The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Author:Henry Schlesinger
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Storage Batteries, Electricity, Science, Design and Construction, Electric Batteries - Design and Construction - History, General, Electrical, Storage Batteries - Design and Construction - History, Power Resources, Electric Batteries, History
ISBN: 0061442933
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

EDISON WAS NOT THE FIRST to light a city, though he was the best marketer of city lighting. Two years before he revved up the dynamos for this first power plant on Pearl Street in Manhattan, another firm, the Brush Arc Lighting Company, installed more than twenty arc lights in the city to light a street at its own expense. It was a neat promotion, but no match for Edison. With backing from J. P. Morgan, Edison was soon in business, installing stand-alone generators to light high-profile locations, such as the New York Stock Exchange, Chicago’s Academy of Music, and even shop windows. Within a few years he installed more than 300 of these generators across the country.

This didn’t mean Edison was retreating from his original position on central power; rather, he was promoting lighting by the most efficient means available. In today’s marketing parlance, he positioned electricity as “upmarket” and exciting. In lower Manhattan, he supplied a fashionable theater called Niblo’s Garden with battery-powered bulbs that dancers wore as part of their costumes. To Edison and others working in the field, anything that put electrical lighting in the view of the general public was a good thing. The store windows and signs that Edison lit in large cities were not just selling the products of their sponsors, but the concept of electric lighting as well.

Just as the telegraph networks had been scaled down to doorbells and hotel annunciators, electric lighting, too, was scaled down. In Europe and the United States it was possible to rent electric lighting for special events. By the 1880s catered electricity came complete with strings of electric lightbulbs and lead storage batteries to power them. Party hosts negotiated with the company as to how many lights they wanted and how long they wanted them lit. Trained electricians, schooled in the mysterious arts of the technology, tended the lighting arrangements. Feasting and dancing under the battery-powered luminescence was viewed as the height of modernity and fashion. The power was supplied via large lead acid storage batteries provided by companies such as the New York Isolated Accumulator Company and the Electric Storage Battery Company (known as EPS), which made lighting the balls of the rich something of a specialty. No doubt today such gatherings would be candlelit.

The 1880s also saw the formation of the Electric Girl Light Company based in New York City. For a fee, party hosts could rent young ladies decorated with electric lights powered by small batteries. The company’s launch was described with a bit of wit in the New York Times. “The Electric Girl Lighting Company will furnish a beautiful girl of fifty or one hundred candle power, who will be on duty from dusk till midnight—or as much later as may be desired,” the story in the Times enthused.

This girl will remain seated in the hall until someone rings the front doorbell. She will then turn on her electric light, open the door, and admit the visitor and light him into the reception room.

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