Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [48]
Upon publication of the story, thousands traveled to see Edison's invention for themselves. Wealthy New Yorkers, accustomed to the glow of gas lamps, arrived from their city in horse-drawn carriages. Others traveled by trains that steamed through the short, cold afternoons. Farmers who lived solely by the light of kerosene lamps rode in from the dark countryside, hauling wagonloads of children riding atop bales of hay. In the Menlo Park lab, they jostled one another to look at the light of the future, which would arrive for the wealthy in a handful of years. The farmers—and the farmers' children—might never live to see it in their homes, but perhaps for the moment, before its history unfolded, they were all equal in their wonder. Here was a little click that meant light was contained in a glass vacuum and need never again be linked with a flame or coaxed forth and adjusted; light that did not waver, tip, drip, stink, or consume oxygen and would not spontaneously ignite cloth dust in factories or hay in the mow. A child could be left alone with it.
Surely, a measure of its beauty and brilliance was linked to the Menlo Park setting, a place that must have been both familiar and strange: with its blacksmiths and glass blowers, but also its mathematicians and electricians, notebooks in hand. And a place remote and apart in the deep heart of winter, the time when light holds its greatest meaning. The contrast between the greater dark and the glowing "strip of paper" could only have reinforced how those present were witness to something they had never imagined, something that would change the quality of shadows as well as the quality of light, and change the atmosphere of their household nights.
The crowds continued to arrive by day and by night, so many that after a few days, Edison was forced to close his lab to them. But he kept the lamps burning so that those who came could view them from the grounds. When he opened up the laboratory again on New Year's Eve to officially display his lighting system, thousands more arrived at Menlo Park to see the twenty-five lamps in the lab, the eight in the counting room and office, the twenty on the street and in neighboring houses. The New York Herald reported:
The light was subjected to a variety of tests. Among others the inventor placed one of the electric lamps in a glass jar filled with water and turned on the current, [and] the little horseshoe filament when thus submerged burned with the same bright steady illumination as it did in the air.... Another test was turning the electric current on and off on one of the lamps with great rapidity and as many times as it was calculated the light would be turned on and off in actual house illuminations in a period of thirty years, and no perceptible variation either in the brilliancy, steadiness or durability of the lamp occurred.
By the following winter, Edison, having successfully expanded his electric system around Menlo Park by means of underground conduits, shifted his operations to Pearl Street in Manhattan, with the intention of developing a practical and workable central station that would deliver power to the surrounding neighborhood. During the several years it took him to complete the Pearl Street station, he installed incandescent lights as isolated direct current (DC) systems, first on the cruise ship Columbia and then in factories throughout the country. Manufacturers whose businesses were prone to fire, such as sugar refineries,