Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [30]
The exterior of the Pearl Street station. Coal is being dumped from a cart through a sidewalk vault into the cellar.
Preparations in New York reached a fever pitch in the spring and summer of 1882, particularly at the four-story building on Pearl Street that would serve as the hub of the lighting system. Butting against the Third Avenue elevated train line and within smelling distance of the Fulton Fish Market, the site was chosen because it was cheap and near the center of the lighting district. One side of the Pearl Street building was set aside for offices and sleeping quarters for Edison and the station attendants, the other for the power plant itself. The two floors that would hold the heavy machinery were reinforced with wrought iron. By April the boilers were installed, and the steam engines had been received from the manufacturers. As the Jumbo dynamos neared completion, the Machine Works was so busy that it was bursting at the seams. Edison paid off the local Tammany boss to let him work on the sidewalk, and soon he ran power belts through the shop windows and set up engine lathes on the streets.17
The laying of feeders and mains was proceeding at a rate of about 1,000 feet a night. Edison spent as many as four nights a week down in the ditches, solving technical problems with the conductors and lending another strong back to the cause. By July the entire network had been laid—more than fourteen miles in all.18
One morning in July black coal smoke streamed from the two steel stacks that towered eighty feet above the Pearl Street building—evidence that the system was being tested for the first time. The station was arranged vertically, with every bit of space, from basement to top story, in use. The process started on the street. A workman heaved open the metal door of the sidewalk vault, and a teamster tipped his truck and sent a load of coal rumbling down into the cellar. Screw conveyers, powered by a twenty-horsepower engine, carried the coal up one story to the boiler room (and more screw conveyers delivered the ashes to barrels back in the basement). Workmen shoveled the coal into stoke holes of the four Babcock and Wilcox boilers, which fed steam to the six steam engines in the floor above. The shaft of each engine was coupled directly to an adjacent Jumbo dynamo, each of which stood six feet tall and produced enough current for 1,200 lamps. Electricity from the dynamos fed into heavy copper conductors along the walls, which terminated in a switch that linked them to the feeders that took current into the streets. For testing purposes, the current could be diverted one floor up, to a bank of 1,000 lights mounted on the wall.19
After conducting test lightings of a few selected buildings, Edison believed he was finally ready for a public unveiling, and he set the date for September 4, 1882—almost exactly four years after he had first started to work on the incandescent lamp. When Edison arrived at the Pearl Street station at about nine that morning, he was wearing a frock coat and white, high-crowned derby, but he immediately threw off his coat and collar and plunged into a final check of his sys-tern. In midafternoon he put his coat and collar back on and synchronized watches with the station engineers. Trailed by a gaggle of reporters, he set out for the Wall Street offices of his bankers, Drexel, Morgan & Company.
Jumbo dynamos at the Pearl Street station.
For the moment, the lighting system served only fifty-nine customers with 1,284 lamps, but those few customers were an influential group that included not only Drexel, Morgan but also the buildings of several newspapers. Edison arrived at J. P. Morgan's offices and greeted the board of directors of the Edison Electric Light Company, who had gathered to witness the culmination of the work they had financed. The men chatted nervously as they waited for three o'clock