Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [842]
LET THERE BE LIGHT
In 1879 New York’s Common Council decided to experiment with arc lighting. Back in 1808 Humphrey Davy had discovered that when an electric current arced across the space between two carbon electrodes, it heated the carbon points to white heat, giving off a powerful incandescent light. For many decades this “arc light” found only intermittent uses, as carbons burned up rapidly and batteries were prohibitively expensive. By the 1870s, however, the development of electric generators had reduced the cost of power and a device had been invented to automatically replace burned out rods. Arc lights were now deployed here and there in Europe—St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace and Nevski Drive; Paris’s Place de la Concorde and Arc de Triomphe—and even more so in the United States, where Charles F. Brush’s company erected huge “sun towers” in several western cities. The towers were cheaper to install than hundreds of lampposts, and it was believed that the carpet of illumination they spread equally through all parts of town was somehow a more democratic, more American light.
New York City’s Gas Commission authorized the Brush Electric Light Company to set up a generating station at 25th Street, consisting of two Corliss steam engines and two dynamo-electric generators. These would power a series of arc lights along Broadway. Each was mounted on a twenty-foot-tall ornamental cast-iron post, one per block, between the lower end of Union Square, opposite Delmonico’s, and Madison Square. On December 20, 1880, the boulevard was bathed in brilliant light—a Broadway show that garnered rave reviews.
The Brush Electric lights on Broadway, near Madison Square. This view looks south across 23rd Street, with Fifth Avenue on the right. The clock tower, which stood outside the Fifth Avenue Hotel, remains to this day. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
During 1881 the city commissioned lights for Fifth Avenue and the crosstown streets of 14th and 34th. In addition it tried out “sun towers” in Union and Madison squares—160-foot masts topped with clusters of arc lights. The system was far from perfect, and storms often triggered power failures, but progress in driving back the darkness seemed evident.
Over the next few years, electric arc illumination spread along selected streets. By 1886 fifteen hundred lamps were in operation on Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh avenues, between the Battery and 59th Street, and up the thoroughfares flanking Central Park. Brush Electric Light (and soon its rivals) also began stringing wires on street poles and delivering power to illuminate industrial and commercial spaces: factories, railroad stations, building construction sites, Gansevoort Market Square, wharves, and the lobbies of hotels, theaters, office buildings, and department stores. The brilliant lights offered security for a burgeoning nightlife and drew vast numbers of visitors to commercial establishments.
At first there was no equivalent change in domestic lighting, even though by the 1870s gas light was rapidly falling from public favor. Once celebrated as a clean energy source, it now seemed impure, dirty, unhygienic. Gas jets produced headaches by eating oxygen and giving off ammonia, sulphur, and carbon dioxide, and they blackened ceilings and wrecked parlors with their soot. But arc lights were too dazzling for domestic use. Gas light was measured in the dozens of candlepower, arc light in the thousands. Unlike gas, moreover, an arc’s intensity could not be varied, and though they didn’t use up oxygen, their carbons gave off noxious fumes as they burned.
In 1878 Thomas Edison announced to the press that New York’s interiors would not be left in flickering half-light much longer. He intended to develop an