Chapter 60: The Electric Age
Electric power has become a staple of our daily lives. In this episode, we’ll discuss how it was made possible. Topics covered include:
The rise of the modern engineer and the many technological breakthroughs made in the late 19th Century
The life of Thomas Edison
The development of the lightbulb
The spread of electrical distribution
The War of the Currents
Sources for this episode include:
“1870s – 1940s: Telephone.” Imagining the Internet: Time Capsule. Elon University. https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/time-capsule/150-years/back-1870-1940/
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Bellis, Mary. “Elisha Gray and the Race to Patent the Telephone.” ThoughtCo. 16 Feb 2021. https://thoughtco.com/elisha-gray-race-to-patent-telephone-1991863
“First Practical Typewriter.” Wisconsin Historical Society. 22 Mar 2007. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS2697
Frenzel, Louis E. “Marconi Did Not Invent Radio.” Electronic Design. 8 Jan 2007. https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/communications/article/21759673/marconi-did-not-invent-radio
Gray, Charlotte. Alexander Graham Bell: The Reluctant Genius and His Passion for Invention. Arcade Publishing. 2006.
“Herman Hollerith: American inventor.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Last updated: 13 Dec 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Herman-Hollerith
Hobsbawm, E.J. The Age of Empire 1875-1914. Vintage Books. 1987.
Johnson, Steve. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Penguin Random House. 2014.
Maio, Alyssa. “When Were Movies Invented? A Brief History of Motion Pictures.” StudioBinder. 12 Dec 2019. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/when-were-movies-invented/
Russel, D. A., & Williams, G. G. (1977). “History of Chemical Fertilizer Development.” Soil Science Society of America Journal, 41(2), 260.
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. Grove Press. 2007.
Winchell, Mike. The Electric War: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Light the World. Henry Holt & Co. 2019.
This Episode is Sponsored by Surfshark VPN
Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/INDREVPOD – Enter promo code INDREVPOD for 83% off and 3 extra months free!
Full Transcript
Reminder: Footnotes and an ad-free stream are available to our Patreon supporters. To sign up, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod.
A few years ago – not long after I started podcasting, actually – Sarah and I took a hiking trip to Wyoming and Idaho. And in Idaho, one of our stops was Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve. If you’ve never been there, or never heard of it, well, it’s a strange place. Volcanic activity has been going on there for about 15,000 years, leaving fields and craters of black, basalt soil. As a result, it looks a bit like the surface of the moon. Walk around, and you’ll find big lava hills to climb up and deep caves to explore.
Another important feature of this landscape is its remoteness. Far from any cities, there is very, very little light pollution there, making it among the fewer than 200 locations across the globe designated as an “International Dark Sky Place”. It’s a great destination for stargazing, and during our visit, we attended a late evening outdoor lecture, where a National Park ranger pointed out the celestial bodies above us.
What I found most fascinating about the lecture, though, was not the locations of stars and planets, but how the local animals in the preserve depend on the visibility of these bodies for their survival. If light pollution was to disrupt that visibility, it would have a major impact on the ecosystem – adversely affecting the insects, critters, and other species that use the stars and moon to get a sense of time and direction. That in turn affects the plant life they depend on, the local birds and whatnot that depend on them, and so on.
Think about how much of the world is engulfed by light pollution today, and you realize it has massively changed the makeups of ecosystems across the globe for the past 150 years. The world we inhabit today is not the world inhabited by our ancestors.
What’s more, consider the ways our ancestors gazed up at those stars for millennia and millennia – how it inspired them to craft narrative storytelling, mythological canons, astrology, religion; how they incorporated these celestial bodies as they built their pyramids and stone circles and more. If you want to dive deep into understanding the human being – understanding the origins of our communications, our social organizing, our creativity, our inventiveness – you have to imagine the tens of thousands of years they spent looking up at the night sky.
Go outside your house tonight, and chances are you won’t see the same night sky they saw. Chances are your night sky only features a few notable constellations, while most are blocked out by the dim fog of countless lightbulbs all around you.
Consider this passage from Steven Johnson’s 2014 book, How We Got to Now:
“Imagine some alien civilization viewing Earth from across the galaxies, looking for signs of intelligent life. For millions of years, there would be almost nothing to report: the daily flux of weather moving across the planet, the creep of glaciers spreading and retreating every hundred thousand years or so, the incremental drift of continents. But starting about a century ago, a momentous change would suddenly be visible: at night, the planet’s surface would glow with the streetlights of cities, first in the United States and Europe, then spreading steadily across the globe, growing in intensity. Viewed from space, the emergence of artificial lighting would arguably have been the single most significant change in the planet’s history since the Chicxulub asteroid collided with Earth sixty-five million years ago...
“From space, all the transformations that marked the rise of human civilization would be an afterthought: opposable thumbs, written language, the printing press – all of these would pale beside the brilliance of Homo lumens.
“Viewed from the surface of the earth, of course, the invention of artificial light had more rivals in terms of visible innovations, but its arrival marked a threshold point in human society. Today’s night sky now shines six thousand times brighter than it did just 150 years ago.”
Who made this world of artificial light possible?
Well, lots of people, to be sure. The first known example we have of incandescent light was when our old friend, Sir Humphry Davy, lit up a platinum filament connected to a battery in 1802. (Shout out Chapter 16!) In 1838, a Belgian lithographer named Marcellin Jobard made what was probably the first-ever incandescent lightbulb, encasing a carbon filament in a glass vacuum. The first patent for an incandescent lightbulb went to Frederick De Moleyns, a Liberal MP from Ireland, who made his own in 1841. Dozens more followed, including the self-taught British inventor Joseph Swan, who set up about 30 electric lamps in the English town of Godalming, County Surrey, in 1881.
But if you heard “who made this world of artificial light possible?” and you answered “Thomas Edison” – well, you have good reason. It is thanks to Edison that we can see so much evidence of intelligent life from space. And it’s thanks to Edison we can barely see the stars anymore – not because he invented the lightbulb (he didn’t), but because he built the systems needed for mass lighting.
Even more importantly, Edison invented the modern system of invention itself – he was the harbinger of the Research & Development Revolution that has given us the wide range of technological advancements we take for granted today.
---
This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 60: The Electric Age
---
First of all, thank you to all the wonderful folks who support this podcast every month on Patreon.
Special shout outs go to historian, author, and new patron Joshua Shanley, as well as Hakim Ahmed, Jim Ankenbrandt, John Bartlett, Adam Bibby, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Harriet Buchanan, Jeppe Burchhardt, Tara Carlson, Matthew Frost, Michele Gersich, Hans Fredrik Hansen, Michael Hausknecht, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hogensen, Ian Le Quesne, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Andrew C. Madigan, Martin Mann, Duncan McHale, John Newton, Emeka Okafor, Ido Ouziel, Donovan Robin, Brad Rosse, Kristian Sibast, Jonathan Smith, Brandon Stansbury, Sebastian Stark, Ross Templeton, Walter Torres, and Seth Wiener.
Thank you.
Part 1: A Great Time for Inventors
In earlier episodes, we talked a bit about the deskilling of labor that took place in the First Industrial Revolution. It was a phenomenon wherein learned crafts passed down for centuries were gradually replaced by simplified, often repetitive tasks. Whereas a guild master would used to teach his apprentices about the techniques for producing a fine good, start to finish, now an industrialist would hire workers who would all do different tasks which – as a result of their combined efforts – would lead to a mass-producing of the good. These workers didn’t need to know how to do everything and, really, the industrialist didn’t want them to know how to do everything. He controlled the process. They were to be the cogs in his machine.
But as the old production techniques were forgotten, new skilled labor was needed for making the goods of the future possible. Filling the void left by the craftsman was the modern engineer. Relying on the latest research and the scientific method, rather than mere traditions, engineers were developing new processes for production, construction, and more. New branches of the profession emerged – there were civil and structural engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, even chemical engineers. And across the western world, they established new associations for the profession, further sharing their knowledge amongst themselves.
This engineering environment led to an extraordinary age of invention going into the late 19th Century. It’s why the Second Industrial Revolution is often called the Technological Revolution.
In 1867, Scientific American published an article about a new “Type Writing Machine” made in the U.S. If you remember back to Chapter 39, there had been a number of typewriters invented in the U.S. and Europe going back to the early 1700s, though none had been commercially viable. Neither was the one discussed in this article, but among the people who read the article and decided to pursue the typewriter further was one Christopher Latham Sholes.
Born in Pennsylvania, Sholes had resettled in Wisconsin where he got involved in newspaper publishing across the state. He immediately recognized the great potential of the typewriter and contacted Carlos Glidden, a mechanic friend of his in Milwaukee. Together, they spent years tinkering with a prototype. Among their innovations was the “QWERTY” keyboard layout, intended to make typing fast but not so fast it created key jams. And even though key jamming isn’t a problem on our modern computer keyboards, we still use the “QWERTY” layout today. (It makes for slower typing than alternative layouts, but who has time to relearn typing, amirite?)
But Sholes and Glidden had trouble producing typewriters at scale until they courted the firearm and sewing machine company, E. Remington & Sons. Remington agreed to a licensing deal, producing and selling several hundred of these first practical typewriters, before making their own improvements for later models. Remington Typewriters were among the top sellers well into the 20th Century.
In the 1890s, a pair of self-taught inventors pursing wireless telegraphy figured out how to hone radio waves. One was a Serbian-American electrical engineer named Nikola Tesla. The other was an Irish-Italian aristocrat named Guglielmo Marconi. Both were inspired by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, who had tested the theories of our old friend, James Clark Maxwell, and proved the existence of radio waves within the electromagnetic field.
Marconi borrowed (or, quite arguably stole) key concepts from Tesla in his development of a practical wireless transmitter, which he initially invented in 1895 and continued to improve going into the 1900s. He also built a successful business empire to deliver his product to market. It was especially useful for ocean faring ships, helping save hundreds of lives that had been aboard the Titanic and Lusitania. And, of course, Marconi’s transmitter was an important step in the march toward radio broadcasting.
Throughout the 19th Century, several chemical engineers made substantial improvements to fertilizers, helping to further increase the world’s food supply and food security. Among them was our old friend, Justus von Liebig (the guy whose silvering process made the mass production of mirrors possible). He experimented with many chemicals, believing they essentially served as food for plants. Another was a friend of ours from last time, the steel production innovator Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, who discovered that the slag byproduct of steel converters was high in phosphate and was useful in fertilizer.
Following in their path were such researchers as the Norwegians Kristian Birkeland and Sam Eyde, who created an electrical process to convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitric acid for fertilizers. Germans Adolph Frank and Nicodem Caro developed the cyanamide process in 1898, for which factories were built across the world. Their great rivals, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, soon topped these innovations with a more energy-efficient process, later winning them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1877, English photographer Eadweard Muybridge made a totally different kind of breakthrough. He was working for yet another old friend of ours, the railroad tycoon and former California Governor Leland Stanford. Among other things, Stanford had invested in racehorses. Setting up 12 cameras at a racetrack in Sacramento, Muybridge captured several photos of a horse and rider in rapid succession. He then invented a device for viewing the photos in rapid succession. He had, in effect, invented the moving picture.
About a decade later, this was followed up by one of the several notable inventions coming out of Edison’s laboratory – what he dubbed the “Kinetograph” – the first motion picture camera. By the mid-1890s, kinetographs and kinetoscopes (for viewing the movies) were being sold in the U.S. and Europe, and the new field of cinema was born.
In 1889, German-American engineer Herman Hollerith was issued a patent for an electro-mechanical system to gather data from cards with holes punched in them. Right away, he began working with the U.S. Census Bureau, teaching them how to compile statistics with his tabulator and sorting box. A few years later, he founded his Tabulating Machine Company, and started selling his data machines to governments and corporations across the globe. In the 1920s it was renamed “International Business Machines” – better known by its abbreviation, IBM. These machines were, in effect, the first commercially viable computers, and they remained the dominant form of the technology until digitalization came about during the Second World War.
Yet, none of these inventions attracted quite as much attention as another one we need to talk about today: The telephone.
On Valentine's Day, 1876, an engineer and former Oberlin College professor named Elisha Gray signed the paperwork for a provisional patent application, and his lawyer took it to the U.S. Patent Office. The application included drawings and a description of “a new art of transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically… so that actual conversations can be carried on by persons at long distances apart.”
Though he never completed a college degree himself, Gray had made a fairly successful career as an inventor, making new telegraph and audio equipment, often combining the concepts. This telephonic invention was to be the culmination of all that work.
In fact, it was to be the culmination of a lot of work along these lines. As early as 1849, an Italian immigrant named Antonio Meucci invented a very basic version of a telephone, although he was unable to make it a practical item for sale. In 1854, French mechanic Charles Bourseul made his own attempt, producing an electromagnetic microphone, but failing to make a successful receiver for the transmitted sounds. Parallel to this work was the 1857 invention of the phonautograph by French printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville – a device that could print sound waves on paper.
Here’s the thing, though: The same day Gray’s lawyer submitted that patent application, it just so happened that another application was submitted by the lawyers for another telephone inventor. I cannot even begin to get into the details of the mess at the Patent Office in those days in this episode, nor the slimy details of this particular case (including the critical question of whose application arrived first). So, I’ll just keep it simple – they awarded the telephone patent to this other guy.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847. His father was an elocution teacher, like his father before him – what today we might call a speech pathologist – helping people with speech impairments like stutters and lisps. His dad was particularly interested in the science of speech – how the human voice produced sound – and in systematizing the elocution profession. He was also a domineering father, and young Alec straddled the fence of blowing off the authoritarian figure (cutting classes and what not) and trying to win his approval. He began inventing things, including some kind of speech machine. (He used it to make the family dog appear to talk, much to the amusement of visitors.)
Eventually, Bell decided to follow the family business and became an elocution teacher. He took particular interest in teaching deaf students.
In his early 20s, the family emigrated to Canada, and the young Bell followed. The next year, he was recruited to emigrate yet again, this time to the United States. He settled in Boston, working at various schools for the deaf around New England. (Among his students was Hellen Keller.)
Boston was a hub of tech entrepreneurship at the time, with many citizens caught up in the excitement of new inventions. Among Bell’s students were the children of businessmen and engineers. It exposed him to the world of telegraphy and, soon, Bell was developing his idea for a “harmonic telegraph”, what he called a “telefon.” He began working with a phonautograph in a lab he set up, raised investments from some of the wealthy parents of his students, hired an experienced electrical engineer named Thomas Watson to work with him, and took the next couple of years to devote himself to this invention.
Eventually, they discovered a way of transmitting sounds without the need of electricity. It didn’t work great, but by the end of 1875, Bell and Watson were drawing up the patent application, hoping to beat rivals to the punch. Like Gray, Bell submitted his application to the Patent Office on February 14, 1876, without a working model.
And just three days after they both submitted their applications, Bell had a breakthrough. In his application, Gray had included a liquid transmitter in the design. When Bell applied this concept to his own design, he was able to get the clear transmission he needed. Testing it with Watson in a different room, Bell spoke a now-famous nine-word sentence into the receiver: “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you.”
At last, he had a successful prototype. With it, he not only had patent primacy over Elisha Gray, he had the instrument that would soon overtake the world. Over the next decade, the Bell Telephone Company was established, started selling devices, began building telephone lines in the U.S., and went international. By 1890, they had telephone lines set up in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Russia.
Though it in many ways accomplished the same ends as the telegraph – transmitting information long distances very quickly – it had an obvious appeal that the telegraph couldn’t match. With the telephone, a listener could pick up on the tone of a speaker’s voice, making for clearer communication. You can also convey messages much quicker by speaking them, rather than having a telegrapher type them. Most people didn’t put telegraphs in their homes, but they slowly started installing telephones in their homes. By the end of the Second Industrial Revolution, there were over 12 million telephones in operation across the world, including one for every ten people in the United States.
And although he still had a strong interest in education for the deaf, Bell had also transitioned into the role of an inventor. Over the next 30 years, he continued experimenting with new technologies. He created some of the earliest metal detectors, hydrofoil boats, and even an early precursor to fiber optic systems. He experimented with biofuels, airplanes, and audio recording equipment.
Even more significant was the work done by his American Bell Telephone Company, which soon began an R&D department. That department would later spin off as Bell Labs – a groundbreaking company responsible for many of the important technological developments of the 20th Century – but we’ll get to all that some other time.
And there’s one more thing about Bell’s legacy worth mentioning. The telephone didn’t just create a new means of communication, it also inspired the first major invention coming out of a new laboratory in New Jersey – a laboratory owned an operated by the era’s most famous inventor of all.
---
Part 2: The Wizard of Menlo Park
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847. His family was originally from New Jersey, but they fled to Ontario as Loyalists during the American Revolution. Edison’s father, Samuel, however, wasn’t quite as loyal to the Crown and joined the Rebellion of 1837 up there in Canada. When that uprising was stamped out, the Edisons fled the Great White North and returned to the United States.
In Ohio, Sam Edison got a job in a sawmill while his wife, Nancy, found work as a schoolteacher. But Milan had benefited from a canal, which was soon bypassed by a new railway along Lake Erie, completed in 1853. Economic opportunities dried up, and the Edisons moved to Port Huron, Michigan, to start over.
Young Edison – or “Al” as he was known in his childhood – never received much of a formal education. What schooling he did receive came in part from his mother and in part from visits to the Detroit Public Library. He soon discovered he had no natural talents in mathematics and not much when it came to the sciences either. But that didn’t stop Al from conducting chemistry experiments. The ever-so-curious boy even set up a laboratory in his cellar, testing different substances with his friends.
Of course, all this cost money, so Al did odd jobs around town to pay for his experiments. By age 12, his father got him a job selling snacks and newspapers on the trains between Port Huron and Detroit. As a newsboy, he not only learned entrepreneurship, but also the incredible influence the newspapers had on their readers.
A little act of heroism would soon give Al a new direction in life. At his train station, he saw a little boy playing on the tracks while a boxcar rolled toward him. Al sprang into action, running toward the boy, picking him up, and moving him out of the way. As it turned out, this saved child was the son of the station’s telegrapher, one James Mackenzie. And to show Al his appreciation, Mackenzie gave him lessons in telegraphy.
Within a matter of months, the teenage Edison had become so proficient that he began wandering the U.S. as an itinerant telegrapher, learning the business and making connections. Eventually he wound up in Boston, where he got a job at Western Union. Also in Boston, Edison came across the book that would change his life: Experimental Researches in Electricity by our old friend, Michael Faraday. Not only did Faraday’s ideas blow Edison’s mind, but the book also spoke to the scientific researcher in him and it was all about electricity – the source of the telegraph’s extraordinary power.
Edison started working night shifts, when telegraph communications were less frequent, so he could spend time reading and devote more energies to his experiments. By age 21, he patented his first invention: An automatic vote counter that, with its complex electrical hardware, could help lawmakers tally floor votes easier and more transparently (which, it turned out, made lawmakers totally uninterested in it.) He followed this up with various telegraph printing devices and upgraded telegraphy equipment. Then, with little more than a dream and a dollar in his pocket, Edison moved to New York City.
Within a few weeks there, he had another lucky break. It was at this same time our old friend Jay Gould was trying to corner the gold market (shout out chapter 57!) and Wall Street needed up-to-date gold prices throughout the day. To track them, they used a sort of stock-ticker called a Gold Indicator, produced by one Dr. Samuel Laws of the Gold Indicator Company. One day, the indicator stopped working. Panic ensued. Laws was freaking out.
And who stepped up? Thomas Edison. He had an idea for what was going wrong. He removed the cover, found a spring that had fallen in the gears, and removed it. The indicator worked again. Crisis averted. (Well, until the government started selling gold that September, anyway.)
Laws offered Edison a job as a chief technical advisor to the company, which he accepted. From there, Edison made various improvements to the machine which were patented. And when these patents were bought out by a competitor, Edison received a nice cash windfall. With it, he decided to embark on a new career as a full-time freelance inventor.
Now, it’s worth noting how remarkable this is. All this time we’ve been talking about inventors and inventions, we’ve mostly been talking about individuals who were either (a) Scientists who happened to think of an idea in the course of their research (think Denis Papin, who made the pressure cooker and an early steam engine); (b) Renaissance Men who came up with practical items as a hobby (think Thomas Jefferson and his swivel chairs); (c) Workers who stumbled across a great idea (think James Hargreaves, who made the Spinning Jenny); and most importantly, (d) Mechanics pursuing a singular concept they believed they could change the world with (think James Watt or Richard Arkwright or Charles Goodyear or so many others we’ve talked about before.)
What Edison was doing, by contrast, was setting up as an inventor-for-hire. And if there was any age to do it in, this was that age. For over a century now, inventors had been radically reshaping Western economies, militaries, and more. They were being celebrated as geniuses, lifting the world into what seemed like a state of perpetual progress. Not only did Edison understand this, he believed there was fortune to be found in such fame.
Throughout his twenties, he assembled a team of engineers who worked with him day and night on new inventions. The objective was to regularly develop and patent new technologies at a rate of “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” With his employees – other men in their twenties – they clocked roughly 20 hours per day to these ends. They ate their meals together (including the daily “midnight suppers”) and took the occasional naps when they were too tired to continue. Edison became known for his unkempt hair and worn-out clothes. (Apparently, folks regularly remarked that he “dressed like a tramp” while his employees referred to their not-yet 30-year-old boss as “the old man.”)
But despite the hard work, he was barely making any money. That is until Jay Gould’s hostile takeover of Western Union in his war against the Vanderbilts. As part of it, Gould paid Edison a whopping $30,000 to stop working for the telegraph company. And with that money, Edison would invest in a new research laboratory where he and his team could spend every waking hour, hard at work with state-of-the-art equipment and no rent to worry about. He put his father, Sam, in charge of finding the site for this lab. Sam found a plot out in New Jersey and oversaw construction of a simple, wood-shingled building.
They called it Menlo Park.
And of all of Edison’s innovations, Menlo Park was perhaps the most significant. He had invented the industrial laboratory – a factory specializing not in a single good, but in ideas. It was the predecessor of Bell Labs and everything that came after. Whether in academic institutions like MIT, CalTech, or Stanford, or corporations like IBM, 3M, or Alphabet, (and that’s just some of the American ones) R&D had become professionalized.
It’s ironic because when we’re taught about Edison as kids, we think of this lone inventor, hunched over his desk, tinkering with the lightbulb. But that’s not how he worked. He had a team of engineers who were significantly more capable than he was – and he profited handsomely from their labors.
Today, this is the norm. Most innovations today aren’t coming from single great minds – they’re developed by teams, working in labs on behalf of the folks paying for R&D. Personally, I think this is best explained in this scene from Season 1 of HBO’s The Wire, discussing Chicken McNuggets.
Among the early inventions at Menlo Park was an electric pen – the first automatic copier until the Xerox machine came along many decades later – and various alternative versions of the telegraph machine. But the first big breakthrough came in 1876, after Bell’s telephone was patented. Edison – jealous it wasn’t his own creation – set about making newer, better versions of the device. One was a so-called “musical telephone” (basically, a telephone with really high-quality audio).
While experimenting with this device, he made a suggestion to his Number 2 at Menlo Park, a man named Charles Batchelor. It turned out to be brilliant.
“Batch, if we had a point on this, we could make a record on some material which we could afterwards pull under the point, and it would give us speech back.”
In only a day, his team developed a needle-and-wheel contraption that could print the audio vibrations of speech onto wax paper. Edison tested it with the same five words he used for all his audio inventions – “Mary had a little lamb.” Not only did it make the intended marks on the wax paper, but they were able to then play it back. Though barely audible – it came out as “Ary ad eh il am” – everyone understood what a monumental breakthrough had been made. Menlo Park burst out in applause, hand-shaking, and back-patting.
The phonograph, as it was called, was Edison’s first major invention, and it catapulted him into glory. He was now a household name. Journalists started coming to Menlo Park to learn all about this ingenious inventor. It was at this point that the New York Daily Graphic’s William Croffut gave Edison his most enduring nickname: “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”
But the phonograph would also be one of Edison’s last inventions – at least, one of the last inventions that he personally conceived, tinkered with, and oversaw development of, start to finish. From here on, Edison’s inventions will mostly be the work of his employees, who will continue laboring night and day in the pursuit of world-changing technologies. Edison himself, meanwhile, became the name and face of the operation. It was that name and face – helped along by Edison’s strong knack for PR – which attracted customers and investments down the road.
Sure enough, the workload only continued to grow, now that he was famous. And so, in 1878, Edison took a vacation. And, thanks to that vacation, Edison would become the most famous inventor of all time. He took a trip to Wyoming with University of Pennsylvania professor George Barker to watch a solar eclipse. While there, Barker talked to Edison about the work some engineers were doing to create artificial lighting from electricity. Perhaps it could replace gas lighting – those lamps that relied on gas derived from coal.
Expressing some mild interest in this work, Edison agreed to meet with some of Barker’s contacts in Connecticut – a firm called Wallace & Son, which operated a copper and brass foundry and had acquired a powerful electrical generator. A couple months later, the two men visited the foundry to see this electric lighting together. A New York Sun reporter, who was following Edison, captured the moment for posterity.
“Edison was enraptured… eight electric lights were kept ablaze at one time, each being equal to 4,000 candles, the subdivision of electric lights being a thing unknown to science. This filled up Mr. Edison’s cup of joy. He ran from the instrument to the lights and from the lights back to the instrument. He sprawled over the 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 could save in a day, a week, a month, a year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing.”
Edison turned to his host and told him, “Wallace, I believe I can beat you making electric lights.” One week later, he told reporters that Menlo Park would “soon” deliver a practical system of electric lighting.
Menlo Park very quickly threw together a prototype. It barely worked, but they were able to fool reporters by giving them sneak peaks for a few minutes at a time. And the positive press they gained from these sham demonstrations resulted in a wave of investment, allowing the wizard to form the Edison Electric Light Company.
Over the next several months, they scrambled to develop a commercially viable lightbulb – one that could turn on and off and on again; one that could last years before needing to be replaced; one that was bright enough to make kerosene lamps obsolete, but not so bright that you wouldn’t want it in your home or office. (Most folks working on electric lighting at this time were developing something called arc lamps, which were much, much brighter than incandescent lightbulbs – too bright, really.)
Now, today, historians like to note how inefficient Edison was in his lightbulb R&D process – how he’d send his team down these months-long rabbit holes, like a feedback system to prevent the filament from melting, before switching gears and going the same route as many of his predecessors by creating a vacuum in the bulb to prevent oxidation. But as Edison once put it, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” Eventually, he made the breakthrough by using carbonized paper as the filament – rather than platinum or other metallic wires – and they spent about a year determining bamboo to be the best source. The result of this simple, though time consuming discovery, was that it made the lightbulb commercially viable.
Now, there were other inventors out there working on this, but it was Edison who made it happen, thanks in large part to his mastery of publicity. The next year, they set up a public demonstration at Menlo Park, with a few dozen lights used in lamps, inside the laboratory, and in a boardinghouse next door. By New Year’s Day, 1880, hundreds of visitors (including reporters) had seen the lights. They were convinced not only of Edison’s brilliance (yet again), but also got a sneak peak into the homes, worksites, and streets of the future, illuminated by the power of electricity.
But for this future to emerge, a lot, lot more was needed. In the grand scheme of things, the lightbulb was relatively straightforward. Now, a massive system of electrical generation and distribution was required, as was a whole lot of heavy lifting by the few electricians around at the time to create the wiring, plugs, switches, meters, and everything else where a lightbulb would go.
Now, a few attempts had been made to electrify small towns and villages in England, though none really succeeded. Edison would have his electrical vision catch on in the massive and ever-growing New York City. In 1881, he moved there with his family and set up an office in lower Manhattan, powered by a gas generator in the basement, illuminating the building to draw the attention of passersby. Gradually, they expanded electricity across the city.
To avoid a messy web of wires in the streets, Edison convinced local politicians to let him bury his lines underground. And he got permission to build a few power plants throughout the city. Getting that real estate wasn’t cheap, but it was necessary to deliver power into nearby homes. Not only were the dynamos of the time much weaker than those we have today, but the power they generated needed to be distributed by Direct Current, which didn’t have great range.
But before the end of the decade, this system of distribution by Direct Current was being challenged by another self-made inventor businessman with a clearly superior product: Alternating Current.
---
Part 3: The War of the Currents
The way electricity moves is fairly straightforward – or so you would think. Imagine you’ve got a battery or a generator or a big dynamo which produces power. That power flows through the wires from that source to a utility, like a lightbulb or a vacuum cleaner or a laptop. Maybe you’ve got a multi-prong circuit so that power flows from the source to one utility, then onto another, then onto another. Simple, right?
Well, that’s how direct current (or “DC”) works. Except, we almost never use direct current anymore. For the most part, we use alternating current (or “AC”), in which the power generated is able to move back-and-forth throughout the circuit multiple times.
AC has several advantages over DC. For one thing, the voltage can be adjusted through transformers for the specific utility you’re powering. That means you could do more than power lightbulbs – you could power motors, allowing electricity to replace steam power for many machines. For another thing, AC allows for long-distance transmission, so you can have one power plant covering a very large geographic space, rather than several smaller DC plants spread throughout a city (which, by extension, would limit the economic feasibility of electric power).
But in the early 1880s, few electrical engineers believed AC was practical. It could be done, sure, but could it be done efficiently? Could it be done safely? There was little evidence it could.
Yet that didn’t stop experimentation. And when Engineering magazine ran an article on AC in 1885, one of its readers – an already-successful young mechanic – realized he could make AC the dominant form of electrical distribution.
George Westinghouse Jr. was born in Central Bridge, New York, in 1846. His father owned a machine shop where he took on George Jr. as an apprentice at age 13. (Like Edison, Westinghouse wasn’t much of a student, but had a knack for mechanical tinkering.) Throughout his teenage years, he figured out little ways to make his work significantly more productive with inventions like new rotary engines and steam-powered lathes and so forth.
While traveling on the railroad in his 20s, though, Westinghouse came up with a couple ideas that shot him up to the status of a famous inventor of the day. One was a car-replacer that would make it way, way easier to get rail cars onto train tracks. The second was the air brake with which a railroad engineer could use compressed air to quickly halt a moving train before it collided with an obstacle. Patented in 1869, Westinghouse’s air brakes were introduced to the majority of the world’s railways over the next decade.
Now, he had virtually no experience with electrical engineering. But when he read that magazine article about AC, one of Edison’s lightbulbs appeared over his head (so to speak) and he turned his full attention to the project of alternating current. He bought an experimental AC generator from Siemens, recruited pioneering electrical engineers, and incorporated the Westinghouse Electric Company the next year. Quietly, they developed the technology.
At last, they set up their AC system in a large, all-purpose trade store in Buffalo, New York, in November 1886. Promoting it in the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, the store told readers to “Come and see the grandest invention in the nineteenth century.”
By this point, Edison had been expanding his operations in major cities on both sides of the Atlantic. Now he suddenly had a serious competitor. The Westinghouse system took off faster than anyone could have imagined. By the end of 1887, Westinghouse had about a hundred stations set up. By comparison, Edison’s company had been in business for eight years and had only 121 set up. What’s more, French industrialist Eugene Secrétan was effectively monopolizing the global copper market at the time, driving up the price of wire, putting Edison’s less efficient DC system at a further disadvantage.
And so, Edison decided to go to war.
The War of the Currents started innocuously enough – with Edison telling reporters that Westinghouse should “stick to air brakes” – but it soon got real ugly. Throughout 1887 and 1888, the Wizard of Menlo Park went after his rival like a bat out of Hell. He planted numerous articles about AC being a danger to the public, published a pamphlet calling AC “cheapness in applied electricity” which “jeopardizes life”, and accused Westinghouse of lying to the public about the known risks of the system.
It wasn’t all that unlike James Watt’s aversion to high-pressure steam engines. On the one hand, it’s very likely that both inventors believed the more powerful versions of their technology really were too dangerous. On the other hand, it’s also very likely that ego was a major factor in both Watt’s and Edison’s doomsayings.
When the blizzard of 1888 hit, piling pounds of snow on top of electric lines across the northeast, Edison took advantage of it in the press, further warning of the dangers of AC. He also reversed his position opposing capital punishment when he was asked to lend his support to another new invention: The Electric Chair. He argued that the “instantaneous death” AC would deliver to the convict sitting in the chair was a more humane way of offing him than hanging him would be. Edison even insisted that this form of the death penalty should be referred to as being “Westinghoused.”
Perhaps the worst of the War of the Currents came when Edison ally Harold P. Brown demonstrated the power of AC by electrocuting a caged dog with it until the tortured animal’s scratching and whining moved the audience to intervene. But, believing any press in this war was good press, the Edison team continued torturing animals (many to death) with AC in similar demonstrations – though, moving forward, they’d invite audience members who weren’t quite so squeamish.
Despite Edison’s extreme PR tactics that year, it was also in 1888 that Westinghouse finally found the breakthrough that would lead AC to overcome DC in the electrical marketplace. That May, a former Edison employee conducted a lecture at the convention of the new American Institute of Electrical Engineers. It was Nikola Tesla.
Now, we don’t have time to go into the life of Nicola Tesla in this episode. But later this month there will be a bonus episode about him. I’ll be talking with Stephen Kotowych, host of Tesla: The Life and Times Podcast, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.
Anyway, Tesla was showing off the AC motors and transformers he had developed. The audience was stunned by their efficiency. And among those in the audience was a group of engineers from the Westinghouse Electric Company. Within a week, they were courting the former Edison man. As Westinghouse explained, “If the Tesla patents are broad enough to control the alternating motor business, then Westinghouse Electric Company cannot afford to have others own the patents.”
While it’s not known just how much Westinghouse paid Tesla for the patents, it was definitely a fortune. Some estimates are as high as a million dollars. Additionally, Tesla was to receive $2.50 per watt produced from his motors. (Although he’d later give up the royalties for the sake of helping beat DC as the War of the Currents got totally out of hand.)
Now, the Edison Electric Light Company and the Westinghouse Electric Light Company may have been the two most well-known, but they were by no means the only electric companies at the time. There were dozens of electric companies across North America competing on the same turf, supplying electrical power, and producing lightbulbs and motors. After consolidating many of his own companies, Edison also began taking over smaller competitors. In 1892, these mergers formed the new company Edison General Electric – or, as we know it today, GE.
It was this series of mergers that eventually ended the War of the Currents. At the same time as the corporate structure was snowballing, many of the managers and shareholders of its subsidiaries were turning toward AC because they knew it was simply better. And once GE was finally consolidated, Edison was pushed out.
Over the next 30 years, the western world was gradually electrified – electric plants were constructed; transformers and power lines were erected; homeowners and business owners had electric wiring installed in their walls; and new electrical appliances were invented, using AC motors. It was a new world that Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse all deserve credit for creating.
What I find most significant about this point in history is that the world they created essentially replaced a world that was already industrialized. The system of electric lighting replaced an already industrial system of gas lighting. Dynamos delivering power through copper wires replaced an already industrial system of steam engines delivering power through belt apparatuses.
And think about that for a second: More than a century after James Watt patented his steam engine, we are now seeing technology emerge that will soon make the steam engine obsolete. But electrical technology was not alone in this. Because during these same years, a totally new kind of engine was coming onto the scene, powered by a new form of energy. The Internal Combustion Engine and Petroleum: Next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
---
Don’t forget to come back later this month to learn about the life and times of Nikola Tesla in my bonus episode with fellow podcaster Stephen Kotowych.
Thanks again for listening.