Traveling America's Electrified Road to Power Generation

Sep 08 - Buffalo News

In 1879, inventor and self-promoter Thomas Edison strung two copper wires from a small steam-powered dynamo at his Menlo Park laboratory to a curious carbon-coated fiber, sealed in a glass bulb. This was not the first electric light, nor was it necessarily Edison's brainchild. What made it different from the rest is that it worked.

The inexpensive filament, encased in a near vacuum, burned for 170 hours, giving off a steady, pleasing, nonflickering glow. Edison had beaten dozens of rivals in the race to produce a practical incandescent light bulb to replace the expensive and dangerous gas lamp. Within three years, Edison's electric light company had strung underground wires along the paths of gas pipes from his Pearl Street station to more than a thousand electric lamps in Manhattan's Financial District.

Almost overnight, a multimillion-dollar industry was created at a time when $1 million was an outlandish amount of money. Who would have imagined that in less than a decade more than 3 million electric lamps would replace gas lights and kerosene lamps, or that there would be 37 companies producing light bulbs? And who could have predicted that the nation's patent attorneys would be growing rich, litigating the claims and counterclaims generated by the true innovators and the rip-off artists?

But then, who would have imagined in the 1980s, when this newspaper first was produced with the aid of a rudimentary computer and two refrigerator-sized hard drives (a fabulous 300 megabytes each!), that in 25 years, every school kid would be connected to the world through hand-held devices so inexpensive that principals would have to ban them from the classroom?

That's called American invention.

Who knows? Maybe we're only one small breakthrough away from the day when gasoline goes the way of the kerosene lamp.

Maury Klein, who has authored more than a dozen books on American business and invention, steps us through the two major innovations of the 19th century: The harnessing of steam and then the conversion of steam power into electricity, and thus, light. Klein offers a comprehensive, yet readable, analysis of the development of new sources of power through science and entrepreneurship.

The ensuing power revolution changed the Western world beyond imagination and burst across the nation at a pace unheard of in our history. Men made fortunes while others went broke trying.

Buffalo and Niagara Falls played key roles in this revolution, especially in the setting of standards for electrical power distribution across long distances, not to mention the development of the electric chair.

But then, why not? In 1890, one in five people in this nation lived within 400 miles of Buffalo. And according to Bavarian scientist William Siemens, if all the coal output of the world at that moment were burned to produce steam, it would not match the horsepower of Niagara Falls.

Klein characterizes the construction of the power station below the Falls, and the new products and industries it spawned along the upper Niagara River, as "one of the most audacious adventures in American business history."

His book is an amalgam of economics, invention and engineering. The epic battle between Edison's electric light companies and the stubborn George Westinghouse foreshadows today's titanic struggle between Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs. And just as today, the true inventors at the dawn of the age of electricity, men like Nikola Tesla, Werner Von Siemens, Charles Bush, and hundreds of lesser lights are muted in the shadows of the few men adept at turning invention into profit.

Edward Cuddihy is a retired Buffalo News managing editor.

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The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America

By Maury Klein

Bloomsbury

521 pages, $29.99

Originally published by NEWS BOOK REVIEWER.