Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Author:Jill Jonnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588360007
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

Having emerged from the shadows, Thomas Edison did not retreat again. He now proceeded to use the full force of his monumental fame and prestige to persuade the public and politicians that there was safe electricity, which was his—low-voltage DC, whose transmission lines were safely buried—and dangerous electricity—high-voltage AC, which was carried on open wires. His goal: Such public fear of AC that it would be legally banned from use in the United States. He would thereby eliminate Westinghouse from the field and recover his own company’s primacy, which was faltering. Predictably, the next battlefields for the escalating War of the Electric Currents were the state legislatures, where Edison and Brown hoped to ruin Westinghouse by governmental bans against high-voltage electricity.

The first clash was at Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Old South. Westinghouse hired powerful lawyers and one of Edison’s longtime enemies, Professor Henry Morton of the Stevens Institute of Technology, to serve as an expert. On February 12, 1890, Edison himself appeared as the first witness to testify before the Virginia State Senate. The hearing room was packed with many men and women craning for a glimpse of America’s most beloved inventor. Edison’s worsening deafness made it hard for him to hear and, thus, to answer the committee’s questions. The famously witty raconteur was not as eloquent as hoped. Edison was followed by Professor Morton, who long ago had very publicly pooh-poohed Edison’s invention of the light bulb. Now, Morton denigrated his old enemy on new grounds, asserting that AC was, contrary to Edison’s alarmist views, a perfectly benign force when handled responsibly.

But the most compelling witnesses turned out to be the local arc-lighting men, who rushed to defend their flourishing businesses from these battling Yankees. Some were even sons of the old Confederacy and thus gained instant sympathy. “The first of these gentlemen who was called upon had but one leg and used a crutch…. He expressed himself fluently and with great force…. In closing, he derided the suggestion that 3,000 volts was dangerous and exclaimed, ‘Why gentlemen, the pennyroyal bulls of Fairfax County are far more dangerous than that current.’”26 The Westinghouse men quickly saw that here were their best allies, far more persuasive to state representatives than eminent northerners such as Thomas Edison or Professor Morton. The Edison people had failed to take into account the powerful arc light lobby, for almost every American city of any size now had some sections with arc lights. Those local companies would be destroyed by a high-voltage ban. The Edison DC forces would lose in Virginia, but this did not deter Edison and Brown from pressing on, presenting their case—sometimes illustrated by Brown’s ghoulish dog shows—in other states and Canada, determined to shut down AC via state legislatures.

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