If you ask people about Thomas Edison, they nearly always come up with the light bulb. But in truth, that’s just the start of it.
In 1878 on a vacation with a group of scientist friends in the Rocky Mountains, he was struck by a thought of one of them, Professor George Barker, that he might look at the possibility of producing light electrically. Gas lighting was the standard at that time.
The existing electrical system, the arc light originally developed by Humphry Davy in 1808, was “too bright and too big”, wrote Edison. “What we wished for was little lights, and a distribution of them in people’s houses in a manner similar to gas.”
It is clear that from the start Edison envisioned the whole thing - from the generation of the electricity, through its distribution, to the lamps and fittings themselves, together with necessary fuse systems. So many parts of this system needed either to be invented from scratch, or to have adaptations made to existing inventions.
In developing the electric lamp, a key problem was that the early filaments tested were both too expensive and burned out far too quickly – in less than ten minutes. Over time they tested more than 7,500 materials. “Finally, I carbonized a strip of bamboo from a Japanese fan, and saw that I was on the right track,” wrote Edison. Now they had to establish which strain of bamboo would be best suited for the purpose. It was in the end in Japan that they found exactly what they were looking for. It gave 900 hours of continuous light.
In parallel, Edison built a glass-blowing plant at his labs at Menlo Park in New Jersey, installing the most advanced vacuum equipment. He calculated the size and cost of using copper mains, worked on an improved dynamo, driven by steam and producing a steady 110 volts, created a system for sending power from the generators, through feeder wires, to distribution points, and from there to individual streets and buildings.
Having got the whole system up and running, Edison first provided the complete lighting system for a newly-built ship, the SS Columbia. Then he had eight miles of underground electric mains laid at Menlo Park, lighting the houses in the village – together with lamp posts across the fields for streets that did not yet exist.
He invited the city council of Manhattan to come and observe this amazing phenomenon, and they were persuaded that this could all work. So Edison turned his attention to Manhattan, moving his headquarters there and laying eighteen miles of underground electrical mains. “I saw every box poured and every connection made on the whole job,” he said. “There was nobody else who could superintend it. I used to sleep nights on piles of pipes at the station.” On September 4th, 1882, the lights were switched on.
Edison was thirty five. The world was never to be the same again.
In 1878 on a vacation with a group of scientist friends in the Rocky Mountains, he was struck by a thought of one of them, Professor George Barker, that he might look at the possibility of producing light electrically. Gas lighting was the standard at that time.
The existing electrical system, the arc light originally developed by Humphry Davy in 1808, was “too bright and too big”, wrote Edison. “What we wished for was little lights, and a distribution of them in people’s houses in a manner similar to gas.”
It is clear that from the start Edison envisioned the whole thing - from the generation of the electricity, through its distribution, to the lamps and fittings themselves, together with necessary fuse systems. So many parts of this system needed either to be invented from scratch, or to have adaptations made to existing inventions.
In developing the electric lamp, a key problem was that the early filaments tested were both too expensive and burned out far too quickly – in less than ten minutes. Over time they tested more than 7,500 materials. “Finally, I carbonized a strip of bamboo from a Japanese fan, and saw that I was on the right track,” wrote Edison. Now they had to establish which strain of bamboo would be best suited for the purpose. It was in the end in Japan that they found exactly what they were looking for. It gave 900 hours of continuous light.
In parallel, Edison built a glass-blowing plant at his labs at Menlo Park in New Jersey, installing the most advanced vacuum equipment. He calculated the size and cost of using copper mains, worked on an improved dynamo, driven by steam and producing a steady 110 volts, created a system for sending power from the generators, through feeder wires, to distribution points, and from there to individual streets and buildings.
Having got the whole system up and running, Edison first provided the complete lighting system for a newly-built ship, the SS Columbia. Then he had eight miles of underground electric mains laid at Menlo Park, lighting the houses in the village – together with lamp posts across the fields for streets that did not yet exist.
He invited the city council of Manhattan to come and observe this amazing phenomenon, and they were persuaded that this could all work. So Edison turned his attention to Manhattan, moving his headquarters there and laying eighteen miles of underground electrical mains. “I saw every box poured and every connection made on the whole job,” he said. “There was nobody else who could superintend it. I used to sleep nights on piles of pipes at the station.” On September 4th, 1882, the lights were switched on.
Edison was thirty five. The world was never to be the same again.
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