Sometimes you just have to do it.
From Delancey Place, May 12:
Today's selection-- from Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes. George Westinghouse, chief competitor to Thomas Edison, made a bold gamble for the 1893 World Fair:
“On Monday, May 16, George Westinghouse and Charles Terry arrived at the World's Fair's offices in the Rookery, a Burnham building on LaSalle Street, where almost two dozen men had assembled. Some were already nervously smoking cigars. Chief Burnham and the other members of the Committee on Grounds and Buildings were installed at a long table, where sat the sealed iron bid box. Sitting in other chairs were Captain Eugene Griffin, a second vice president for General Electric, and the firm's two local managers.
Once Westinghouse and Terry were also seated, all waited expectantly as the bid box was unlocked and unsealed. Cigar smoke drifted about amid the low whispering. The final electrical joust was about to begin. Once again there were only two bids. General Electric's was read aloud first. Their new DC-only bid was $577,485, their new AC-only bid $480,694. As every man sitting in that Rookery office was well aware, these new General Electric bids were a shameless one-third the company's original $1,720,000 bid. There were various murmurings and men glancing at one another. Then, as the new Westinghouse bids were taken up to be read, silence descended, only the street noises filtering through. Westinghouse's bid for a combination of DC and AC was $499,559. The GE men squirmed and looked unhappy. Westinghouse was undercutting the trust.
Westinghouse's AC offer for all ninety-two thousand lights was $399,000, $80,000 below the trust's best bid. Daniel H. Burnham, fair construction director and a forceful man of definite opinions, said promptly that the contract should go to Westinghouse. But the other committee members balked. One later memoir claimed that some were 'stockholders in the General Electric Company' still determined to see Coffin prevail. The committee retreated to a locked office. Hour after hour passed. The lights in the nearby buildings had gone dark. At 7:00 P.M., when the janitors began cleaning the halls and offices, the exhausted committee men agreed to reconvene the next morning. As they all left, Westinghouse said to a Daily Interocean reporter, 'There is not much money in the work at the figures I have made, but the advertisement will be a valuable one and I want it.'
“And so, Tuesday morning, as the lovely spring weather held, the joust resumed at the Rookery. Captain Griffin of GE sulkily insisted that George Westinghouse could not possibly carry out the contract, because, reported the Chicago Tribune, 'his patents...were involved in litigation. [GE] had injunction proceedings instituted against the use of the lamp which Mr. Westinghouse proposed to furnish.' Westinghouse laughed affably, responding, 'There wasn't the slightest question about his ability to furnish the lamps desired.' Another fair director complained in exasperation to the Daily Interocean, 'For many years the Edison Company contented itself with flooding the country with circulars trying to ridicule the Westinghouse system. One morning it suddenly awoke to find it had a competitor. Now it says that if the contract is given to Westinghouse an injunction will head him off.... One moment's thought will show how great a bluff is made.'....
....MUCH MORE
