edison in manhattan--4/8/2026
Today's selection-- from Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes. Moving from Menlo Park, Thomas Edison sets out to conquer New York:
“In February of 1881, Edison and his key staff members began shifting, at long last, into Manhattan, joining the already legendary cacophony of the Empire City, what one guidebook of the era described as "the intense activity and bustle alike visible and audible in all the conditions of its street-life. The crush of carriages, drays, trucks, and other vehicles, private and public, roaring and rattling over the stone-paved streets; the crowds of swiftly moving men walking as if not to lose a second of time, their faces preoccupied and eager; the sidewalks encumbered, without regard to the convenience of pedestrians, with boxes and bales of goods–in a word, the whole aspect of New York in its business portions is a true key to the character of its population, as the most energetic and restless of people. By the end of February, Edison had signed a lease for the handsome former Bishop Mansion at 65 Fifth Avenue, an ornate four-story double brownstone in the city’s most fashionable quarter, just below 14th Street.
“At the highly visible headquarters for the new Edison Electric Illuminating Company, Edison quickly rigged up a steam engine and generator and by mid-April had equipped its tall-ceilinged rooms with numerous ‘electroliers’ (electric chandeliers) and other attractive light fixtures. Illuminated every evening and long in the wee hours, 65 Fifth Avenue was a glorious and radiant new electrical reality, where Edison held court most nights. The back parlor served as his campaign headquarters, complete with a wall-size map of Manhattan and his designated first lighting district. Long before moving into New York, Edison had thoroughly canvassed his prospective ‘first district’ central station electric customers and determined that 1,500 were coal-gas customers using twenty thousand jets. All this was indicated on a map, along with the planned routes of the subways, switches, and so forth. For his new role as businessman, Edison moved up sartorially from his old blue flannel suit to a seedy Prince Albert frock coat. He was in his usual ebullient spirits: ‘We’re up in the world now. I remember ten years ago–I had just come from Boston–I had to walk the streets of New York all night because I hadn’t the price of a bed. And now think of it! I’m to occupy a whole house in Fifth Avenue.’
“Edison certainly liked to promote this Horatio Alger story that predated those popular books, describing himself as arriving in New York as almost penniless youth with a great talent for wireless technology and machines. He happened, so he said, to be in the first days of a lowly job at the Gold Indicator Company, which supplied Wall street via ticker tapes with the fast-changing price of gold, when the equipment ground to a halt. As the officers began to panic, Edison examined the silent machine and observed that the trouble was a broken contact spring. Amid the hysteria, he quickly fixed the problem and was duly promoted to the important position of technician. And so was launched his prosperous career as an inventor and improver of telegraphy equipment. The reality, says Edison scholar Paul Israel, was that while Edison certainly started life with a few advantages, when he first came to Manhattan he was already well connected and had a respectable-not lowly-job as an engineer, and any money problems were short-lived.
“When Edison returned to New York this time, he brought with him many of his main Menlo Park crew, each assigned new and greater responsibilities. In mid-February, John Kruesi, Edison's trusted Swiss mechanic, the man who could fabricate and make almost anything work, had opened the Edison Electric Tube Company at 65 Washington Street. Kruesi was the general in charge of Edison's toughest campaign-the manufacture and then physical installation (beneath some of Manhattan's busiest, filthiest thoroughfares) of fourteen miles of underground distribution cables and wires. He would command a big gang of Irish laborers, many of whom viewed electricity as some evil sprite. They would share the nighttime streets with the city's denizens of the dark, including the great army of rag pickers and their dog-pulled wooden carts, each licensed to root through the daily refuse for salvageable cloth. Kruesi's longtime Menlo Park assistant, Charles Dean, was put in charge of the all-important Edison Machine Works, located in an old ironworks building at 104 Goerck Street near the East River docks on the crowded and noisome Lower East Side. Here in this grimy setting would be perfected and manufactured the workhorses of the Edison system–the generators. Meanwhile, back at Menlo Park, Francis Upton, the scientist, was running the light bulb factory, now churning out a thousand lights a day. These three enterprises were all organized and financed by Edison or his closest associates
“Even as Edison himself settled into Manhattan, his other right hand man, Charles Batchelor, sailed off to Paris to launch the Edison European branch. Business manager and sometime Edison promoter Edward Johnson headed to England to push the Edison light there. Both were to lay the groundwork for the electrical empire Edison had envisioned from the start. Edison was a famous commercial name already overseas, for he had conducted major European business with his previous inventions. He had existing partners and contacts and now Batchelor and Johnson were to begin launching the famous boss's biggest enterprise yet–central electric stations, as well as isolated or stand-alone electric plants for individual factories or buildings. The Edison Electric Light Company of Europe had already been formed in January of 1880. So even as Edison labored away in Gotham, Charles Batchelor was hard at work in Paris organizing the all-important Edison system display for that summer's International Electrical Exhibition. Across the Channel, Johnson began building a demonstration central station that would light up the centrally located Holborn Viaduct.
“Back in New York, down on Wall Street, Edison's investors were again questioning the necessity–and the ensuing huge expense–of burying the electric wires in ‘subways,’ something Edison had been determined to do from the start. By the 1880s, anyone lifting his or her gaze above street level in the commercial blocks of American cities could barely see the sky for the ugly maze of hundreds of electric wires strung higgledy-piggledy between towering wooden poles. The wires crisscrossed the streets and were festooned from windows and rooftops as if huge crazed spiders had run amok. A range of fast expanding industries now depended upon electricity (most of it still battery produced) –including the telegraph, telephone, stock tickers, fire and burglar alarms, and certain small manufacturers. In any city, numerous companies vied to provide these various services, and where they found customers, they installed more poles-some towering a hundred feet and higher. Firms came and went, but their wires remained, deteriorating, fraying, dropping onto one another, and creating short circuits. However, all these early electric-based services operated on very low voltage direct current derived from large batteries. These wires might cause a shock but would not electrocute a hapless passerby.
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| The Edison Machine Works on Goerck Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan |
“All that changed with the coming of the new outdoor arc lighting in the 1880s. The extremely high voltage alternating current required to operate these lights–as high as 3,500 volts–made their outdoor wires potentially truly perilous. The Brush Electric Company had installed its first lights on Broadway between 14th and 34th Streets at the end of 1880, and their brilliant blue white light soon earned Broadway its sobriquet ‘the Great White Way.’ New York City then contracted with Brush to light more of Broadway and several squares.
“Hotels, theaters, and other public spots installed arc lights. Brush built three central power stations and transmitted its high-power electricity–typically 2,000 to 3,000 volts–on wires strung among the existing low-voltage tangle. Edison wanted nothing to do with these mangled nests of live and abandoned wires and insisted that the Edison system, by burying its wires, would be both safe and reliable. The new Edison system operated on low-voltage direct current, which was efficient and economical only within a half-mile radius of the generator. Beyond the distance, the cost of copper wiring became prohibitive and the energy loss too great. However, Edison prided himself upon the low voltages of his system and believed its buried wires added a great margin of safety for the general public and his customers.
“In late April 1881, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company finally received city permission to begin digging its subways. In the meantime, the company had already wired about fifty first-district homes and office buildings and promised that current would be flowing by the fall, providing them lovely electric light just as the winter gloom closed in. The city's permission came with one deeply worrying caveat: Five city inspectors–to be paid $25 a week by Edison–would monitor progress. Edison envisioned all kinds of trouble aimed mainly at extracting bribes. But in true Tammany ‘do no work’ fashion, the inspectors appeared only on Saturday afternoon to collect their pay. Kruesi quickly broke ground with his Irish street crews, working largely at night when the city's much maligned streetcleaning crews spread out to remove the two to three million pounds of equine manure left behind each day by the city's 150,000 horses. Kruesi soon found that digging down two feet was far more time consuming and arduous than expected. Edison and Kruesi personally had to install the connector boxes located every twenty feet. Worse yet, the suppliers of the copper wiring and the iron pipes (the latter substituting for the original wooden boxes) had stopped delivering. June was slow going, as it rained every day but one. Then, on July 2, the Edison men organizing the evening's subway work heard shocking news: President James Garfield, waiting at the Baltimore and Potomac station for a train to the cool of the New Jersey seaside, had been shot twice in the back by an angry job seeker. Still alive, the president was carefully conveyed to the stifling heat of the White House. The nation prayed that Garfield would survive this terrible attack.
“At the time, Edison was scouting the worst slum streets of his first district, looking for a cheap but capacious building to house the heart and soul of his system-the central generators. That August, with the summer heat exacerbating the usual stench of horse piss and manure, great piles of garbage, and sour beer and sawdust from the ubiquitous bucket shops, Edison purchased 255-57 Pearl Street for $65,000. From this squalid block, Edison's electricity would eventually gently hum forth a half mile in each direction, lighting up the all-important financial district centered on Wall Street and much of newspaper row. ‘The Pearl Street Station,’ Edison later said, ‘was the biggest and most responsible thing I had ever undertaken. It was a gigantic problem, with many ramifications .... All our apparatus, devices and parts were home-devised and home-made. Our men were completely new and without central station experience. What might happen on turning a big current into the conductors under the streets of New York no one could say.’ The Edison dynamos-powered by coal-fired steam engines-produced an initial alternating current electricity that was then gathered from the machine by ‘commutators’ and brushes and turned into a direct current. One of the perennial problems with these early generators was that the constant friction against the commutators and brushes meant regular replacement. Every step of the way, myriad technical problems arose that had to be resolved. Again and again, the starting date was postponed.”
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