Thomas Alva Edison’s US (1847–1931) wired a whole district of lower Manhattan, around Wall Street, to be powered by a plant installed in two semi-derelict buildings on Pearl Street. Through the winter, spring and summer of 1881–2 Edison laid fifteen miles of cable and fanatically tested and retested his system. On the afternoon of 4 September 1882, Edison, standing in the office of the financier J. P. Morgan, threw a switch that illuminated eight hundred electric bulbs in the eighty-five businesses that had signed up to his scheme. Where Edison truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The invention of the light bulb was a wondrous thing but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into. Edison and his tireless workers had to design and build the entire system from scratch, from power stations to cheap and reliable wiring, to lamp-stands and switches. Within months Edison had set up no fewer than 334 small electrical plants all over the world and within a year or so his plants were powering thirteen thousand light bulbs. Cannily he put them in places where they would be sure to make maximum impact: on the New York Stock Exchange, in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining room of the House of Commons in London. Joseph Swan, meanwhile, was still doing much of his manufacturing in his own home. Indeed, he didn’t even file for a patent. Edison took out patents everywhere, including in Britain in November 1879, and so secured his pre-eminence. By modern standards those first lights were pretty feeble, but to people of the time an electric light was a blazing miracle – ‘a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin’s lamp’, as a journalist for the New York Herald breathlessly reported. It is hard to imagine now how bright and clean and eerily steady this new phenomenon was. When the lights of Fulton Street were switched on in September 1882, the awed Herald reporter described for his readers the scene as the customary ‘dim flicker of gas’ suddenly yielded to a brilliant ‘steady glare . . . fixed and unwavering’. It was exciting, but clearly it was also going to take some getting used to.adapted from At Home - A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (2010)
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 05:36:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015