Edison: A Biography by Matthew Josephson

Author:Matthew Josephson [Josephson, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography & Autobiography, USA, Entrepreneurship, Inventors
ISBN: 1230002341842
Google: T12mDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 40231985
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
Published: 1958-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Mr. Edison’s exhibition is the wonder of the show, and his representative [Johnson] is the prince of showmen. One feels that after an hour with Mr. Johnson that there is only one system and... there is but one Edison and Johnson is his prophet.400

The Edison Electric Lighting Company, Ltd., had been organized in the preceding year with British capital and soon began the construction of what was actually the first commercial incandescent-lighting station in the world, at the Holborn Viaduct. Sir William H. Preece, chief engineer for the Government’s postal and telegraphic departments, had seen the Edison exposition at Paris, and now not only publicly retracted all that he had formerly said against Edison’s lighting projects, but also befriended the British Edison Company by ordering lights for a large part of the great Post Office Building, which was within the power radius of the Holborn Viaduct station. Two newly completed Jumbo generators had been hurriedly shipped out from New York, and from the Holborn Viaduct station they supplied an installation of two thousand lights for commercial use in that quarter of London. An Edison underground main-and-feeder circuit was a notable feature of this installation.

The experience gained by Edison’s lieutenants in London was fully reported to him before he had completed the first New York station. Luckily, Johnson had engaged the knowledgeable Dr. John Hopkinson as a consultant, together with J. Ambrose Fleming. Hopkinson went to work on the “bugs” in the first Jumbo dynamos and made carefully conceived proposals for improving their performance and lowering their internal heat, his exact calculations being forwarded to Edison. After Hopkinson’s valuable work on the dynamo much of the mystery about internal heat and wasteful eddy currents was dissolved.401

The Edison Company, Ltd., began business with high hopes of lighting up all of England’s streets and dwellings. At an early stage of affairs, it had entered suit for infringements of its patents against the Swan United Electric Light Company and soon obtained a preliminary court order for an accounting of lamps made and sold by Swan.402 But late in 1882 Parliament passed an Electric Lighting Act empowering municipalities to buy up street and residential or business lighting systems, after a period of twenty years, at fair market value. The prospects of all private electric light and power companies, therefore, became quite dim, financially speaking. Edison’s English counselors, therefore, advised that it would be best for his company to join forces with Swan’s by an exchange of stock. Swan was a distinguished native son; he had strong financial support; and the nature of his old carbon lamp patents left the outcome of a suit somewhat in doubt.

In the end, Edison seemed disposed to accept the counsels of his attorney, Sir Richard Webster, and other reliable English associates favoring a merger; but a serious stumbling block to negotiations proved to be the proposal of the rival group that the new amalgamated company bear the name of Swan together with that of Edison. Writing his London attorneys in

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