It was big news, then, when Father Joseph Neri, a professor at San Francisco’s Saint Ignatius College, installed a small battery-powered electric light in his window in 1871; slightly less than a decade later, in 1879, San Francisco already had the nation’s first-ever central arc lighting station. This system consisted of two dynamos (an early kind of electric generator) powered by a coal-fired steam engine at Fourth and Market Streets. It may have been tiny, lighting only twenty shockingly bright lamps, but it was a grid.
