At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

However, when Edison’s first practical installation did come, it was far more prominent and therefore more lastingly significant. Edison wired a whole district of lower Manhattan, around Wall Street, to be powered by a plant installed in two semiderelict buildings on Pearl Street. Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1881–82, Edison laid fifteen miles of cable and fanatically tested and retested his system. Not all went smoothly. Horses behaved skittishly in the vicinity until it was realized that leaking electricity was making their horseshoes tingle. Back at Edison’s workshops, several of his men lost teeth to mercury poisoning from overexposure to Sprengel’s mercury pump. But all the problems were finally resolved, and on the afternoon of September 4, 1882, Edison, standing in the office of the financier John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan, threw a switch that illuminated eight hundred electric bulbs in the eighty-five businesses that had signed up for his scheme. Where Edison truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The lightbulb was a wondrous thing but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into. Edison and his tireless workers had to design and build the entire system from scratch, from power stations to cheap and reliable wiring, to lamp stands and switches. Within months, Edison had set up no fewer than 334 small electrical plants all over the world; within a year or so, his plants were powering thirteen thousand lightbulbs. Cannily, he ...