Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

In the last decades of the 19^th Century, inventors and industrialists battled for dominance in the emerging market of electric energy. One of the major fronts of this conflict was the choice of DC (direct current) or AC (alternating current). Jill Jonnes explains the history of this pioneering age of electricity in Empires of Light.

Thomas Edison was a major player in the early days of electrification. He is known for developing a commercially viable incandescent light. The innovation that made his light commercially successful was that he developed an entire system for generating a distributing electric energy to make those lights work.

Edison designed a DC system, and he was a major proponent of DC. A weakness of his system was distance. He could only supply power over a distance of about a mile. If large areas were to be lit, a power station would be needed every mile. This made it hard for Edison to market the system for community lighting, though he successfully sold many systems to manufacturers, commercial establishments and very wealthy homeowners. In spite of the limitations, he built a system to light a portion of Manhattan; his Pearl Street station began powering lights in 1882.

Though it was not obvious at first, it soon became clear that high voltage AC could be transmitted over very great distances. The invention of transformers in Europe provided a way for voltage to be stepped up for transmission and stepped back down to levels appropriate for lighting.

George Westinghouse adopted the AC system. The advantages of AC soon make Westinghouse Electric Company a major competitor with Edison. Even Edison’s own salesman began to ask for an AC system to sell, though he was reluctant to have any involvement with AC.

Edison believed that AC and the high voltage used for its transmission were dangerous. He also had business and personal reasons to oppose the introduction of rival systems. He attacked the use of AC. He even went so far as to aid an AC opponent who successfully lobbied to make electrocution by AC power the official means of executing condemned prisoners in the state of New York.

Westinghouse pressed on and won high profile contracts that proved the safety and efficiency of his AC equipment. Notably, he had the major lighting contract for the White City of Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893. He also won the contract to build generators for the hydropower plant at Niagara Falls. The promise of inexpensive power drew major manufacturers to the area before the plant starting operating in 1895. This surprised the investors, who had though the city of Buffalo would be the target market.

Though transformers made AC a very viable system, it had other technological hurdles, such as difficulty powering motors. Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla solved this problem with his induction motor. Like Edison, Tesla invented an entire system for supplying electrical power to his motors, which could also easily accommodate incandescent and arc lighting. The Niagara Falls system was based on Tesla’s patented technology.

Tesla went on to invent and explore the potential of other electrical devices, notably fluorescent lights and radios. Unfortunately, he was never able to create commercial products from these later works. He fell on hard times and was quite poor for many of the last years of his life. He died in 1943.

After the formation of General Electric, which largely pushed him out of the management of the company, Thomas Edison moved on to other things. His later ventures were of mixed success, but his work on the phonograph and improvements to motion picture helped to launch the American entertainment industry. Edison passed away in 1931, semi-retired in Florida.

Westinghouse continued to grow his electrical empire. After the Panic of 1907, in which a banking crisis shook the economy, investors forced him out of the management of Westinghouse Electric. He had four other companies to run. He didn’t care for the way Wall Street did business so he got involved in Progressive politics. He died in 1914.

Jonnes includes a chapter that is a very good, brief introduction to the history of electrical science. She describes the discoveries of William Gilbert, Stephen Gray, Andreas Cuneus, Benjamin Franklin, Alessandro Volta, Sir Humphrey Davy, Hans Christian Oersted, André Marie Ampère, Zénobe-Théophie Gramme and Michael Faraday.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York: Random House, 2003.

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

For those of us who can remember a time not so long ago when we didn’t have telephones (computers really) in our pockets and the Internet was something few were connected to, even of those few who had computers in their homes, the current state of communication technology can seem revolutionary. This is tame compared to the changes wrought by technology that seems commonplace to us now. In The Age of Edison, Ernest Freeburg describes the amazing changes brought about in the 50 years following the introduction of electric lighting.

Though Thomas Edison is a huge figure in electric lighting, especially in the United States, Freeburg is careful to avoid the myth of the solitary inventor bringing an idea out of thin air. Many people were working on electric lighting.  Edison’s incandescent bulb had advantages over other lights, especially because he conceived of a complete lighting system with power sources, distribution and controls in addition to lamps. There were predecessors in the field, so Edison was working in a social context of seeking to provide superior lighting.

These competitors were not only other electric light inventors, but also older technologies, especially gas. Because electric power did not reach rural areas until the 1930s, much older artificial lights, like kerosene lamps, persisted even as electric lights became common in middle-class urban homes.

The first customers of electric lights were not homeowners, but businesses and cities who were already customers of lighting systems. These lights transformed cities, which various economic forces were causing to grow. From public lighting, electric systems were adapted to retail businesses, arts, entertainment, and science.

The early electric lighting market was competitive, unregulated, and wild. Electrocutions and fires were too common and widely publicized. Light companies were forced to improve safety by a political movement that supported municipal government control and ownership, and insurance company interests. This led to electric codes, the founding of the Underwriter’s Laboratory (UL) in 1893, college programs in electrical engineering, and the unionization of electrical workers.

Commercial interests dominated the early development of electric lighting. This was not the only reason electric lights had critics, but it was a significant reason. Intellectuals criticized the unartistic randomness of commercial messages seeking outshine each other. They were not especially successful in curbing electric lights, but the industry began to mature in this context and develop more attractive, effective and efficient lighting systems that were adapted to uses in homes and businesses.

Freeburg wraps up with Henry Ford’s 1929 jubilee of the invention of the incandescent electric lamp. In 50 years, the invention transformed almost every part of American life, especially urban life that was quickly becoming more common as people left farms for opportunities in cities. One of the telling things is that the event was broadcast on radio. In 1879, people huddled around candles and lanterns if they had to have light when the sun went down, but well within the span of a lifetime electric lights became dominant and electric appliances were common enough that radios were in homes and many were able to participate in a distant celebration of a transformative technology. It is hard to imagine how amazing these changes were to the people who experienced them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Freeburg, Ernest. The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America. New York: Penguin, 2013.

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Maury Klein’s book The Power Makers is a history of power from the Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine to the foundations of America’s electric grid.

Unlike many historians who look at the history of electric power, Klein gives a lot of attention to steam. We haven’t had steam engines directly powering industrial plants for decades, but steam turbines are still central to the production of most electricity in the United States. Even nuclear power plants use steam turbines to run their generators, they just use the heat from nuclear reactions rather than from the combustion of coal or natural gas to boil water and heat the steam to more than a thousand degrees.

Klein gives attention to many lesser known names in the history of power. He shows that Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse had rivals other than each other, such as Elihu Thomson. Nikola Tesla is well known as the genius who invented the AC motor, but other engineers helped develop his prototype into a commercial product, such as mathematically talented engineer Benjamin Lamme. Many talented inventors tried their hands at making electric lighting and power systems better. Only some of them had the vision, business sense, good partners and luck to turn their ideas into successful products. Few of them are widely known today.

Electrification had clear, direct effects in industry and transportation. Klein discusses how it’s influence reached into other sectors of the economy. Corporate management and finance changed to meet the needs of a growing new technology. For instance, Edison General Electric was able to take advantage of a new New Jersey law that allowed corporations to own businesses in other states. Electric companies grew, expanded and consolidated through numerous mergers and acquisitions. They had a demand for capital that nearly rivaled the railroads, another transformative technology that had shortly preceded electric power.

As the availability of electricity grew, certain industries were able to grow, too. Some chemical and metals manufacturing required abundant electric power to catalyze chemical reactions or generate the high temperatures of electric furnaces. Manufacturers flocked to Niagara after a lager hydroelectric power station started operation there in 1895.

Klein brings the many thread of his story of power together by reflections on three great fairs: the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the first, a giant steam engine that powered exhibits by means of belts and pulley was a significant attraction. By the second, electricity was on display, and the White City fairground was a model for testing AC power systems. By the 1939 fair, large power utilities of the type we would recognize today were becoming common. By then it was no big deal to flip a switch or pull a lever and get power so, unlike the previous to fairs, no dignitary undertook a show of doing it; the power was on from the start.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

1939 by David Gelernter

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe 

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Klein, Maury. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.