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By Root 965 0

urban and suburban households for decades, and in rural homes for decades after that. Black neighborhoods would be among the last lit in cities—long after electricity had come to seem a matter of course in white neighborhoods—and rural blacks would have an even longer wait than rural whites. The longer they waited for electric light, which would continue to grow ever brighter and become ever more a symbol of modernity, the greater the disparity would seem, for electricity did say yes or no with the same voice: the lines ran—or did not run—along the streets and into the homes; electric light suffused entire windows (whereas oil lamps did not). Thus the distinction between those with and those without would come to be as pronounced as the gulf between the Midway Plaisance and the Court of Honor.

At that time, however, when electricity in the home was out of reach for almost everyone, more visitors wandered among the exhibits in the Electricity Building than at any other exposition site, especially in the evening, when it was the brightest place in the White City. After visitors walked past the statue of Benjamin Franklin—"his gaze turned upward toward the lowering clouds, in one hand the kite, and in the other the key of which all the world has read"—they encountered the General Electric exhibit, with its displays of Edison's phonograph and his Kinetoscope, which continually projected a short film of British prime minister William Gladstone addressing the House of Commons. Beyond, visitors could peruse twenty-five hundred specimens of Edison incandescent lamps—"no two of which were alike, being in many colors and in candle power ranging from ½-c.p. to 300-c.p"—and other lamps in different stages of construction, as well as examples of the filaments that Edison carbonized in his quest for incandescent light and examples of his dynamos. At the center of it all stood Edison's Tower of Light, an eighty-two-foot-high column built of thousands of miniature colored lamps that flashed in various designs. It was crowned by a huge incandescent bulb made of cut glass.

The attempt to subdivide electric light may have continued for almost a century and have involved dozens of experimenters and electricians, but Americans would always think of Edison as the sole inventor of the electric light, and he would always hold a particular and sentimental place in the popular imagination, as was clear during the opening ceremonies of the Electricity Building. One observer wrote:

The Edison tower and the classic pavilion at its base stood revealed in all their cold, chaste beauty of outline. But for a few seconds only; the glare of search-lights focused upon them, causing their dark surface to shine with a dazzling radiance. Then the crystal bulb at the top burst into flame, flashing like a crown of diamonds; and finally the entire column was arrayed in robes of purple light like a pillar of fire ... and by a thousand voices was shouted the name of him by whom these marvels had been wrought.

Beyond the General Electric exhibit, in displays of both foreign and domestic electric manufacturers, visitors encountered countless things that would have been uni maginable twenty years before: motors, engines, welding equipment, surgery and dentistry instruments. "Close at hand one may study the system of an electric signal company ... in a neat railway model marked 'dangerous'; he may have a suit of clothes cut by an electric machine, or he may seat himself in an easy chair while his boots are polished by electric brushes. Here also is an electric incubator, with eggs in the process of hatching." They marveled at the exhibit of an electric kitchen, where flameless heat for cooking turned on instantaneously, water poured from a faucet at the turn of a knob, and machines washed clothes and dishes. But electricity not only offered a vision of the future; it also seemed to redefine history. Dioramas depicted past civilizations retrofitted with electricity, such as Egyptians "dipping reels of wire into insulating baths, and bearing to their queen, typical