Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [845]
The alacrity with which New York adopted the new technology did have its drawbacks. Most notably it generated a vast and proliferating network of wires that threatened to bury Manhattan. Western Union, Bell Telephone, the Gold and Stock Ticker Company, the Brush, United States, and East River Electrical Lighting companies, the fire department, police department, and private burglarproofing companies who installed alarm systems—all these strung their power lines on poles or across rooftops. As firms rarely deigned to share space, the streets were soon festooned with posts, each between fifty and ninety feet tall, each carrying a dozen to two score crosstrees, each crosstree bearing perhaps twenty wires. Some poles groaned with the weight of two hundred strands.
Increasing numbers of these snapped, dropping writhing live wires to the street below. In 1884 the legislature, impressed by the success of Edison’s underground operations, insisted that all other electrical supply systems be buried as well. The telephone, telegraph, and lighting companies ignored the order. Four years later, the blizzard of 1888 deposited twenty-two inches of snow on the streets and coated the wires with ice, sending them crashing down, terrifying the city. Mayor Grant led an ax-and-nipper patrol around town, slashing at the wire tentacles, but the Brush Company threatened to leave the city, and Jay Gould, now Western Union’s chieftain, got an injunction.
The public’s growing anxiety was heightened by Edison’s war against George Westinghouse, who was promoting “alternating current.” This rival system could be used to transmit power at high voltage from generating stations sited near waterfalls or dams hundreds of miles away, bypassing Edison’s entire patented system of direct current stations, which had to be located near their customers. Edison issued shrill warnings about the danger of high voltage lines, and, in the fall of 1887, when the state legislature asked for his help in inventing a more humane method of execution, he set aside his opposition to capital punishment and arranged some public demonstrations with test animals—using alternating current. When a competition was held to name the
In response to the huge demand for telephones and electricity during the 1880s, a forest of utility poles sprang up along the streets of downtown Manhattan. (Consolidated Edison)
method, candidates included “electromort” and “electricide” (Edison held out for “Westinghoused”) but in August 1890 a convicted murderer was “electrocuted” for the first time, a bungled job that produced an “awful spectacle.” “They could have done it better with an axe,” Westinghouse said.
In October 1889 a Western Union lineman had been electrocuted on a wire gridiron in the heart of the business district. Thousands watched as the body dangled from overhead lines for nearly an hour, its mouth spitting blue flame. The next day the mayor ordered unsafe wires chopped down. It took another two months for incensed public uproar to overcome corporate legal stonewalling, but finally the poles began to fall. By 1894 there would still be lots to bury, but New York’s Board of Electrical Control announced that millions of feet of wire had been banished belowground and that Manhattan now possessed a sixteen-hundred-mile-long electrical arterial system from which 6,790 arc lamps, 268,000 incandescent lamps, and nearly ten thousand telephones drew sustenance.
USEFUL AND UNUSEFUL UTILITIES
While working on the electric light, Edison, aware that his generator run in reverse could serve as a motor, took a break from his primary experiments, purchased some secondhand horsecar tracks, and built a model roadbed one-third of a mile long. Then he mounted a twelve-horsepower