in Brünn, Bohemia. However derivative Swan’s new lamp might or might not have been of Edison’s—a question that could be settled only in a court of law—it was equally efficient if not superior with its filament of parchmentized cotton thread, even smoother and harder than madake bamboo. Johnson thought the best thing for both inventors would be to merge their British interests. Edison would not hear of it. Swan’s gentlemanly concession of victory to him at the Paris exposition left him unmoved: “My own private opinion is that he tries to claim other peoples work & carries to extreme the idea of enormous respectability while being at heart what his compatriots call a ‘bloody liar.’ ”184
RED, WHITE, AND BLACK
Mary Edison suffered during her husband’s hyperactivity that winter with uterine troubles and an attack of depression. “She seems very nervous and despondent and thinks she will never recover,” the family doctor wrote Edison. “She seems so changed physically and mentally of late that I think something ought to be done.”185
He suggested she be taken to Europe for a few months. But the best Edison could do, with resumption of work at Pearl Street looming, was escort her and the children to Florida for four weeks in March. He was exhausted himself, after a spell of seventy-two-hour working jags, and also under doctor’s orders to get away. It was his first visit to the Sunshine State. The strawberry season had begun, and the sulfurous waters at Green Cove Springs, a resort on the St. John’s River in Clay County, were therapeutic. Mary was in no hurry to go back north. Insull, who enjoyed writing letters in Edison’s name, was pleased to hear nothing from “the Great Mogul” until the twenty-eighth, when he suddenly announced his return home.186
For the moment that meant Menlo Park rather than Manhattan, Edison not having relinquished his takeback of the Lamp Company. He felt that it was now ready to relocate to the enormous plant he had bought for it in East Newark. The transfer, supervised by Francis Upton, began on the first of April, and more than a hundred local jobs melted away.187 For as long as Edison needed his laboratory and electric railway for experiments, and Mary the house as their country retreat, Menlo Park would retain some signs of life. But with the Uptons and the Batchelors and Kruesis gone, and Mrs. Jordan’s boardinghouse in need of guests, and the lamp works standing empty, its ghost days were near.
Edison returned to Manhattan and rented a suite in the Everett House, a luxury hotel on Union Square.188 It was to be a base
for him during what promised to be the most urgent summer of his life. If he took much longer to light up the First District, after Batchelor and Johnson had won such cheers for him last autumn in Paris and London, he could expect only ruder noises from the citizens of New York.
Already, The New York Times reported, there was “grumbling” by Electric Light Company subscribers in the First District, tired of seeing dead wiring hanging out of their walls. Trench work had resumed with the spring thaw, but there were still seven miles to go, at one thousand feet a day. The paper sent a representative to ask Sherburne Eaton if he had set a completion date, and his replies made plain the pressure on Edison to deliver.
A We can fix no limit whatever. We should have completed the work before the frost came last fall, if the parties who furnish our material had not failed to keep their contracts.
Q Can a very distant limit be fixed, say four months?
A Not definitely.
Q Will it be concluded in a year?
A I can’t positively fix any limit whatever. Our contractors may disappoint us again about material.
Q Do you expect to be delayed again by frosty weather?
A. You can judge that as well as I can….We are doing our best to get the wire laid, immediately after which we should be able to light the lamps.189
Edison was further driven by the desire of his backers to develop a lucrative and less costly alternative to the construction of central stations—isolated systems for private customers like J. P. Morgan, or suburban factories and small towns.190 That switch of interest signified that financing for a Second District in New York might be a long time coming or never at all if he did not finish the First before another winter came round.
Four 240-horsepower boilers were installed at 257 Pearl in the spring, along with three jumbo dynamos on the second floor and a mini-avalanche of auxiliary fixtures next door. The first dynamo, directly shafted to its Porter-Allen engine, whirred into life on 5 July. Three days later it was connected to the monitoring panel on the top floor of number 257.191 A vision of a future unimaginable even by Edison materialized when the wall-mounted oblong lit up: a thousand bulbs packed close in rows, their brightness flickering at different strengths according to the current that fed them.*35
The pace of pipe laying increased during July, Edison helping out as before. It did not stem his flow of patent applications, more tumultuous now than it would ever be again. Among them were a coal conversion method of power generation that essentially presaged fuel cell energy, and a 330-volt overhead “village” distribution network that reduced the already economical copper quotient of the Pearl Street system.192 He simultaneously and brilliantly invented, but did not have time to caveat, a three-wire branch circuit that interposed a neutral conductor between two “hot” ones of 220 volts each, permitting independent operation of multiple lamps at 110 volts. It too looked forward to a time when red, white, and black wires would be standard equipment in American homes.*36, 193
His total of fifty-three successful patents that spring and summer did not include foreign ones, or the seventy-eight applications lost or stolen from him by his alcoholic patent attorney, Zenas Wilber. “I am free to confess,” Edison said in later life, “that the loss of these 78 inventions has left a sore spot in me that has never healed. They were important, useful, and valuable.”194
While oddly forgiving of Wilber, he took the precaution of hiring a new young intellectual property lawyer, Richard Dyer, and gave him the task of organizing his cumulative total of letters patent, now numbering more than four hundred in the United States alone.195
Power monitor panel, Edison Pearl Street station, 1882.
August was a month of rapid progress for the Edison Light, Lamp, Isolated Lighting, and Electric Illuminating companies and especially for the Electric Tube Company and the Machine Works. All of them were aware that the consummation of their effort was in sight, with a momentum that seemed determinate now rather than willed by any manager. Even Edison was borne along. Lamp production in Newark rose to fourteen hundred a day, with an estimated capacity of thirty times that output. The factory had so many dynamos to build, thanks to orders coming in from Edison’s foreign enterprises, that it had to put them on hold while it finished the six jumbos he needed for Pearl Street.196
Finally the full column of paired engines and dynamos stood ready at 257 Pearl. Kreusi paved over the last of the First District’s feeders and mains and completed connections to the premises of major system subscribers—most notably, the New York Times building on Park Row. So far the Electric Light Company had 946 customers with well over fourteen thousand lamps installed. Property owners and tenants who had not yet signed up were wooed with circulars promising no charge for installations unless “you ultimately decide to adopt our light permanently.”197
Scientific American published the first detailed description of “the Edison Electric Lighting Station” system on 26 August. It was illustrated with exquisite technical engravings that conveyed, better than any screened photographs, the radiance of the high monitor (every one of its thousand bulbs limned), the frightening mass of the dynamos, the ocean liner dimensions of the stoke hole, with its sixteen furnaces and attendant Nibelungen (all wearing neat black bowlers), and the precision engineering of the two dozen street conductors attached outside, beneath the Pearl Street sidewalk, in a service hall bright with reflector sconces, unknown to the pedestrians clomping overhead. The text explained how all the moving devices worked, from the coal conveyors to a giant switch, something like a triple-bladed guillotine, that could be used to slice any dynamo out of circuit.198
“We have no doubt,” the editors wrote, “that before this paper meets the eye of the reader, the district will have been illuminated.”199
In the days immediately following, gas company workers were seen removing their globes from streetlamps around Pearl and trundling them away in wagons.200
AN END TO THE DOMINANCE
Another issue of Scientific American had gone to press before Edison felt ready to activate his system on Monday 4 September. He did so with some dread, and none of his usual theatrical flair, powering up just one dynamo at three in the afternoon and directing its current to a scattering of customers across one-third of the district.201 It was as if he hoped daylight would blank out the failure of any of his “luminous horseshoes” to incandesce. Workers at The New York Times did not notice until dusk that there was any change in the light they were used to. They turned the thumbscrews on their office walls and, instead of the flickery glare of gas mantles, found themselves bathed in a soft glow that remained pleasantly steady. Commuters walking down Fulton Street to the Brooklyn Ferry noticed circles of the same light on the sidewalk. Those who glanced up saw pear-shaped globes with porcelain shades hanging from iron crooks, each filament leaving a tiny imprint on the eye if stared at too long.202
By seven o’clock it was dark enough203 for reporters seeking Edison out to be surprised that the lamps of Pearl Street had not been cut in, although the station itself was radiant. He was found on the second floor at number 257, looking gleeful and as slovenly as ever in a high-crowned white hat and collarless shirt:204 “I have accomplished all that I promised.” Asked why he had not illuminated the whole district, he said that he would have, but for the insistence of the New York Board of Fire Underwriters that the city should sign off on every wired building. He rejoiced in those that had already been connected: “The lights in the office of Drexel, Morgan & Co., half a mile away, are burning as brightly as the lights here.”205
Brightness, however, was not a novelty anymore. The sixteen-candlepower average of the eight hundred lamps aglow that evening was pallid compared to the intensity of arc lights in public places elsewhere in the city. The revolution Edison had wrought was so unobtrusive and at the same time so world changing that few, if any, of the people w
ho experienced it realized what had happened: an end to the counterbalance of night and day that had obtained for all of human history, mocking the attempts of torchbearers and lamplighters and gas companies to alter it with their puny waves of flame.
A TUSSLE BETWEEN ELEPHANTS
The only morning papers that paid attention to the inauguration of central station service in New York were, not surprisingly, the two with the most Edison lamps in their newsrooms: the Times and the Herald.206 There were a few other brief reports across the country, none conveying much excitement. The best that could be said for British comment was that it was respectful, perhaps because Edison had for once achieved something without boasting about it. An editorial wisecrack in The Boston Globe came nearest to the truth of the matter: “Chevalier Tom Edison has had an ‘opening night.’ His aim is to open night until it shall be as day.”*37, 207
For a week Edison slept on a cot at the station, determined to keep its output up as subscriptions to the First District network multiplied. Foreseeing a time when he would need his full battery of six generators to supply the demand of sixteen thousand lamps, he experimentally yoked two jumbos together, in a union that he thought would make for a smooth aggregation of power. As things turned out, he could not have been more mistaken.208
The moment we threw in the second engine the first engine slowed way down and the second engine jumped up to speed almost in an instant, and then went two or three times its speed, until we thought the building would collapse. Then the other engine would speed up, and they would see-saw, from 50 revolutions a minute to 800 revolutions a minute. Nothing of steel or iron could stand it. The commutator brushes burned and red-hot globules of copper flowed down on the floor and began to burn the wood. Smoke poured all over. The building was apparently going to come down, and everybody made for the stairs. Finally I yelled to shut down, and two of the men jumped in and closed the throttle.209