Even though thousands of arc light systems were burning in American cities, manufactories, and mines before Edison turned the lights on for the staff of the Times and other residents of Wall Street, the Pearl Street Station is where, in the American popular imagination, the electric age began. This is due not so much to the fact that our current grid looks or works like Edison’s first attempt—in many ways it does not—but because parallel circuits changed both the intensity of lighting and the proliferation of bulbs, and both of these have become ordinary to us in the present.
