The First Edison Central Station- 2

The First Edison Central Station- 2

 [11] For description of feeder patent see Appendix.

It should be borne in mind that from the outset Edison had determined upon installing

underground conductors as the only permanent and satisfactory method for the

distribution of current from central stations in cities; and that at Menlo Park he laid out

and operated such a system with about four hundred and twenty-five lamps. The

underground system there was limited to the immediate vicinity of the laboratory and was

somewhat crude, as well as much less complicated than would be the network of over

eighty thousand lineal feet, which he calculated to be required for the underground

circuits in the first district of New York City. At Menlo Park no effort was made for

permanency; no provision was needed in regard to occasional openings of the street for

various purposes; no new customers were to be connected from time to time to the mains,

and no repairs were within contemplation. In New York the question of permanency was

of paramount importance, and the other contingencies were sure to arise as well as

conditions more easy to imagine than to forestall. These problems were all attacked in a

resolute, thoroughgoing manner, and one by one solved by the invention of new and

unprecedented devices that were adequate for the purposes of the time, and which are

embodied in apparatus of slight modification in use up to the present day.

Just what all this means it is hard for the present generation to imagine. New York and all

the other great cities in 1882, and for some years thereafter, were burdened and darkened

by hideous masses of overhead wires carried on ugly wooden poles along all the main

thoroughfares. One after another rival telegraph and telephone, stock ticker, burglaralarm,

and other companies had strung their circuits without any supervision or

restriction; and these wires in all conditions of sag or decay ramified and crisscrossed in

every direction, often hanging broken and loose-ended for months, there being no official

compulsion to remove any dead wire. None of these circuits carried dangerous currents;

but the introduction of the arc light brought an entirely new menace in the use of

pressures that were even worse than the bully of the West who "kills on sight," because

this kindred peril was invisible, and might lurk anywhere. New poles were put up, and the

lighting circuits on them, with but a slight insulation of cotton impregnated with some

"weather-proof" compound, straggled all over the city exposed to wind and rain and

accidental contact with other wires, or with the metal of buildings. So many fatalities

occurred that the insulated wire used, called "underwriters," because approved by the

insurance bodies, became jocularly known as "undertakers," and efforts were made to

improve its protective qualities. Then came the overhead circuits for distributing

electrical energy to motors for operating elevators, driving machinery, etc., and these,

while using a lower, safer potential, were proportionately larger. There were no wires

underground. Morse had tried that at the very beginning of electrical application, in

telegraphy, and all agreed that renewals of the experiment were at once costly and

foolish. At last, in cities like New York, what may be styled generically the "overhead

system" of wires broke down under its own weight; and various methods of underground

conductors were tried, hastened in many places by the chopping down of poles and wires

as the result of some accident that stirred the public indignation. One typical tragic scene

was that in New York, where, within sight of the City Hall, a lineman was killed at his

work on the arc light pole, and his body slowly roasted before the gaze of the excited

populace, which for days afterward dropped its silver and copper coin into the alms-box

nailed to the fatal pole for the benefit of his family. Out of all this in New York came a

board of electrical control, a conduit system, and in the final analysis the Public Service

Commission, that is credited to Governor Hughes as the furthest development of utility

corporation control.