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By Root 7647 0

was conveying 196.7 million; and by the latter year, counting all means of travel, well over a million people poured into New York each day and flowed back home each night. Titans and typists, merchants and clerks, insurance men and accountants, storekeepers and shopgirls, lawyers and advertisers and journalists—they streamed, in their hundreds of thousands, across the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn Heights, Bedford, and Bay Ridge; boarded the Staten Island ferry to New Brighton, where they caught trains out to Arrochar and Bowmans; clambered on cars at Grand Central that whisked them north to Yonkers, White Plains, and New Rochelle; ferried east to the Long Island Rail Road terminus at Hunter’s Point and west to Jersey for connections to Newark and Morristown. The great human tide ebbed to a hundred domestic destinations, regathered its energies, and was transported next morning back to the tall-tower workplaces, in time for the opening of yet another business day.

60

Bright Lights, Big City

In the 1880s New York got wired for sound and light, and the whirlwind rise of the electrical industry, and its equally rapid consolidation by New York financiers, was a telling sign of the times. It was probably inevitable, in the absence of government funding, that electrification, the largest industrial investment in the nation’s history, would be pioneered in the metropolis. Wall Street’s capital pools were here. So were the new corporations, who swiftly realized that electric power worked synergistically with tall towers and rapid transit to increase the velocity and efficiency of business operations. Manhattan also had a well-established tradition of innovation. Its interlocking commercial and civic cultures had nurtured Fulton’s steamboat and Morse’s telegraph into fruitful life, and now, in the corporate-professional postwar decades, a diverse mix of financiers, engineers, workers, lawyers, and publicists stood equally ready to promote scientific experimentation and harvest its most profitable applications. The city’s cosmopolitan openness to new ways of doing things, moreover, guaranteed a swift embrace of electric opportunities by leading economic, social, and cultural actors. Son et lumière would thus transform everyday urban life at the same time it strengthened the emerging corporate order and New York’s claim to be its capital.

HELLO, CENTRAL

In the early 1870s Western Union, the New York-based communications giant, was having technical difficulties. It had solidified its grip on the country’s telegraphic system, crushed efforts to create a government-run service, and, in alliance with the Associated Press, come to dominate the flow of information to the nation’s newspapers. But success had generated a staggering increase in the volume of messages, clogging the system. As a result, many telegraphers—the cantankerous, tobacco-chewing, hard-drinking, iconoclastic, peripatetic, and poorly paid men who worked the wires in stations across the country—had taken to spending their off-hours trying to strike it rich by inventing a “duplex,” a device to send two messages over the same wire at the same time.

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the tinkering telegraphers. He had displayed a bent for experimentation as a child in rural Ohio and developed a rudimentary mastery of mechanics and electricity in his years of wandering from one midwestern post to another. In the late 1860s, having been fired repeatedly for tying up lines for his research or alienating workmates with crude practical jokes, Edison was living in Boston, working on a duplex. He made ends meet by traveling to New York City, buying up stock tickers (just recently invented), and reselling and installing them for Boston financial firms. Beginning in 1869 he spent more and more time in New York, working on improving the ticker. He soon devised Edison’s Universal Printer, which was snapped up by Wall Street companies, becoming another of the technological struts supporting Manhattan’s financial preeminence.

In the summer of 1870 Edison ran across Daniel H. Craig,