Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [27]
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THE LAYING OF underground conductors—the feeders and mains—under the streets of New York proved to be a monstrously difficult challenge. It was also an avoidable one. Telegraph services and arc light companies ran their wires above ground, on poles or across rooftops. Had Edison followed suit, building his system would have been relatively easy. But back in 1878, when he made his first premature announcement of success in incandescent lighting, he said that the wires would be "laid in the ground in the same manner as gas pipes," and he never wavered from this plan. As an ex-telegraph man, Edison knew that overhead lines could be felled by storms or cut by unscrupulous competitors, causing disruptions in service and loss of faith in the new technology. Edison wanted his light to be as reliable as gas and thus felt that his current had to run underground, as gas did.3
The work started in the spring of 1881. The city allowed Edison to lay conductors only at night, to avoid disrupting traffic during the day, and it also required him to hire five city inspectors at five dollars a day. "We watched patiently for those inspectors to appear," Edison said. "The only appearance they made was to draw their pay Saturday afternoon." It was classic Tammany Hall graft, and Edison happily paid it to avoid interference.4
To lay the conductors underground, a gang of men first tore up the heavy granite cobblestones and stacked them on the curb. Another gang dug a trench a few feet deep and laid the mains. Each main consisted of two copper conductors wound with rope to separate them from each other and slipped inside an iron tube. Then the insulating compound—kept bubbling hot in cart-mounted cauldrons—was pumped into the tube. At every street corner was a "safety box" containing a lead fuse that melted if the circuit became overloaded. Problems—such as air bubbles in the insulation that allowed electricity to leak—cropped up constantly and had to be fixed on the fly. Once the mains were laid, another crew punched holes into cellar walls and connected street mains to the buildings.5
Edison hired fifteen "wire runners"—most of them telegraph linemen or burglar alarm installers—to wire, free of charge, the homes and offices of every customer in the district who agreed to try the electric light. He promised them that they would be enjoying the lights within a few months, by the summer of 1881. But in December—a year after he displayed his Menlo Park model system to New York's aldermen—only about a third of the tubes had been laid. Then frost locked up the earth, halting work until spring.6
Workers laying underground conductors for Edison's first lighting district in lower Manhattan.
OVER THE WINTER, the Machine Works became the inventor's favorite haunt, where he received visitors and worked on the generators late into the night—this despite the plant being located in a Manhattan slum so dangerous that Edison Electric sent its house detective to protect Edison whenever he ventured there. At two or three in the morning he would repair to a tiny all-night restaurant, where, he said, "for the clam chowder they used the same four clams during the whole season, and the average number of flies per pie was seven. This was by actual count."7
The Machine Works was busy building small dynamos to feed the explosive growth of a business that Edison earlier had resisted: "isolated lighting" plants, in which users bought generators and produced their own electricity, such as those that lit the offices at Sixty-five Fifth Avenue and the SS Columbia. By early 1881 Edison Electric had received more than 3,000 requests for such plants from around the globe, but Edison initially