The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeberg

Author:Ernest Freeberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

Cutting down poles and wires on Broadway. The New York Times reported that “after a long and tedious fight . . . New Yorkers were about to see one of their fondest dreams realized.”

Burying wires in New York City, 1889.

After that dire warning, Edison offered a self-serving solution to this problem, urging the city to ban all high-powered alternating-current (AC) wires, above or below ground, and to replace them with safer wires that carried low-voltage direct current. In short, Edison suggested that all companies should be made to use the system he had developed, one that relied on a force “so feeble that the wires, even at the point of the generator itself, may be grasped by the naked hand without the slightest effect.” In this, Edison took aim not only at the arc-light companies but also at a new and serious rival in the light and power business, the central stations being developed by the Westinghouse and the Thomson-Houston companies. Their systems generated high-voltage alternating current and used transformers to step down the power for safe use by each customer. Already cutting into Edison’s central station business by 1889, these AC systems were more efficient and flexible, and could serve customers across much larger areas. Edison had considered but rejected the use of AC, concluding that it posed insurmountable technical problems and could never be made safe. Citing “nearly one hundred deaths” across the country caused by arc-light wires, he declared this an “unanswerable argument” for banning all systems that used alternating current.22

Outraged by Edison’s attempt to use the death of John Feeks as a way to damn their high-tension currents, George Westinghouse and his partners issued public statements to the city Board of Electrical Control, denouncing Edison’s system as “dangerous in the extreme” and declaring his claims about AC power to be “grossly incorrect and even absolutely false.” They challenged Edison to a technical showdown, a public contest on the relative merits of direct and alternating current, to be judged by a panel of disinterested experts. The controversy turned farcical when an Edison supporter challenged Westinghouse to a “duel by electricity”; he would take increasingly large jolts of Edison’s direct current, while he dared Westinghouse to try the same with alternating current. The first to “cry enough” would have to “publicly admit his error.”23

Few in the public could follow the heated, technical, and contradictory claims made by the rival companies and their paid experts, or the bickering between the city inspectors and the arc-light companies. The newspapers continued to print each round of accusations and joined citizens in muttering over this “electric light muddle.” That winter the fear of electrocution tingled the spines of many New Yorkers, a palpable anxiety about “being slaughtered without notice by an invisible agent.” As a journalist put it, “one scarcely ventures to put a latch key in his own door.” The experience left some influential voices wondering if electricity could ever be properly controlled. “Its laws are apparently ill understood,” warned the

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