first central generating plant in the United States. It was also a major engineering challenge for Edison and his organization; it required the building of six huge “dynamos,” or generators, which, at 27 tons each, were nicknamed “Jumbos” after the huge elephant from Africa with which the circus showman P. T. Barnum was then touring America.
Another landmark event in electric power occurred a few months later, on January 18, 1883. That was the first electricity bill ever—dispatched to the Ansonia Brass and Copper Company, for the historic sum of $50.44.3
It had required a decade of intense, almost round-the-clock work by Thomas Edison and his team to get to that electric moment on Pearl Street. Still only in his midthirties at the time, Edison had already made himself America’s most celebrated inventor with his breakthroughs on the telegraph and the phonograph. He was also said to be the most famous American in the rest of the world. Edison was to establish the record for the greatest number of American patents ever issued to one person—a total of 1,093. Much later, well into the twentieth century, newspaper and magazine polls continued to select him as America’s “greatest” and “most useful citizen.”
Edison was largely self-taught; he had only a couple of years of formal schooling, plus six years as an itinerant telegrapher, making such achievements even more remarkable. His partial deafness made him somewhat isolated and self-centered, but also gave him an unusual capacity for concentration and creativity. He proceeded by experiment, reasoning, and sheer determination, and, as he once said, “by methods which I could not explain.” He had set up a research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with the ambitious aim, as he put it, of making an invention factory that would deliver “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”4
“THE SUBDIVISION OF LIGHT”
That was not so easy, as he found when he homed in on electricity. He wanted to replace the then-prevalent gas-fired lamp. What he also wanted to do, in his own words, was to “subdivide” light; that is, deliver electric light not just over a few large streetlights as was then possible, but make it “subdivided so that it could be brought into private homes.”
Many scoffed at Edison’s grand ambition. Experts appointed by the British Parliament dismissed Edison’s research as “good enough for our transatlantic friends” but “unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”
To prove them wrong and successfully subdivide light, Edison would have to create an entire system—not just the lightbulb but also the means to generate electricity and distribute it across a city. “Edison’s genius,” one scholar has written, “lay in his ability to direct a process involving problem identification, solution as idea, research and development, and introduction into use.” His aim was not just to invent a better lightbulb (there had already been 20 or so of one kind or another) but to introduce an entire system of lighting—and to do so on a commercial basis, and as quickly as possible.5
The inventor had to start somewhere, which did mean with the lightbulb. The challenge, for a practical bulb, was to find a filament that, when electricity flowed through it, would give off a pleasing light but that also could last not just one hour but for many hours. After experimenting with a wide variety of possible sources—including hairs from the beards of two of his employees—he came up with a series of carbon filament, first made from cotton thread and then from cardboard and then bamboo, that passed the test.
Years of acrimonious and expensive litigation followed among Edison and other competing lightbulb inventors over who had infringed whose patents. The U.S. Court of Appeals finally resolved the legal fight in the United States in 1892. In Britain, however, the court upheld competing patents by the English scientist Joseph Wilson Swan. Rather than fight Swan, Edison established a joint venture with him to manufacture lightbulbs in Britain.
To create an entire system required considerable funding. Although not called such at the time, one of the other inventions that could be credited to Edison and his investors was venture capital. For what he developed in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was a forerunner of the venture capital industry that would grow, coincidentally, around another Menlo Park—this one in Silicon Valley in California. As an Edison biographer has observed, it was his melding of the “laboratory and business enterprise that enabled him to succeed.”6
Costs were a constant problem, and as