At Home - Bill Bryson [70]
Edison dispatched men to the far corners of the world to search for potential filaments, and had teams of men working on up to 250 materials at a time in the hope of finding one that had the necessary characteristics of permanence and resistance. They tried everything, including even hair from the luxuriant red beard of a family friend. Just before Thanksgiving 1879, Edison’s workmen developed a piece of carbonized cardboard, twisted thin and carefully folded, that would burn for as long as thirteen hours—still not nearly enough to be practical. On the last day of 1879, Edison invited a select audience to come and witness a demonstration of his new incandescent lights. As they arrived at his estate at Menlo Park, New Jersey, they were wowed by the sight of two buildings warmly aglow. What they didn’t realize was that the light was mostly non-electrical. Edison’s overworked glass blowers had been able to prepare only thirty-four bulbs, so the bulk of the illumination actually came from carefully positioned oil lamps.
Swan didn’t get back into electric lighting until 1877, but working on his own, he independently came up with a more or less identical lighting system. In January or February 1879, Swan gave a public display of his new electric incandescent lamp in Newcastle. The vagueness of date is because it isn’t certain whether he demonstrated his lamp at a public lecture in January or merely talked about it, but the following month he most certainly fired it up to an appreciative audience. In either case, his demonstration was at least eight months ahead of anything Edison could manage. That same year, Swan installed lights in his own home and by 1881 had wired up the house of the great scientist Lord Kelvin in Glasgow—again well ahead of anything Edison was able to achieve.
However, when Edison’s first practical installation did come, it was far more prominent and therefore more lastingly significant. Edison wired a whole district of lower Manhattan, around Wall Street, to be powered by a plant installed in two semiderelict buildings on Pearl Street. Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1881–82, Edison laid fifteen miles of cable and fanatically tested and retested his system. Not all went smoothly. Horses behaved skittishly in the vicinity until it was realized that leaking electricity was making their horseshoes tingle. Back at Edison’s workshops, several of his men lost teeth to mercury poisoning from overexposure to Sprengel’s mercury pump. But all the problems were finally resolved, and on the afternoon of September 4, 1882, Edison, standing in the office of the financier John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan, threw a switch that illuminated eight hundred electric bulbs in the eighty-five businesses that had signed up for his scheme.
Where Edison truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The lightbulb 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; within a year or so, his plants were powering thirteen thousand lightbulbs. Cannily, he put his incandescent bulbs in places where they would be sure to make maximum impact: the New York Stock Exchange, the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining room of the House of Commons in London. Swan, meanwhile, was still doing much of his manufacturing in his own home. He didn’t, in short, have a lot of vision. Indeed, he didn’t even file for a patent. Edison took out patents