Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 11: Edison and the Promise of Universal Progress - Part 2
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Part 1 of Chapter 11 was published on Monday, June 17, 2024
Part 2
“An Invention That Will Revolutionize the Motive Power of the World”
In July 1878, Professor Barker invited Edison to travel with him by the new Union Pacific railroad to Wyoming, to join a group of scientists in viewing a solar eclipse.[1] On this trip of two months, Barker reviewed with Edison the development of electrical science, and the recent attempts to create light from electricity.[2]
On Sept. 8, Barker took Edison to Connecticut, to view an arc light (a bow of flame between two electrodes, emitting an intense light unsuitable for indoor use) powered by a generator driven by a water wheel.
Edison saw at once that he had at hand the means by which he could change the universe.
Two days later, New York newspapers carried a sensational but accurate report on Edison’s visionary thinking, his relationship with Professor Barker, and the changes that were in the offing.
The headline was incendiary:
A GREAT TRIUMPH
AN INVENTION THAT WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE MOTIVE POWER OF THE WORLD[3]
The article posed the problem as Edison thought of it, in terms of the mastery and use of electricity. Inventing an electric light for indoor use could be a commercial means to introduce this revolutionary power to general use.
Since this article is a primary source of information on the Edison story written at the time it was happening, we here reproduce excerpts from the text:
To utilize the vast power generated by numberless rivers and tide-ways, by transmitting it from regions where not used to points where it is invaluable, has long puzzled scientists. In places away from the seaboard and the great watercourses, especially, power has heretofore been obtained only by the erection of expensive machinery, the constant generation of steam, and the consequent consumption of vast quantities of coal brought from a distance.
While visiting the mining regions of the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains in his late Western tour, Professor Edison was struck with the difficulty there had by miners in drilling and boring, though in many cases in the vicinity of rapid flowing mountain streams. . . . [A] means of facilitating this work evolved itself from Edison’s fertile brain. Turning to his intimate friend, Professor Barker, of the University of Pennsylvania, he exclaimed, . . . “Why cannot the power of yonder river (pointing to the Platte River on the plain 1000 feet below) be transmitted to these men by electricity?” This thought seemed not to go from Edison's head, and all the way across the plains on their journey home he and his friend “Barky,” as he calls him, discussed various problems for the transmission of power.
Before starting for the West, Professor Barker had visited Ansonia, Connecticut, where his old friend, Mr. William Wallace, is engaged in the manufacture of electrical machines . . . He showed Professor Barker an instrument to which he had devoted the best years of his life, but which was yet in a crude condition. He is still experimenting with it, but he believed he would so perfect it as to transmit power from one point to another by means of electricity.
When the Edison party [returned from the West to] New York, Professor Barker . . . invited Professor Edison to visit [Wallace at] Ansonia with him . . .
[Mr. Wallace] had shown [his machine], only to a few [persons. He] calls it a telemachon[4] . . .
Mr. Edison was enraptured. He fairly gloated over it. Then power was applied to the telemachon, and eight electric lights were kept ablaze at one time., each being equal to 4000 candles [and thus far too bright for home or office], a subdivision of electric lights being a thing unknown to science. This filled up Mr. Edison's cup of joy. He ran from the instruments to the lights, and from the lights back to the instrument. He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child and made all kinds of calculations. He calculated the power of the instrument and of the lights, the probable loss of power in transmission, the amount of coal the instrument would save in a day, a week, month, year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing . . . .
[Wallace’s] instrument [was] calculated to revolutionize the entire manufacturing business. By means of it, power may be obtained from places where river power or total power is abundant, or maybe generated where fuel is cheap, as at the coal mines, and, by means of an ordinary cable, be transmitted hundreds of miles. The cable may be tapped at any point and power used therefrom.
The article continues by describing the “stupendous results that may follow” if a device such as Wallace’s were to prove successful. The power of Niagara Falls was estimated to equal the entire world’s coal consumption, or 200 million tons per year. If a
“dinamo-electric machine” [could capture] the whole power of Niagara . . . it could be distributed over the United States, so as to give from that waterfall alone the power equal to the present entire mechanical force of the world . . .[5]
A series of flumes could be constructed . . . to carry all the water of the Niagara River through water wheels [which] turn the machine generating the electric current. This current could then be carried to New York City by . . . copper rods [which] may be tapped in at any point, wherever power is needed, and wires carried into factories . . . to run the shafting [that drives the shop’s machines.]
. . . Mr. Edison believes that he can now assist Mr. Wallace in perfecting the telemachon that power may be transmitted from one point to another as though it were a telegraphic message . . .
To do what Edison was proposing, he would need a substantial infusions of funds, and the Philadelphians were staggering financially.
A New York Sun article published the following week illustrates how Edison used bold pronouncements to shake up the financiers, who were heavily invested in gas for lighting, and not usually interested in massive new industrial projects. He would thus gain bargaining leverage, as panicky selling depressed gas stock values.
EDISON’S NEWEST MARVEL.
SENDING CHEAP LIGHT, HEAT,
AND POWER BY ELECTRICITY
. . . Edison on returning home . . . studied and experimented with electric lights. On Friday last his efforts were crowned with success, and the project that has filled the minds of many scientific men for years was developed.
“I have it now!” he said on Saturday,” “and . . . I have obtained it through an entirely different process than that from which scientific man have ever sought to secure it . . . When ten lights have been produced by a single electric machine, it has been thought to be a great triumph of scientific skill. With the process I have discovered, I can produce 1000 – aye, 10,000 – from one machine. Indeed, the number may be said to be infinite.
When the brilliance and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public, which will be in a few weeks, or just as soon as I can thoroughly [protect?] the process – illumination by carbureted hydrogen gas will be discarded.
With 15 or 20 of these dynamo electric machines . . . I can light the entire lower part of New York City, using a 500 horsepower engine . . . In each house, I can place a light meter, once these wires will pass through the house, tapping small metal metallic contrivances that may be placed over each burner [formerly used for gas] . . . Whenever it is desired to light a jet, it will only be necessary to touch a little spring near it. No matches are required.
Again the same wire that brings the light to you will also bring power and heat. With the power, you can run an elevator, a sewing machine or any other mechanical contrivance that requires a motor, and by means of the heat, you may cook your food. It will only be necessary to have the ovens or stove properly arranged for the reception.
It has been computed that by Edison process the same amount of light that is given by 1000 ft³ of the… Gas now used in this city, and for which from $2.50 to three dollars is paid, may be obtained for from $.12-$.15. Edison will soon give a public exhibition of his new invention.[6]
Edison’s assertions were immediately challenged in a rebuttal published in the Sun. In transmitting power from Niagara Falls for a distant electric light, the anonymous letter claimed, no such efficiency as Edison projected could be achieved. To conduct such a vast current would require a wire eight inches in diameter, costing $12 per foot, rendering an electric light for indoor use no cheaper than a gas light.[7]
This objection that the project was technically impossible, based on calculations for powering arc lights, would be demolished within a short time through Edison’s completely new design for a lighting system.
The transatlantic financiers – led by Junius Morgan in London and his son J. P. Morgan (Drexel Morgan) in New York -- were unnerved by Edison’s announcements.
[There was] great concern within the Drexel Morgan boardrooms. Was Edison bluffing? . . . If they financed Edison, this mark of confidence in his yet-nonexistent electrical system might induce a further drop in gas investments.
Yet, despite the universal verdict of “impossible” given by their scientific advisors, if Edison succeeded in building his electrical system without their financial support, then the gas stocks would fall even more. When the Menlo Park reports reaching J.S. Morgan in London made this seem likely, the New York office was instructed to strike a deal with Edison as soon as possible. Since Edison was too busy to come to New York, J.P. Morgan forgot his dignity and made the trip to Menlo Park himself to secure the rights to Edison's electrical patents for the Morgans.[8]
The Edison Electric Light Company (EELC), controlled by Morgan, was incorporated November 15, 1878. Edison received $30,000 for experiments, and $20,000 to come later in installments.[9]
Innumerable books and articles in every language have told the story of Edison’s light and power breakthroughs at Menlo Park.
After thousands of experiments, he found a carbon filament that electric heating would cause to glow brightly for many hours, prevented from burning out by being inside a glass bulb from which the air had been removed.
He “subdivided the light” by wiring his lamps in parallel circuits, directing the current simultaneously among alternative paths. Thus one bulb failing does not cause the whole circuit to fail, which happens when wiring is in series.
He reached efficiencies previously thought impossible in his dynamo, by having low resistance in input conductors and high resistance in output devices. The previous false presumption otherwise had been based on experience with batteries, or with arc lights, which had low resistance at the output end; such systems could never get beyond 50% efficiency in the use of input energy.
Edison’s War of Independence
Edison knew that control by financiers could allow them to suppress his work. He used publicity to educate a broad range of supporters and potential financial backers.
The New York Herald was Edison's special champion. That newspaper was a kind of headquarters for the Irish underground; Herald foreign editor John Devoy was a wise, brave leader of Ireland’s struggle for freedom from British rule.[10] Edison’s friend, Herald reporter Edwin Fox, was given special access to Menlo Park. A particularly influential article in the December, 1879 Herald precisely detailed the history of Edison 's work on light and power up to that point, describing the result as "a bright, beautiful light, like the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn."[11]
The British scientific establishment and their American hangers-on churned out incessant, scornful anti-Edison propaganda.
A special committee of Parliament heard experts testify that the electric light was impossible, and electric power would be dangerous in the general public's use. Sir William Preece told the Royal United Service Institution on Feb. 15, 1879:
"It is ... easily shown (and that is by the application of perfectly definite and well-known scientific laws) that in a circuit [with constant] electro-motive force ... additional lamps [inserted] ... in series [will cause a sharp diminution of the light in relation to] the number inserted. Hence a sub-division of the electric light-is an absolute ignis fatuus."[12]
Among the attacks against Edison in the New York Times was an interview with a prestigious scientist, Henry Morton, pronouncing the whole electric light idea a failure, and repeating the British line that no sub-division of the light is possible.[13]
The New York Herald replied, referring obliquely to the British heart of the problem:
Mr. Morton ... will not have [the electric light] on any terms, and when a man of his eminence ... refuses to consent to the electric light it is but little short of impertinence for Mr. Edison to invent it. ... As Lord Russell [former British prime minister] was willing to consent that the progress of the British people might be admitted to go so far as he approved, but held that the point so gained must be a finality, so this professor will not admit that there may be any movement in the progress of invention beyond his finality; which is gas.[14]
At length, Edison made his impossible light, his unlawful dynamo, and the hundreds of other inventions –
switchboards, regulators, pressure and current indicators, fixtures in great variety . . . meters, sockets, small switches, underground conductors, junction boxes, service boxes, manhole boxes, connectors, specially made wires[15]
-- that would deliver to the world, as a gift-package, the complete electrical power system.
However, Morgan blocked the manufacture of light bulbs, preferring to simply hold the patents.[16] So Edison sold stock in the EELC for funds, and he and Edward Johnson set up the Edison Lamp Works (later called Edison Lamp Company) in the summer of 1880, the world’s first factory for making incandescent bulbs.
Edison and Morgan agreed that the inventor would test the system by installing lights and power in Morgan’s New York house and in the surrounding neighborhood. This was Edison’s Pearl Street power station project. By a similar arrangement in England, Edward Johnson supervised the construction of the Holborn Viaduct power station in London.
Edison also pushed ahead with “isolated” power plants, small units installed with lighting, for eager customers owning factories, department stores, hotels, yachts, theaters – and the offices of the New York Herald.
However, the Morgan-controlled EELC refused to allow any more generators to be built to power towns and cities.[17]
But the overwhelming public faith in Edison's competence made it likely that other money sources could somehow be found, and a brawl on the EELC board loosened Morgan's stranglehold for a time.
Edison now proceeded with the spread of electricity the way the railroads had been built before the Civil War: municipalities issued their own bonds to pay for the building of power stations.
To get it started, Edison personally funded an informal company called the Edison Construction Department to do these installations.
Local investors would form companies in a town, with Edison having a fraction of the stock. After he personally surveyed energy use there, his team would “construct the generating plant and distribution network, wire local business and homes, train employees, and operate the station for a short period before turning it over to the utility.”[18]
Edison built America’s first independent electric installation and utility in Sunbury, Pennsylvania – near ample supplies of Pennsylvania coal to fuel the generator.
A local historic marker honoring the accomplishment reads:
This tablet commemorates the installation at Sunbury PA., of the first three-wire central station incandescent electric lighting plant in the world. On the night of July 4, 1883, Thomas A. Edison, the creator of the incandescent lamp, and inventor of numerous mechanical and electrical devices necessary for a complete system of electric light, heat and power, acting in the triple capacity of Chief Electrical Engineer, mechanical expert and Superintendent of Construction, turned over to the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Sunbury, PA., a completed operating central station electric plant.[19]
The Construction Department immediately built 13 other town plants in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Massachusetts. Production of dynamos and their installation grew rapidly. Large city central power stations rose to 12 in 1884, and to 58 in 1886. By 1888, Edison had installed 200 central lighting stations and 1,500 isolated plants.
Edison’s Partners
Numerous cities formed electric utilities to use Edison’s patents – to begin life as his partners.
Detroit Edison commenced in 1886. Mechanic Henry Ford joined the firm and by 1894 he was chief engineer. Edison would give his blessing to Ford’s experiments with car designs, and the two inventors became great friends.
President Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln formed Chicago Edison in 1887.[20] Five years later, Samuel Insull, Thomas Edison’s former private secretary and manager of the Edison Construction Department, became the Chicago Edison president.
Insull would become notorious by the 1920s for corporate pyramid looting schemes, in line with the practices of Wall Steet financiers who by then owned most utilities.
But in Chicago Edison’s early years, Insull followed Edison’s business model: introduce electricity to as many homes, farms and businesses as possible, at a low price, gaining good profits by a high volume.[21]
Edison's economic ideas were terrifying to the rentier financiers. As he put it,
The company with the best and cheapest machinery will do the business . . . Fact is . . . all electric machinery is entirely too high now. These high prices hurt the business. With the leaden collar of the Edison Electric Light Co. all around me, I have never been able to show what can be done. The ground of cheapening has scarcely been scratched. Let us break the leaden collar and you will see a brainy competition that will show them what real competition is . . . [Prices] must go down 50 to 75 per cent lower than now . . . and we will make a great profit [emphasis in original].[22]
In March 1881, U. S. Secretary of State James Blaine announced that the State Department would organize and plan U.S. participation in the International Congress of Electricity in Paris later that year. Blaine appointed as American commissioners for the event, Professor George Barker and Colonel George Gouraud, along with U.S. State Department and military officers.
Paris streets and public schools were “magically lighted” that August” to celebrate the harnessing of electricity. It was thus under U.S. government sponsorship that the German Emil Rathenau met Professor Barker at the Paris exposition, and began a friendship and partnership with Thomas Edison.
Rathenau was a Jewish engineer, brimming with optimism under Chancellor Bismarck’s program for Germany’s rapid industrialization.
Rathenau got Edison's patents and the loan of Edison's power plant engineer, William Hammer. Rathenau's German Edison Company (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, AEG) now raced to electrify German society and industry, and the world economy. He built the electrical grids of Madrid, Warsaw, Genoa, and Buenos Aires, and otherwise brought power to Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and much of Western Europe.
Rathenau put electric power into Saint Petersburg and streetcars into Moscow. Later, he and his son Walther worked with the great Russian modernizer Count Witte to build up Russia's own electrical industry, and AEG would electrify the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
Edison created other partnerships for light and power in Argentina, Cuba, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, India, South America. Africa, England, France, and Italy.
Edison Steps Down
A decade of unimaginably intense creative work, under the constant pressure of financial warfare, took its toll on the inventor by the late 1880s. The new Thomson-Houston and Westinghouse companies were pushing hard on Edison, with their high-voltage alternating current system allowing long-distance power distribution impossible to his direct current system.
Edison began to withdraw into a defensive shell, with the same conservative reaction to new technology that he had always condemned. Thus began a battle, particularly against Westinghouse, in which Edison lowered himself to propagandizing against the safety of a system that his own partners would adopt before long.
In July 1888, in the middle of this “war of the currents,” Westinghouse strengthened their system by buying the patents to the important polyphase alternating current devices from Nikola Tesla, who had earlier worked for Edison. There now began to be cultivated a fallacious narrative around Tesla as the supposed father of the electrical industry, contrasted with an image of Edison as a worthless opportunist and tool of Wall Street.
It was under these circumstances that Morgan moved to take control of Edison’s whole enterprise, and to sweep Edison aside.
Mathew Josephson told the sordid story:
Thomson-Houston, whose directors were the leading financiers of Boston’s State Street – including Henry Lee Higginson, F.L. Ames, and T. Jefferson Coolidge – had large financial resources.
Under Siege, Edison agreed to a merger with Thomason-Houston to form “Edison General Electric.”
Then,
Edison G.E. was . . . sold over the inventor’s head. H. M. Twombly [a member of the Vanderbilt family which had large holdings of Edison stock], D. O. Mills [a stock plunger tied to Morgan], and Morgan negotiated the sale with a Thomson-Houston committee consisting of F.L. Ames, T. J. Coolidge, and Henry Lee Higginson – State Street men with whom Morgan often collaborated in big investment deals . . . Morgan was determined to put the company Edison had founded under his financial leadership.[23]
The new company was called simply “General Electric.” Edison and his old associates were frozen out. Morgan men would control G.E., along with the mammoth trusts that swallowed the steel and other U.S. industries built by creative Americans.
Grasping, thieving electric utilities would put the brakes on the expansion of electric usage, in favor of financial manipulation. Farmers were particularly starved for the new technology.
In the late 1920s, Franklin D. Roosevelt was aroused to action against this injustice. As New York Governor and as President, his public measures revived the progress of electrification that had begun in the 1870s at Menlo Park.
[1] During the eclipse, Edison used his new invention, the tasimeter, to measure the heat brought to Earth from heavenly bodies. He was able to show that the Sun’s corona conveyed about 15 times as much heat as did the star Arcturus. Edison Papers note, online at
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/oa_monograph/chapter/974259
[2] Barker told the historian of the University of Pittsburgh that as a professor of Natural Science there in 1864, he had experimented “to produce electric light by passing the current through a resisting filament” and that he had made “the first steady electric light generated in Pittsburgh, if not the country” in his laboratory -- William Jacob Holland, History of the University of Pittsburgh, typed manuscript, pp. 8-10. https://documenting.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A00a805098m/viewer#page/2/mode/2up
Barker was subsequently a professor at Yale College, before his 1872 employment at the University of Pennsylvania.
[3] The article first appeared in the (New York) Sun, September 10, 1878, from which it was copied the same day in the New York Mail. Edison’s assistant Charles Batchelor clipped the Mail article, which is thus preserved in the Edison papers.
[4] A version of a dynamo or generator.
[5] Quoting “Professor C. W. Siemens of the Royal Society of Great Britain, who has recently visited this country.”
[6] “Edison’s Newest Marvel,” The Sun, Monday September 6, 1878.
[7] New York Sun, “Power Flashed by Wire – Mr. Edison Defending Wallace’s Wonderful Invention – Answering the Criticisms of a Correspondent Who Doubts the Practicability of the Telemachon,” The Sun, September 17, 1878.
[8] Michael Tobin, “Thomas Alva Edison: The Scientist Who Created the Electric Light and Power Industry,” Fusion magazine, July-August 1983, p. 22. The Morgans had likely seen the letter sent by the head of the Rothschild banking firm in Vienna to their U.S. representative, August Belmont, saying that
it would greatly interest me to learn, whether really there is something serious and practical in the new ideas of Mr. Edison, whose last inventions, the microphone, phonograph, etc., however interesting, have finally proved to be only trifles.
Edison Papers, in note to page 698, digital edition.
[9] Edison Papers, digital edition, p. 660; Tobin, p. 22.
[10] Terry Golway, Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Ireland’s Freedom (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 87.
Devoy was co-chief of Clan na Gael, the underground Irish nationalist group guided in the late 1870s by Henry Carey’s Philadelphia circle.
[11] “Edison’s Light. The Great Inventor’s Triumph in Electric Illumination.” New York Herald, December 21, 1879, Thomas Edison and Modern America: A Brief History with Documents. Theresa M. Collins, Kisa Gitelman and Gregory Jankunis (Boston: Bedford/St. martins, 2002), p. 2006.
[12] Quoted in Francis Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, Volume 1 (Dearborn, Michigan: Edison Institute, 1937), p. 197.
[13] “A Scientific View of It: Prof. Henry Morton Not Sanguine About Edison’s Success,” New York Times, December 28, 1879. John Foord, New York Times editor-in-chief (1876-1883), was British born and an insider among the New York financiers’ “reform” political faction.
[14] Both the Times attack and the Herald’s witty rebuttal are reproduced in their entirety in Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, op. cit., pp. 399-400.
[15] Dyer, p. 355
[16] Edison testified in 1n 1890 patent suit,
Wall Street could not see its way clear to finance a new and untried business . . . We were confronted with a tremendous obstacle. Nowhere in the world could we obtain any of the items or devices necessary for the exploitation of the system. The directors of the Edison Electric Light Company would not go into manufacturing. Thus forced to the wall., I was forced to go into the manufacturing business myself.
Josephson, p. 248..
[17] The board of directors came near to a candid recitation of their blocking policy in an 1882 report:
There was strong objection on the part of some of your board
against changing the policy of our company from what it has always been, namely, that of merely paying the expenses of experiment. and taking out and holding patents and not of investing capital in the actual business of lighting.
Fifteenth Bulletin of the Edison Electric Light Company, December 20, 1882, p. 37.
[18] Paul Israel, Thomas Edison: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), dictionary entry for Edison Construction Department. The author of this new work, Paul Israel, is the director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, and the author of a 1998 Edison biography.
For these central stations, the invention of the crucial three-wire system allowed Edison to cut copper use by 62% -- Francis Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, Volume 3 (Dearborn, Michigan: Edison Institute, 1941), Volume 3, p. 936 -- and to get smaller-voltage devices operating safely from a higher-voltage supply without needing transformers. The main circuit led into twin parallel sub-circuits by a third wire between the main conductors -- Israel, Edison Reference Guide, dictionary entry for three-wire system..
[19] Historical Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=89742
[20] Blaine Brooks Gernon, The Lincolns in Chicago (Chicago: Ancarthe Publishers, 1934), P. 61. Robert Todd Lincoln had served as U.S. Secretary of War (1881-1885), and would be the U.S. Minister to the United Kingdom (1889-1893).
[21] Col. George Gouraud had initially hired the young English-born Insull as his secretary in London. Gouraud and Edward Johnson then arranged for Insull to go to New York to be Edison’s secretary and right-hand man. See Forrest McDonald, Insull (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Historian McDonald was a stalwart defender of the American Constitution and of Alexander Hamilton.
[22] Quoted in Josephson, p. 360.
[23] Josephson, pp. 359, 363, 364.
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