Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [28]
As the Manhattan campaign encountered delay after delay, however, the isolated plant business grew too lucrative to ignore. Some of the first customers were lithography plants and cotton mills, which were too fire-prone for illuminating gas but needed good light to distinguish colors. Major cultural institutions—Boston's Bijou Theater, the Academy of Music in Chicago, and Milan's La Scala Opera House—also bought Edison plants, both to improve lighting and to cut the risk of fire from gas lighting. Among New York's upper crust, an electric lighting plant became the latest status symbol. Cornelius Vanderbilt installed lights in his Fifth Avenue mansion, but his wife insisted that it be stripped out after crossed wires scorched the wallpaper. J. P. Morgan's electric wiring sparked a fire that charred his library walls and carpets, but he remained enthusiastic about the lights.9
Rather than hampering central station work, the isolated lighting business proved to be a godsend, demonstrating the brilliance of the Edison system in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. It also created a market for the products of the Edison manufacturing companies, allowing them to remain solvent as they refined manufacturing techniques. This was especially true for Bergmann & Company, maker of the new lamp sockets, which were a big improvement over the crude wooden ones used in the Columbia installation. According to legend, Edison had a flash of inspiration while unscrewing the cap of a can of kerosene, and the screw socket was born. Like many of Edison's inventions, the design seemed so simple and obvious that people wondered why no one else had thought of it. The screw socket allowed even the inexperienced user to seat the bulb firmly in its base without jarring the fragile filament. Bergmann transformed Edison's original wooden screw socket into an elegant plaster of Paris design, and he worked similar magic on other electrical components. In addition to practical elements like switches and safety catches, Bergmann & Company designed and sold ground-glass shades, wall brackets, and the elaborate ceiling fixtures known as electroliers. Bergmann also made the electrical meter required for Edison's central station business. The meter, perfected by the late spring of 1882, worked on the principle of electroplating: Zinc plates were placed in a solution of zinc sulfate, and a tiny, fixed fraction of the electricity entering a home was shunted into the solution, causing the zinc from the solution to be deposited on the plates. Edison employees "read" the meters by weighing the plates.10
Although the Machine Works churned out smaller dynamos for the isolated lighting plants—ones that powered about sixty bulbs-most attention centered on machines big enough to power thousands of lamps from a central station. The first such generator was destined for use not in New York but at the Paris International Electrical Exposition. Edison and his staff completed it in September 1881, just hours before it was set to be shipped to Europe. They knocked the machine apart and packed it into 137 crates, and a convoy of horse-drawn trucks rattled to the wharves, its path cleared by an army of bribed police officers. The crates were loaded aboard a steamship that recently had delivered P. T Barnum's elephant, Jumbo, to New York. Newspaper writers linked the big beast to the big machine, which henceforth was known as Jumbo.
The Jumbo dynamo and the rest of the Edison system took the Paris exhibition by storm, earning top honors and showing the world that Edison was miles ahead of Hiram Maxim and other competitors. Early in 1882 a second Jumbo was shipped to England, where a model central station lit up hotels and offices in the heart of London, earning still more acclaim for Edison's light.11