Electricity: "Pearl Street, Niagara Falls and the war of the currents: The eccentric beginnings of New York's bright lights"

From the BBC, September 24:

When electricity was first rolled out in New York in the late 19th Century, sparks flew between competitors. Today, the city is attempting to complete its electric evolution.

On 7 June 1882, the lights were switched on in a lush Madison Avenue brownstone mansion, making it the first private residence in New York to be illuminated only by electricity.

Inventor and electricity pioneer Thomas Edison and his colleagues had installed wiring throughout the walls of the house, which belonged to financier and investment banker J P Morgan. Incandescent lightbulbs had been added to every room – 385 in total.

In the cellar beneath a nearby stable, a steam engine, boiler and electrical generators clanked and roared away, writes historian Jill Jones in her 2004 book Empires of Light. Connected to the house via underground cables, these were manned by an expert engineer, who started duty at 3pm and finished at 11pm. Sometimes, when the family forgot to watch the clock, they would be suddenly plunged into darkness at this point, Herbert Satterlee, Morgan's son-in-law, later wrote.

The Morgan's neighbour, Mrs James Brown complained the machines made her whole house vibrate. Morgan, though, was reportedly pleased.

But this milestone was just a test run for Edison. "Edison didn't want to build small, separate generators in millionaires' basements; he wanted infrastructure to feed the whole city," writes historian Alice Bell in her 2021 book Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis. "Indeed, the beauty of electricity was that you could distance yourself from the dirt of the generation of power."

A model of Thomas Edison's 1882 Pearl Street power station in New York, credited 

as being the world's first commercial power station (Credit: Getty Images)

....MUCH MORE

Here's an older post on this bit of industrial wizardry:

Speaking of General Electric: "Honey, I Forgot the Anniversary: Edison's Pearl Street Station" (GE)

This was originally posted October 22, 2007.

What with all the anniversaries, the Crash of '87; the Panic of 1907*; Rio 1992; Byrd-Hagel and Kyoto 1997, I'm having trouble keeping them straight.
(*see below)

At 3 a.m. Sunday morning my failing memory woke me from a sound sleep (that and the BPH).

From the New York Times, September 5, 1882:...