"America's electric age was born at 357 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan when Thomas Edison began operating the city's first central power station. His first dynamo, or generator, was built for the Paris Electrical Exposition of 1881 and began commercial operation at the Pearl Street plant on September 4, 1882.
Competitors had already installed harsh electric arc lights on Broadway from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-Fourth Street and on the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883. By 1890, more than thirty companies were generating or distributing electricity in New York City and Westchester, the territory that would be served by the Consolidated Edison Co.
Financed by J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, Edison perfected a carbon filament that would burn in a glass bulb for as long as forty hours. He incorporated the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York to transform the novelty-a few private residences, like Morgan's, had self-contained power plants - into a commercially viable enterprise dependent on dynamos, voltage regulators, fuses, sockets, meters, switches, and miles of copper wire.
At 3:00 P.M. that September 4, Edison and his board of directors traveled about a half mile to Morgan's Wall Street office. With their watches synchronized, an engineer closed the circuit breaker at the plant; Edison flipped a switch; and the office was bathed in electric light. Under a month later, Edison had fifty-nine customers.
Each of the six dynamos weighed 27 tons-_-the largest ever built at the time and produced enough direct current (100 kilowatts) to power 1,100 lightbulbs. The six giant dynamos (nicknamed Jumbo, after Barnum's elephant) were connected directly to a steam engine and became the prototype for generating power from a central station to distribute electricity to homes, a goal Edison had harbored for four years (blame Edison, too, for the first electric bill, based on his electrolytic meter).
Within a year or two, Edison's company was supplying more than five hundred customers. A fire destroyed the plant in 1890, but Dynamo No. 9 survived and continued operating until 1893. Today it is on exhibition at the Henry Ford historical attraction at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.
The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers describes the Pearl Street plant as the first "complete system of commercial electric lighting and power." The success of Edison's incandescent bulb created a demand for reliable power sources. "It was this demand," the institute concluded, "that led to the construction of the Pearl Street station and launched the modern electric utility industry" by generating reliable power and distributing it efficiently “at a price that competed with gas lighting.”
- TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS - 101 OBJECTS
