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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.

8. Overwhelming Brilliance: The White City

Electricity is the half of an American.

—HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT,