Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [843]
A consortium of capitalists set up the Edison Electric Light Company to issue three hundred thousand dollars in stock, of which Edison would hold $250,000. The businessmen put up fifty thousand in cash to get him started experimenting. The twelve-member board of directors included Vanderbilt representatives, Western Union delegates, and J. P. Morgan himself (Drexel, Morgan would be the company’s banker). Henry Villard, flamboyant railroad financier, invested in the firm and urged his German banker connections to do likewise. In Vienna, Baron Rothschild got wind of events and sent August Belmont out to Menlo Park to investigate. Morgan himself crossed the Hudson to negotiate a deal for lighting Great Britain and Europe. And all this before Edison had generated much more than brash and unsupported promises.
Edison, supremely confident, spent a hefty portion of his advance money erecting a greatly expanded workshop, as well as an elegant library, with plush leather furniture, in which to greet visiting plutocrats from New York. Then he set to work, and in December 1879, syndicate members were invited out to a demonstration of what Edison had wrought. As the financiers watched in awe, globes decorated with flowers and papier-mâché glowed evenly and steadily, with the intensity of a gas jet, roughly twenty-five watts of luminosity.
During the following year, Edison prepared for the electrification of New York City. He laid out in the Menlo Park fields a grand mockup grid of Manhattan’s streets, replete with four hundred of the new lights. After a test performance in December 1880, to which he invited an enthralled Sarah Bernhardt, Edison was ready for New York’s officialdom. He gave a gala demonstration to assorted aldermen and commissioners, followed by a Delmonico-catered feast, at which he explained his intention to install subterranean electric wires in the square mile stretching from Wall Street to Canal. The assembled worthies gave Edison three hip-hip-hurrahs and, two weeks later, permission to lay his power mains.
Edison now transferred operations to Manhattan, taking over a four-story brownstone on lower Fifth Avenue near 14th Street. He illuminated it with a hundred globes, making it the first building in New York lighted exclusively by electricity and an irresistible nighttime beacon for residents. He also dismantled the Menlo Park machine shop and relocated it at Roach’s ironworks. To house the power station, he purchased two old buildings at 255-57 Pearl Street, near the Fulton Fish Market, though he professed to be flabbergasted at the $155,000 asking price for what he considered “the worst dilapidated street there was.”
With expenses soaring, financiers complaining, and rivals emerging, Edison reduced his target area to the fifty square blocks encompassed by Spruce, Nassau, Wall, and the East River—a territory that contained New York’s key financial, commercial, and manufacturing establishments and backed up on City Hall and Printing House Square. Throughout the summer, from eight at night until four in the morning, his men dug fifteen miles of trenches, laid the massive, solid copper power mains, and insulated them with a mix of Trinidad asphalt, linseed oil, paraffin, and beeswax. By fall new, improved, twenty-seven-ton generators, named “Jumbos” after Barnum’s giant elephant, were in place at the Pearl Street Station.
Finally, on September 4, 1882, the dynamos fed power—“direct current”—into the system. Eight hundred lamps winked on in two score locations, including the New York Times and the Drexel, Morgan building, where Edison himself, sporting a new Prince Albert coat, presided