Brilliant (15 page)

All that changed with the coming of the new outdoor arc lighting.... The extremely high voltage alternating current required to operate these lights—as high as 3,500 volts—made their outdoor wires truly perilous. The Brush Electric Company ... built three central power stations and transmitted its high-power electricity—typically 2,000 to 3,000 volts—on wires strung among the existing low-voltage tangle. Edison wanted nothing to do with these mangled nests of live and abandoned wires.

So he worked on his subways, while a competing, unorganized lighting market grew throughout the city. Arc light companies illuminated streets, large public buildings, theaters, and hotel lobbies, while incandescent light companies built isolated systems for the interiors of buildings. Hiram Maxim, for instance, had successfully wired incandescent lights in the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company in Manhattan by late 1880. Gas companies responded to electric light by attempting to create more powerful, efficient gas lamps, an effort that would culminate in the development of the Welsbach lamp, which consisted of a burner—essentially a Bunsen burner—surrounded by a mantle composed of finely woven cotton fabric that had been impregnated with a solution of oxides and then dried. Although the burner consumed oxygen and overheated rooms just like traditional gas burners, the mantle, first advertised in 1890, glowed incandescently. It gave off impressive light, although it was also fragile. The lamp was marketed as the "electric light without the electricity."

Finally, Edison completed enough of his system by the summer of 1882 to partially light the neighborhood around Pearl Street, which included the offices of the
New York Times.
On September 4 of that year, he turned on his system, and those working in the newspaper office seemed particularly grateful:

It was a light that a man could sit down under and write for hours without the consciousness of having any artificial light about him.... The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight to have a light without a particle of flicker and with scarcely any heat to make the head ache. The electric lamps in
THE TIMES
Building were as thoroughly tested ... as any light could be tested in a single evening, and tested by men who have battered their eyes sufficiently by years of night work to know the good and bad points of a lamp, and the decision was unanimously in favor of the Edison electric lamp as against gas.

Those on the street at first hardly noticed the modest light. The
New York Herald
reported:

In the stores and business places throughout the lower quarters of the city there was a strange glow last night. The dim flicker of gas, often subdued and debilitated by grim and uncleanly globes, was supplanted by a steady glare, bright and mellow, which illuminated interiors and shone through windows fixed and unwavering. From the outer darkness these points of light looked like drops of flame suspended from jets and ready to fall at every moment. Many scurrying by in preoccupation of the moment failed to see them, but the attention of those who chanced to glance that way was at once arrested.... The test was fairly stood and the luminous horseshoes did their work well.

Direct current also did its work well in sending low voltages over short distances, but it had limitations. First, after a half mile or so, the current quickly diminished and could not be bolstered without costly outlay for thick copper wiring. Second, although direct current could adequately serve electric light customers by delivering a steady 110 volts, more powerful currents to run motors couldn't travel over the same lines. In addition to these intrinsic problems, negotiations for central stations were often complex, since many parties with differing interests would have to come to an agreement. For all of the initial success of Pearl Street, by the end of 1884 Edison had built only eighteen central stations (compared with hundreds of isolated systems that electrified individual homes and businesses).

The true threat to Edison's system proved to be alternating current stations, which sent high-voltage current over wires to transformers that stepped down the power to a lower voltage before delivering it to individual homes and businesses. Alternating current could accommodate different voltages, so the system could power both lights and motors, and the stations could send, via thin copper wires, a steady, strong power supply farther than the half-mile radius of direct current systems. Alternating current systems could expand outward as growth warranted.

Perhaps no one understood the advantages of alternating current more than George Westinghouse, who formed Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh in 1886 and subsequently contracted with inventor Nikola Tesla to help develop alternating current systems for his company. Tesla: tall and lean, possessing intense blue eyes, hypersensitive to the sun and to the experience of passing under a bridge, which caused pressure on his skull. "I would get a fever from looking at a peach, and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house, it caused me the keenest discomfort," he once said. "When a word was spoken to me, the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not." He seemed to live in a fever and quieted his mind by counting his own footsteps during his frequent walks. However much this fever might have been a burden, it was also essential to his creations. He could build machines entirely in his head, down to the smallest details, understand how they worked, and know how they needed to be improved. He could revise them without ever setting them down on paper or making a model.

After immigrating to the United States in his twenties, Tesla worked briefly for Edison, who never seemed to truly acknowledge his genius and refused to pay him a promised bonus, after which Tesla left Edison's employ. But even before their final falling-out, Tesla felt hampered by Edison's fidelity to direct current. When he brought up the subject of alternating current, Edison snapped, "Spare me that nonsense. It's dangerous. We're set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it's all I'll ever fool with."

Edison publicly condemned alternating current. "It will never be free from danger," he declared, while also claiming it was unreliable and unsuitable for central station systems. He took to calling alternating current "the executioner's current," and after promoting a series of high-profile electrocutions of animals—a dog, a calf, and finally an elephant—to prove its fatal power, he publicly supported its use for the first electric chair. The competition between Westinghouse's alternating current and Edison's direct current played out publicly and bitterly in what came to be known as the War of the Currents.

Edison at first seemed to have public anxiety on his side after a series of events in New York City reinforced the dangers of high-voltage wires. First, in the winter of 1888, a blizzard crippled the city: "The wind at times seemed to make the entire circuit of the compass, and men and women were whirled about it like so many dolls. The snow was sharp and dry, and ... it cut like so many pieces of glass. It clung to whiskers and froze ... until the hair on men's faces [was] transformed into glistening miniature icebergs." During the storm, electric lines throughout the city came down. "Poles, with their long arms laden with wires and cables, were wrenched and twisted mercilessly by the wind. Roof fixtures, with their tangled masses of twisted and broken wires, met the eye on all sides, and the loose ends, lashed by the wind, whistled through the air like whipcord.... The breaking of the telegraph, telephone, and electric light wires, with the danger to vehicles and pedestrians attendant thereon, was added to by the danger of falling poles."

The devastation alarmed both citizens and officials, and the alarm was compounded by a subsequent series of "deaths by wire" in the following months, including that of a young boy who was electrocuted after he playfully jumped up to touch a dangling wire. When, in the fall of 1889, a telegraph company employee was killed as he worked on the lines, his brutal death was witnessed by a crowd of New Yorkers: "The man appeared to be all on fire. Blue flames issued from his mouth and nostrils and sparks flew about his feet." A public outcry ensued, and the mayor ordered several light companies, which illuminated three-quarters of the city below Fifty-ninth Street, to extinguish their streetlights and repair their lines before lighting up again. Darkness fell over much of a city accustomed to light. The
New York Times
reported that the

aspect of the city was decidedly provincial.... In the vicinity of Union and Madison squares, City Hall Park, and other open spaces the view was particularly cheerless and depressing. Thoroughfares like Broadway, Fifth, Madison, and Seventh avenues looked by contrast like endless tunnels of gloom.... The Edison system was working as usual in all the Broadway and avenue stores and in all public places through the central section of the city, where its subways are laid.... Orders were at once sent out to all police stations in the darkened district that a double patrol force should be sent out and patrolmen given special instructions to use extra vigilance while on post in guarding life and property from footpads.

Westinghouse countered Edison and sought to assure the public by insisting on the safety of well-constructed lines: "As to the accidents from electric currents," he wrote, "the records of deaths in the city of New York show that there were killed by street-cars during the year 1888, 64 persons; by omnibuses and wagons, 55; and by illuminating gas, 23; making the number killed by the electric current (5) insignificant compared with the deaths of individuals from any of the other causes named."

However dangerous it appeared to be, versatile alternating current was also the ideal current for a rapidly expanding nation and its economy. Although electricity was still almost fully aligned with light in most minds, and the growing number of companies that produced and sold electricity were still called "light companies" rather than "power companies," the mechanical uses of electricity had begun to emerge: electricity began to drive all kinds of devices and machines for factories and households. By 1891 alternating current systems had begun to gain favor; there were almost five times as many alternating current stations in the country as there were direct current stations. Then George Westinghouse outmaneuvered Edison's General Electric Company for the major contract to supply electricity to Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, meant to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage to America. Tesla's polyphase motors would power the greatest ode to electric light the world had yet seen, and the momentum alternating current gained from the exposition would consign direct current to the past.

Electricity is the half of an American.

—
HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT
,
The Book of the Fair

T
HE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION
of 1893—the largest world's fair up to that time—sprang from the most unpromising stretch of land: "a marsh when work upon it was begun, a sopping combination of low lands, water, and hummocks," noted one observer. Another called it "a treacherous morass, liable to frequent overflow ... bearing oaks and gums of such stunted habit and unshapely form as to add forlornness to the landscape." Over three years' time, thousands of men downed the trees; dredged out the muck and hauled it away in wheelbarrows; reshaped more than six hundred acres along Lake Michigan—six miles from downtown Chicago—into promontories and islands; and constructed viaducts, bridges, pathways, and paved boulevards. Countless more skilled workers and laborers—using more than eighteen thousand tons of iron and steel—framed fourteen massive structures around a broad lagoon and plaza to create the Court of Honor, the centerpiece of the fair.

Although a different architect designed each building in the court, chief planner Daniel Burnham required all of the buildings to be adorned with neoclassical arches, towers, and pinnacles; all of the cornices to be set sixty feet above the ground; and all of the edifices to be painted white—the shade, one observer noted, "of darkened ivory or slightly smoked meerschaum." Such unified architecture, Burnham imagined, would create an exposition reminiscent of Venice, without the grime, raw sewage, or ruins. He even imported sixty gondolas from Italy to carry passengers along the waterways. The court came to be known as the White City, in part for the way its pale edifices gleamed in the prairie night.

Never had there been so much light in one place—and it was all electric: 200,000 incandescent bulbs traced the edges of the edifices, and countless more lit the interiors of the massive exhibition halls; 6,000 arc lights on twelve-foot-high posts lined the paths and walkways. That light glinted in the lagoons and bounced off the fountain waters; it glittered in the wakes of the gondolas and the currents of Lake Michigan. Such brilliance seemed all the more miraculous because there were no leaning poles and sagging wires, nothing obvious carrying the current: so as not to mar the beauty and unity of the buildings, the wires ran underground.

Colored lights shone as well. From the rooftops, search-lights fashioned with blue, green, red, and violet slides swept the city and waterways; colored bulbs illuminated water fountains "so bewildering no eye can find the loveliest, their vagaries of motion so entrancing no heart can keep its steady beating." Every night, fireworks went off from different locations. "There would be a dozen or more rockets sent up all at once, and they would all explode together, almost filling the air with red, blue, and green stars, which floated ... for a moment, and then dropped slowly into the water," remembered one fairgoer. The incandescent bulbs, the arc lamps, the search-lights, the fireworks—separately each would have astonished nineteenth-century eyes; together, they overwhelmed. "It is the part that each one plays in the general effect," wrote one commentator, "all contributing to give this wondrous display the aspect of a veritable fairyland, to raise it, for the moment, almost beyond the realm of matter."