Bill Bryson - At Home

Arc lights were way too bright for domestic use. What was needed was a practical domestic filament that would burn with a steady light for long periods. The principle of incandescent lighting had been understood, and in fact conquered, for a surprisingly long time. As early as 1840, seven years before Thomas Edison was even born, Sir William Grove, a lawyer and judge who was also a brilliant amateur scientist with a particular interest in electricity, demonstrated an incandescent lamp that worked for several hours, but nobody wanted a lightbulb that cost a lot to make and only worked for a few hours, so Grove didn’t pursue its development. In Newcastle, a young pharmacist and keen inventor named Joseph Swan saw a demonstration of Grove’s light and made some successful experiments of his own, but the technology was lacking to get a really good vacuum in a bulb. Without that vacuum, any filament would burn out quickly, making a bulb a costly, short-lived indulgence. Besides, Swan was interested in other matters, in particular photography. He invented silver bromide photographic paper, which allowed the first high-quality photographic prints to be made; perfected the collodion process; and also made several refinements to photographic chemicals. Meanwhile, his pharmaceutical business, which involved manufacturing as well as retailing, was booming. In 1867, his business partner and brother-in-law John Mawson died in a freak accident while disposing of nitroglycerine on a moor outside the city. It was, in short, a complicated and distracted time for Swan, and his interests moved away from illumination for thirty years.

Then in the early 1870s, Hermann Sprengel, a German chemist working in London, invented a device that came to be called the Sprengel mercury pump. This was the crucial invention that actually made household illumination possible. Unfortunately, only one person in history thought Hermann Sprengel deserved to be better known: Hermann Sprengel. Sprengel’s pump could reduce the amount of air in a glass chamber to one-millionth of its normal volume, which would enable a filament to glow for hundreds of hours. All that was necessary now was to find a suitable material for the filament.

The most determined and well-promoted search was undertaken by Thomas Edison, America’s premier inventor. By 1877, when he started his quest to make a commercially successful light, Edison was already well on his way to becoming known as “the Wizard of Menlo Park.” Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn’t scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favorable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had “a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.” But he was enterprising and hardworking and a peerless organizer.

Edison dispatched men to the far corners of the world to search for potential filaments, and had teams of men working on up to 250 materials at a time in the hope of finding one that had the necessary characteristics of permanence and resistance. They tried everything, including even hair from the luxuriant red beard of a family friend. Just before Thanksgiving 1879, Edison’s workmen developed a piece of carbonized cardboard, twisted thin and carefully folded, that would burn for as long as thirteen hours—still not nearly enough to be practical. On the last day of 1879, Edison invited a select audience to come and witness a demonstration of his new incandescent lights. As they arrived at his estate at Menlo Park, New Jersey, they were wowed by the sight of two buildings warmly aglow. What they didn’t realize was that the light was mostly non-electrical. Edison’s overworked glass blowers had been able to prepare only thirty-four bulbs, so the bulk of the illumination actually came from carefully positioned oil lamps.

Swan didn’t get back into electric lighting until 1877, but working on his own, he independently came up with a more or less identical lighting system. In January or February 1879, Swan gave a public display of his new electric incandescent lamp in Newcastle. The vagueness of date is because it isn’t certain whether he demonstrated his lamp at a public lecture in January or merely talked about it, but the following month he most certainly fired it up to an appreciative audience. In either case, his demonstration was at least eight months ahead of anything Edison could manage. That same year, Swan installed lights in his own home and by 1881 had wired up the house of the great scientist Lord Kelvin in Glasgow—again well ahead of anything Edison was able to achieve.

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 put his incandescent bulbs in places where they would be sure to make maximum impact: the New York Stock Exchange, the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining room of the House of Commons in London. Swan, meanwhile, was still doing much of his manufacturing in his own home. He didn’t, in short, have a lot of vision. Indeed, he didn’t even file for a patent. Edison took out patents everywhere, including in Britain in November 1879, and so secured his preeminence.

By modern standards those first lights were pretty feeble, but to people of the time an electric light was a blazing miracle—“a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin’s lamp,” as a reporter for the New York Herald breathlessly reported. It is hard to imagine now how bright and clean and eerily steady this new phenomenon was. When the lights of Fulton Street were switched on in September 1882, the awed Herald reporter described for his readers the scene as the customary “dim flicker of gas” suddenly yielded to a brilliant “steady glare … fixed and unwavering.” It was exciting, but clearly it was also going to take some getting used to.

And of course electricity had applications way beyond simply providing lighting. As early as 1893, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago displayed a “model electric kitchen.” It was exciting, too, though not yet very practical. For one thing, since electricity distribution was not yet general, it was necessary for most owners to build their own “electric plant” on the property to provide the necessary power. Even if they were lucky enough to be wired up to the outside world, utilities couldn’t supply sufficient power to make appliances work well. It took an hour just to preheat an oven; even then the oven could produce no more than a very modest 600 watts of heating, and you couldn’t use the stovetop at the same time as the oven. There were certain design deficiencies, too. The knobs to regulate the heat were just above floor level. To modern eyes, these new electric stoves looked odd because they were built of wood, generally oak, lined with zinc or some other protective material. White porcelain models didn’t come in until the 1920s—and they were considered very odd when they did. Many people thought they looked as if they should be in a hospital or a factory, not in a private home.