Westinghouse and Edison democratized light, bringing safe, reliable illumination into streets and homes.
The Age of Edison
By Ernest Freeberg
Penguin, 354 pages, $27.95
By DAVID A. PRICE
God said "let there be light," according to Genesis, and there was light. And God called the light "day" and the darkness "night." Light and day remained synonymous, or practically so, from Paleothic times until the 19th century, when the invention of electric light, and the electrical delivery systems that went with it, changed everything. Until then, human activity was severed between the natural cycles of light and dark, helped along, at night, by whatever flickering flames could be coaxed from wood fires, torches, candles, and gas and kerosene lamps. (click below to read more)
"The hunger for more light was not a yearning induced by clever promoters; the dark was, for all of human existence, a palpable and universal obstacle to human happiness," observes University of Tennessee historian Ernest Freeberg in "The Age of Edison." Mr. Freeberg's wide-ranging social history tells the story of the transition to the era of electric light and its complex reception by American society.
The creation of electric light had its earliest roots not in America, Mr. Freeberg reminds us, but in Britain. There, in 1809, the chemist Humphry Davy demonstrated the predecessor to the incandescent light, the electric arc light, in which electricity crossed a gap between two carbon electrodes and formed an intense shining arc. (The arc welding machine, with its glare, is a distant cousin.) Davy then promptly moved on to other work without developing it further. Others stepped in, but even so, electricity remained mostly a lab curiosity for decades. Its widespread use had to await the invention in 1871 of an adequate device for generating current. Until then, electricity was produced from costly batteries.
When arc lights came to urban streets, brighter and cleaner than the gas lamps they replaced, the lighted "white ways" quickly became a symbol of a city's prosperity and progressivity. Among the first was a stretch of Broadway that became known as the Great White Way. Civic boosters across the country pressed for bright thoroughfares for their own localities. Gilded Age reformers saw the lights as a scourge of crime.
Still, arc lights left much to be desired. Indoors, Mr. Freeberg recounts, their strength seemed to magnify wrinkles and blemishes. Moreover, one commentator fretted, their blue tint failed to "show off to advantage the natural beauty of the Anglo-Saxon race." They also produced an annoying hum.
Those shortcomings added up to opportunity for Thomas Edison. Inventors around the world had already created versions of the incandescent bulb, but they had either abandoned their experimental efforts for lack of a practical power source, or their bulbs were too short-lived. When Edison turned his mind to the problem in 1877, aiming for a commercially practical product, he entered a crowded race of aspirants in pursuit of the same goal.
Edison, already the inventor of the phonograph and improvements to the telegraph and telephone, forecast a quick victory—prematurely, it turned out. But his persistence was rewarded. In 1879, after thousands of experiments, he showed visitors to his Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory a working display of around 50 long-lasting incandescent bulbs.
Journalists who saw the display struggled to describe the unfamiliar kind of light. One witness called it "a little globe of sunshine." Another likened it to "a thousand diamond facets." One thing was certain: Incandescents, doing away with both the harshness of arc lights and the flicker and smell of gas lamps, were the lights of the future.
Edison knew, however, that consumers needed more than a bulb; in today's terms, they needed an ecosystem—power plants and a network to deliver the current to homes and offices. In this, Edison was soon in a bitter rivalry with George Westinghouse, whose alternating current vied with Edison's direct current for supremacy. Edison sought to stir up fear of alternating current and campaigned to have it banned for safety's sake. He argued that it created a risk of death to anyone who touched it—which, at the voltages Westinghouse used, was true—and he publicized its effects with demonstrations on unfortunate animals.
Edison ultimately lost the battle of the currents, however, through simple economics: Alternating current could be sent long distances at high voltage, then easily stepped down to the desired level in a transformer before it reached the customer. In contrast, after direct current at low voltage traveled a short distance, it lost energy to the point that it was no longer usable; it thus required numerous local power plants to be built, enough so that no customer would be more than a mile or so from a generator.
The result of Edison's revolution was what Mr. Freeberg calls the "democratization of light." Electric lighting was cheaper than gas, and it was usable by anyone; unlike gas lighting, it required no skill or maintenance once installed. And the revolution reached every sphere of American life. At home, for the first time, one could read in bed at night without taking a chance on setting the house aflame. On a city sidewalk, streetlights, electric signs and lighted shop windows combined to create "the charged sensory experience of modern urban life."
From a distance, city skylines at night became marvels in themselves, what an urban planner in 1904 called "a mighty constellation." At the factory, electric lights amplified the economic revolution of the 19th century by making new, nighttime shift work possible. In science, electric lighting brought more reliable surgery and opened the way to deep-sea exploration.
Like the current that traveled Westinghouse's wires, though, public opinion about electric lights repeatedly changed direction over time. Early enthusiasm turned to alarm as an appalling number of linemen suffered death or serious injury from electrocution—sometimes in front of horrified crowds. A magazine editor noted that convicts sentenced to death could, to achieve the same result, simply be put to work for an electric-light company.
Safety standards improved, but intangible hazards came to the fore. To some, electric lights seemed to interfere with family togetherness by taking away the need to stay together around a shared lamp or hearth. A well-regarded psychologist worried in 1903 that young people were losing their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
Mr. Freeberg's broad research adds up to a vivid social history with parallels for today's technology innovators and for those who wish to increase their number. It underscores the point that the work of Edison and other pioneers of light took place in an unusual setting, a period in which American invention was remarkably active and fertile.
Mr. Freeberg attributes this richness in part to patent laws that favored inventors. He also cites popular literature of the time that brought technical subjects to the curious at all levels of society—perhaps not unlike magazines such as Popular Electronics and Byte that helped to educate tinkerers about the microprocessor in the 1970s. Complementing this literature were scientific societies that "encouraged public interest," he writes, "in the latest breakthroughs in science and technology"—again, perhaps with parallels in groups such as the Homebrew Computer Club that brought a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak into the personal-computer field.
"The Age of Edison" comes at a fitting time, the close of the era of the incandescent light. With climate change and energy efficiency in mind, Congress in 2007 passed a law that will effectively ban the making and importing of incandescent bulbs, replacing them with compact fluorescents, LEDs and other varieties that are costlier or less appealing in the light they cast. When the old stocks of incandescents run out, it may be the end of pleasant illumination at a cheap price—that is, until another Thomas Edison finds a way.
—Mr. Price is the author of "The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company."
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