Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [25]
He walked the politicians to the laboratory, where he explained the details of the system, then led them to his library and showed them a big wall map of his proposed lighting district, an area of fifty-one square blocks bounded by the East River and Spruce, Nassau, and Wall Streets. He would build a central station with steam engines and generators, lay conductors under the streets, and r un wires into homes and businesses.
The group returned to the laboratory. The tools of the inventing trade had been cleared away, and in their place appeared a long table laid with a feast catered by Delmonico's: roasted and boned turkey, duck, chicken salad, and ham. Champagne, wine, and brandy flowed freely. Edison mixed his wine with liberal doses of cold water before letting it cross his lips. The aldermen drank less cautiously, and by the time they stumbled out to the train at eleven they were promising Edison he would have his permit to dig up the streets of New York and lay his conductors.14
AS EDISON REFINED his system in Menlo Park, the Cleveland electrical pioneer Charles Brush was introducing powerful arc lights to American cities from coast to coast. A chemist by training, Brush began following electrical progress in Europe in the early 1870s, and by the end of the decade he had designed his own generator and arc lamp and founded the Brush Electric Company. In 1879 San Francisco became the first city to adopt the Brush system for street lighting, and Boston and Philadelphia followed suit. On December 21,1880, the same day that the aldermen visited Menlo Park, Brush installed twenty-two lamps on ornamental cast-iron posts along Broadway in New York, from the bottom of Union Square up to Madison Square. The New York Star reported that the lamps "made the gaslights look sickly in comparison." The arc lamps were so bright that just twenty-two of them displaced 500 gas streetlights.15
Brush installed dozens of lights in textile mills and steel plants, while for other customers the appeal of the lamps lay in their novelty. Brush sold one of his first lamps to a Cincinnati dentist, who installed it on his balcony to attract patients. Many small-town Americans saw their first arc lamps inside the bigtop of P. T. Barnum's traveling circus. John Wanamaker bought twenty lights to dazzle customers at his new department store in Philadelphia, and for a time Coney Island's arc lights were more popular than the rides. By the end of 1880, Brush had installed more than 5,000 lamps.16
Charles Brush's arc lamps lit up Broadway in Manhattan in December 1880.
Before the late 1870s, Americans experienced electricity in only a few ways: as pulses zipping through telegraph wires or as surprising shocks administered by doctors or carnival showmen. When arc lamps appeared—slender wires carrying enough energy to produce blinding light—they heightened the sense of mystery surrounding this unknown force. Whenever arc lamps appeared in a city, people gathered to experience this latest manifestation of electricity's powers.
Brush arc lamps arrived in Buffalo, New York, on the night of July 13,1881. After noticing a strange glow in the sky that night, many city residents walked across the Michigan Street bridge into an industrial area known as the Island, at the edge of Lake Erie. As they turned left onto Ganson Street, the Island's main thoroughfare, they saw an iron pole, twenty feet high, topped by a blazing white light. Two wires ran from that post to another, a few hundred feet beyond, and beyond that was still another pole—twelve in all, stretching alongside the wooden plank roadway for more than a mile. A small sun rested atop each pole, buzzing and sputtering and throwing a hard, silvery glare on the industrial landscape of planing mills, grain elevators, and dry docks. By the time a group of reporters and leading citizens arrived, their carriages could barely force a passage through the crowd of thousands who milled about in the road, blinking and shielding their eyes.17
When the lights were shut off late that