The Wizard of Menlo Park (17 page)

In conception, it was clever; in implementation, it fell short of ideal. On the first evening when the light was turned on, there was a flash, followed by a fire that quickly engulfed the desk and spread across the rug before being put out. When Johnson was summoned to the house the next morning, he was shown into the library, where charred debris was piled in a heap. He expected that when Morgan appeared, he would angrily announce that the services of Edison Electric were no longer needed.

“Well?” Morgan stood in the doorway, with Mrs. Morgan standing behind him, signaling Johnson with a finger across her lips not to launch into elaborate explanations. Johnson cast a doleful eye at the disaster in the room and remained silent.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Morgan asked. Johnson said the fault was his own and that he would personally reinstall everything, ensuring that it would be done properly.

“All right. See that you do.” Morgan turned and left. The eager purchaser of first-generation technology handled setbacks with equanimity. “I hope that the Edison Company appreciates the value of my house as an experimental station,” he would later say. A new installation with second-generation equipment worked well, and Morgan held a reception for four hundred guests to show off his electric lights. The event led some guests to place their own orders for similar installations. Morgan also donated entire systems to St. George’s Church and to a private school, dispatching Johnson to oversee the installation as a surprise to the headmistress. The family biographer compared Morgan’s gifts of electrical power plants to his sending friends baskets of choice fruit.

Every such gift basket sent by Morgan represented a mix of good and bad news for his supplier, Edison Electric. Keeping its most important investor happy was good; diffusing the company name into places likely to impress influential individuals was also good. But the self-contained plants were a distraction that required a diversion of precious talent and diffusion of focus while the main project, the centralized station at Pearl Street, was still unfinished. Outside of the New York City area, Edison Electric had obtained contracts to build centralized systems in other municipalities whose officials were willing to believe that the technology had been proven adequate in the demonstrations, without waiting for the real-world test in New York. In Appleton, Wisconsin, for example, the lighting system had been purchased by a local industrialist who was so thoroughly sold on the technology during a fishing trip with an Edison salesman that he had placed an order without even seeing a demonstration. It could have been ready for operation before New York’s Pearl Street, but Edison forbade its operators from progressing beyond the test stage so that Pearl Street would receive the publicity from being first.

By August 1882, the underground conductors for the Pearl Street district were in place, and all that remained was to connect the street mains with the individual buildings, rewire the interior fixtures, and install meters. The very last step was the inspection of each customer’s premises by the city’s Board of Underwriters, a slow process as it had only one inspector. Kinks in the system were ironed out by tests that covered different portions of the district. By the end of the month, service to a few customers had begun unofficially. Though not all portions of the district had received underwriter approval, Edison decided the time had arrived for an official beginning. On the afternoon of 4 September 1882, he, Bergmann, Kruesi, and a few other Edison Electric staff members went to the offices of J. P. Morgan in the Drexel Building at Broad and Wall Streets. At 3:00
P.M
., a switch was ceremoniously thrown, and Edison’s electric lights came to life.

No throng of reporters was on hand to commemorate the event. It received the most complete coverage from the
New York Times,
but that was to be expected: The
Times
itself received service in the Times Building for the first time—a long-anticipated dividend from Edison’s decision to place the first central station where it was. The light was described as superior to that of gas by “men who have battered their eyes sufficiently by years of night work to know the good and bad points of a lamp,” said the
Times.
The comparison between electric and gaslight favored the former, but the differences were subtle. The shades on the electric light fixtures made them resemble gas fixtures, and “nine people out of ten would not have known the rooms were lighted by electricity, except that the light was more brilliant and a hundred times steadier.” The newspaper had not fully committed to switching to electric lights—only fifty-two of a possible four hundred or so lights in the building had been electrified—so the first evening of service did not mark a clean, dramatic beginning of a new era.

The official beginning was covered more objectively by the
New York Herald,
which itself used five hundred incandescent bulbs in its offices in the evening, but these were supplied by power from its own plant, the largest on-site power plant in the city. Its report was a positive one, noting that the Pearl Street machinery worked well and about three thousand Edison Electric customers were ready to receive service, out of five thousand when all of the installations in the district were completed. Some customers were “a trifle disappointed at first” when they saw the soft electric light, but supposedly soon realized that a softer light was best for interior lighting and would be easiest on the eyes.

The
Herald
reporter portrayed the moment as a satisfying denouement to a long-running drama involving unfulfilled promises and a loud chorus of skeptics. After recounting the various difficulties that had slowed the realization of the vision, the story said “many people shook their heads at [the] failure of the promised radiance and believed something was amiss.” Edison and his company had persevered nonetheless and now “the Edison light had a very fair degree of success.” This was the most generous review that the new service received.

The launch of commercial service was not criticized so much as it was greeted with a yawn. It was not regarded by contemporaries as the red-letter date in the history of progress that would be featured in the textbooks assigned to later generations. Most of those people who the
Herald
said had shaken their heads skeptically no longer took an interest in the venture. It had taken four long years after Edison’s announcement in 1878 about inventing a new electric light to bring the complete system into operation. By 1882, the flighty public had moved on to other diversions. The technical community had had their doubts about the feasibility of the system, but demonstrations and awards in London and Paris had eliminated their interest at the same time that the doubts were removed. The only group that had cause to pay close attention was the small group of Edison Electric investors, and they could not yet relax because they still did not know whether this novel system would turn out to be profitable.

At the time of the first announcement in 1878, Edison had painted a picture of electric lights in houses that also included electric meters. After a few weeks of experiments, Edison had declared that he did not think it necessary to measure the amount of electricity used; he proposed instead a simpler system, charging a flat rate for every light fixture (which he anachronistically referred to as a “burner”). “If I find that this works an injustice,” he said, “why I shall try to get up a meter, but I fear it will be very hard to do it.” Planning for flat-rate pricing had ended almost immediately, however, and he returned to working on a chemical meter. Reading the meter involved removing a metal plate and taking it to the central station to be weighed—measuring the quantity of zinc that had been deposited on it indicated the amount of current that had passed through. Characteristically, Edison announced that he had completed work on the meter well before he actually had. But his design eventually did turn out well; the mechanism was simple and accurate. To ensure that it worked well in winter, too, a lightbulb was added below the bottles that held the chemical solution, providing heat to keep them from freezing. The only shortcoming of the chemical meter, and it was not a small one, was that the customer could not verify its accuracy and had to trust the company that its reading was correct.

Edison Electric did not charge for its service the first four months. Its initial customers were treated to a beta test, offered without charge while bugs were identified and eliminated. Short circuits were difficult to track down, especially in the underground feeders. Often employees at the station had no way of identifying the location of the problem, other than to walk the streets, looking for smoke coming up from the paving stones.

Edison Electric had done everything it could to make it easy for prospective customers in its Pearl Street district to switch from gas to electric lighting. It had wired the homes and businesses of its customers for free, and provided bulbs without charge. It also guaranteed that its electric lights would be cheaper than gas. Still, it proved difficult to enlist the cautious prospects who had not signed up before service started. Some customers seemed to Edison determined to “prevaricate” when demanding discounted rates, claiming that their electricity bill was greater than their gas bill had been.

Some of the early customers expressed appreciation of Edison Electric’s inaugural service. One such customer in the liquor business put in an order for 250 lights, placing one light in each of 250 barrels of cheap whiskey, believing that the light took “the shudder out of it.” He was always prompt in paying his bill.

J. P. Morgan was not so cheerful about his own bill, however. He complained to Edison that the meter was inaccurate, favoring Edison Electric. Edison was unwilling to concede any problem with his meter and outlined a method of checking its accuracy, to which Morgan agreed. Cards were printed and hung on every fixture in Drexel, Morgan and Company’s offices, which noted the number of bulbs in each fixture and the time they were to be turned on and off each day. At the end of the month, a clerk collected the cards and calculated the total number of lamp hours consumed. When the number was compared with the bill, the results confirmed the overcharge. Morgan was happy, Edison was not. Edison suggested that they continue the test for a second month. When it yielded similar results, he was nonplussed. Determined to uncover a problem at Drexel, Edison visited the offices, inspected the wires and fixtures, and reviewed the cards recording usage. He then asked that the janitor be summoned. Upon questioning him, Edison discovered that he used the electric lights while he worked but did not record the hours—no one had asked him to. The test was run another month, with the janitor’s participation. With his hours added to the total, the calculated sum came within a few cents of the amount based upon the meter. Morgan was said to have been pleased to find that the meter stood up better to interrogation than others whom he suspected of bilking him.

The story—a parable—was retold with pride many times by Edison and his associates. The lesson it was intended to impart was that Edison Electric had begun its service in an exemplary way. The system worked, and worked well. Judged on its technical merits, the accomplishment was no less than what the company claimed. But as a business that intended to operate in the black, it was less impressive. For once, this could not be blamed on Edison’s inattention to business considerations. He had not pursued the light for the sake of intellectual curiosity; his interest in electric light was nakedly commercial. He had entered the field because of his belief that he could produce a profitable service superior to gas and to the other electric light entrepreneurs. Prior to the start of Pearl Street’s service, he could only estimate and guess and hope, filling notebooks with speculative figures. The definitive answers could be obtained only when real customers paid real money for what he offered. The initial data produced by actual service were disappointing. At the time the company began assessing charges, it had a modest number of 231 customers. It operated at a loss.

Before the switch had been thrown at the Pearl Street station in 1882, Edison had been consumed with the work, technical and nontechnical, necessary to launch the service. But with consummation of the goal, and with it, the conquering of the major technical challenges, his psychological state changed just enough to break his concentration. He had said the previous year that he planned to begin work “immediately” on a second district in Manhattan, bounded by Twenty-fourth and Thirty-fourth Streets, excited at the thought of supplying electricity that would replace not only forty-two thousand gas jets but would also power forty-four hundred sewing machines. But he had not started work on it then, nor could he do so when Pearl Street service began, not when the business had yet to be proven as sound as the technology upon which it was based.

Edison had launched the service believing he could move easily between laboratory and front office, going wherever outstanding problems needed his attention. Two months after Edison Electric began collecting from its first customers, Edison told a reporter that he was going “to be simply a business man for a year,” taking a “long vacation” from inventing. And when he did return to the lab, he said, he would give his attention wholly to electricity; “no more phonographs or things of that kind.”

Acting as “simply a business man” did not satisfy him, however, nor could he take pride in seeing the company prosper. After a year, Pearl Street had merely doubled its customer base to 455 and was still running at a loss. To Edison’s credit, he acknowledged the necessity of bringing in a professional manager, offering Charles Chinnock $10,000 if he succeeded in making the Pearl Street operation profitable. Chinnock was able to do so within the second year of operation. According to company legend, Edison paid Chinnock the promised bonus out of his own pocket.

Expansion in New York proceeded slowly. The uptown station that Edison the year before had claimed that he was about to begin work on was not constructed that year, or the year after. The second district, based at a station on Twenty-sixth Street, did not commence service until 1888, six years later. Coverage in the original downtown district was not expanded until 1891.