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By Root 1018 0

also for one of the same reasons he favored low-voltage direct current over higher-voltage alternating current (AC): safety. In the commercial districts of Manhattan, even before the advent of electric arc streetlights in 1880, numerous small companies had strung wires for telegraphs, telephones, alarms, and stock tickers along poles down city streets. Wires sagged across avenues, weighed down top-heavy crossbars, and were tautly anchored down to the sides of buildings. Each company was responsible for the upkeep of its own lines, and not uncommonly, through neglect or storm damage, loose wires sagged or dangled from poles. Companies went out of business but failed to take down their wires, which simply deteriorated in place. The lines, at first, were problematic but not deadly, as most services ran their operations off batteries. But as historian Jill Jonnes observes,

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