Begun, on September 4, 1882: the electrical age

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Today in 1882, Thomas Edison flips the switch to the first commercial electrical power plant in history, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan. Arguably this marks the start of the electrical age. #OnThisDay

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Pearl Street Station



A sketch of the Pearl Street Station

Pearl Street Station was the first commercial central power plant in the US. It was located at 255-257 Pearl Street in Manhattan on a site measuring 50 by 100 feet (15 by 30 m), just south of Fulton Street and fired by coal. It began with six dynamos, and it started generating electricity on September 4, 1882, serving an initial load of 400 lamps at 82 customers. By 1884, Pearl Street Station was serving 508 customers with 10,164 lamps. The station was built by the Edison Illuminating Company, which was headed by Thomas Edison. The station was originally powered by custom-made Porter-Allen high-speed steam engines designed to provide 175 horsepower at 700 rpm, but these proved to be unreliable with their sensitive governors. They were removed and replaced with new engines from Armington & Sims that proved to be much more suitable for Edison's dynamos.

Pearl Street Station was also the world's first cogeneration plant. While the steam engines provided grid electricity, Edison made use of the thermal byproduct by distributing steam to local manufacturers, and warming nearby buildings on the same Manhattan block.

The station burned down in 1890, destroying all but one dynamo that is now kept in the Greenfield Village Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

[hunter]

1. The Hotel Del Coronado in California opened less than six years later in February 1888.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_del_Coronado

Its power plant, which supplied lighting for the hotel and surrounding community, was not built by Edison but by Mather Electric Company of Chicago. It had two 150 horsepower and one 300 horsepower oil fueled boilers.

Edison's only real connection to the project was the incandescent electric lamps purchased from the Edison Company. Edison was as much inventor as a promoter, much like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Edison light bulbs were expensive hand-made items which had to be returned to the factory when they burned out so the platinum lead-in wires that carried power through the glass to the carbon filament could be recycled. Light bulbs were not mass produced until 1898 after Edison acquired a patent for doing so from the Italian inventor, Arturo Malignani.

Edison fiercely defended his patents on the East Coast but lacked that influence on the West Coast.

Edison is indirectly responsible for the rise of the entertainment industry in Hollywood. You couldn't make a movie or sound recording on the East Coast independent of Edison. Edison held patents on sound recording equipment, electric lighting, electric power for the lighting, movie cameras, and movie projectors. Even if you could make a movie or record on the East Coast using equipment that didn't depend on Edison intellectual property you'd still have to fight off Edison's lawyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company