IEEE History Week

In October 1880, Thomas A. Edison published “The Success of the Electric Light,” in The North American Review,” to explain that the adoption of his electric light for domestic use has been delayed “due to the enormous mass of details which have to be mastered before the system can go into operation on a large scale, and on a commercial basis as a rival of the existing system of lighting by gas.” The “enormous mass of details” would include further research and development to improve the lamp, founding companies to manufacture components, and personally funding and supervising a company to build power plants. This talk will focus on the Thomas A. Edison Central Station Construction Department, a little-known entity founded by Edison himself in May 1883, to construct direct-current electric power stations in towns and cities throughout the United States. It built thirteen central stations in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before being absorbed by the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting in October 1884, coincidently, around the time IEEE was founded. While Edison stepped away from the day-to-day central station business, he continued research in direct current and later alternating current technology. And by the late 1880s, he found himself dragged into a media war with George Westinghouse in what has become the mythical “battle of the currents.” In 1887, Edison opened a new and expanded research laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey and by 1890 his research and business interests moved on to the improved phonograph, the talking doll, motion pictures, ore milling, and other technologies.