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By Root 1089 0

night, the people strolled back across the bridge and made their way home, but word spread around town, and each night more people crossed over to the Island to bask in the glare. The Brush company, eager for good publicity, allowed visitors to enter the rough wood-frame building that held the steam engines and dynamos. After inspecting the machinery, some of the visitors—up to a dozen or so at a time—joined hands in a semicircle, with the person at each end grasping the iron railing surrounding the generators. A small amount of electricity leaked from the dynamos to the iron railing, causing a gentle tingle of electricity to pass through their bodies. It was a descendant of the Leyden jar experiment tried on Parisian monks more than ioo years before, a practice kept alive by traveling showmen with batteries and induction coils. The people of Buffalo found that the old trick worked just as well with this new producer of electric current, the dynamo.18

About nine o'clock on the night of August 7, a man named Lemuel Smith entered the lighting works with three friends. They joined hands, touched the railing, and laughed as they felt the mild current pass through their bodies. Smith and his friends left the plant and repaired to a saloon, where they drank a lot of beer; Smith then returned, alone, to the lighting works. When he reached over and tried to touch one of the dynamos, G. W. Chaffee, the plant's manager, ordered him away, and a police officer sent Smith tumbling out the door. He returned, and again the officer pitched him out. Thinking he had solved the problem, the officer took a stroll down Ganson Street. Smith, who had been lurking around the corner, once more entered the plant. This time Chaffee had his back turned.

Smith leaned over the railing and grasped one of the poles of the generator with his right hand, hoping to feel the tingle again. He felt nothing. He reached with his left hand and took hold of the other pole—thus completing a circuit and sending an enormous surge of electricity through his body. Smith gave one convulsive gasp and collapsed across the railing. Bystanders dragged him away from the machine and laid him on his back on the rough wooden floorboards. He was dead.19

According to the Buffalo Morning Express, "It was a lightning death, and a painless one."20

CHAPTER 6

Wiring New York

IN FEBRUARY 1881 Edison moved his family to the Lennox Hotel in Manhattan and established a new headquarters at Sixty-five Fifth Avenue, just below Fourteenth Street. The brownstone held Edison's offices, but it also served as a showplace. A steam engine and dynamo were installed in the basement, and the windows of the building blazed with electric lamps. Edison threw open the house to visitors every night until midnight, and New York's elite flocked to see the light and meet the great man. They learned that, among Edison's other skills, he could hit a spittoon with pinpoint accuracy.1

Not long after he moved to New York, Edison tried to persuade some of the Edison Electric Light Company's major stockholders to invest in manufacturing companies that would build the components-generators, lamps, conductors—of the new central station. The stockholders, who had yet to see a return on the money they invested in Edison's lighting system two years before, had no interest in sinking more money into the project. They saw Edison Electric as a patent-holding corporation: It would avoid risky manufacturing enterprises and make its money simply by licensing Edison's patents to outside companies.

A dapper Edison with cigar.

In the absence of investors, Edison was forced to sell off much of his stock in Edison Electric and finance the manufacturing concerns himself, and he drafted his top Menlo Park lieutenants to run the new companies. John Kruesi, the master machinist, headed the Edison Electric Tube Company, established on Washington Street in Manhattan to build and lay the underground conductors (which were encased in iron pipes, or tubes). Kruesi's Menlo Park assistant, Charles Dean, ran the Edison Machine