Electric Feel

But first, we’re going to explore the current running through the fair, electricity. You just couldn’t avoid it. Not only was there a whole building dedicated to electricity, featuring electric devices from cigar cutters to toasters to farm equipment, but electric light was everywhere. At night, every building in the White City would have glowed inside and out, thanks to hundreds of thousands of arc lights and light bulbs. Elevators swept visitors up to rooftop promenades and restaurants. Spotlights reached the sky while silent electric trolleys, boats, and moving sidewalks whisked visitors around the fairgrounds.

For many of the estimated 27 million Americans who passed through the fair’s gates, this may have been their first encounter with electric power. It was certainly the first time any of the attendees would have seen electricity used on such a grand scale. Here’s Bernie Carlson again.

BERNIE CARLSON: For the average person, if you had electricity at all, which wasn’t particularly likely, you would have to be like JP Morgan in the 1880s. And you wanted the newfangled Edison electric light, he had to basically install a steam engine, a generator, wires in his house, and then ultimately the light bulbs, which actually went in where you used to have the gas fixtures. And that was noisy, to have a steam engine running in your basement. It was expensive and it was dangerous. And in fact, the electricity basically burned through the insulation and set fire to the drapes in one of the rooms. And it illustrates that this was really a high risk, expensive venture and not for everybody.

ED: So what happens between JP Morgan’s ill fated home and the wonderful quarter of a million light bulbs that actually make the White City white?

BERNIE CARLSON: So what happens is the organizers of the Chicago World’s Fair decide early on that electricity is going to be one of the central themes of the fair, and that they see it as a way of accomplishing what Daniel Burnham, the director works for the fair, said is, make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood. And so from the get go, they committed to electricity and you know, basically asked big companies, like Westinghouse from Pittsburgh, or the General Electric company, to compete and bid on the fair, with the expectation right from the get go that it was going to be fully electrified.

ED: And you’ve got one out of every four Americans coming to this fair.

BERNIE CARLSON: Exactly. Yeah.

ED: That’s an incredible thing. What’s the experience of electricity that people would have when they come to the fair?

BERNIE CARLSON: First and foremost, the manufacturers really focused on incredible, awe inspiring demonstrations. So the honor court is all aglow. You see those thousands of electric lights lighting up the buildings. They’ve got, you know, those big towering lights going up into the sky. The buildings are illuminated. The General Electric company asked Edison to create an 82 foot tower of light with thousands of lights up and down the column, and an eight foot light at the top, which had 30,000 little prisms that were red, white, and blue, because remember this is America. This is patriotism. And at night, the top bulb rotated around and so you’d have these glittering red and blue images like off a disco ball.

ED: I’d love to see that.

BERNIE CARLSON: Yeah. Yeah. And that created a sense of wonder in people, like oh my god, look at the aesthetic things that we can do with electricity. I think two things that the inventors and the manufacturers really implicitly, when you look back, you know, play up. And you know, one theme is wonder. And the other is really democratizing luxury. I mean, if you think about even kings and queens didn’t have the sort of convenience that comes very quickly with electricity. People in this period were like, oh my god, life is going to be entirely different. So like one of the great phrases is the manufacturers would say we are chaining lightning and we’re harnessing the thunderbolt.

ED: That sounds dangerous.

BERNIE CARLSON: It sounds dangerous. And boys and girls, it is. At the same time, people were amazed that AT&T was there. And they had nice, neat, female operators. And those operators were routinely placing long distance calls between Chicago and New York or Boston. And people were just blown away by that idea that you could have a phone call that it was happening for 1,500 miles. People were also, in terms of wonderment, just completely fascinated that Edison demonstrated his first motion picture machine, the kinetochore scope. And people would peer into this box and they would see various things.

I mean, one of the very earliest films was a guy sneezing. Now, that wouldn’t do much for us, but that was the equivalent of special effects at that time.

ED: Yeah, right.

BERNIE CARLSON: So all these things said to people, look at all the possibilities. Look at how wonderful electricity is going to be.

ED: It’s interesting looking back on it. We don’t think of all those things as electricity, right?

BERNIE CARLSON: That’s right.

ED: We think of a film or we think of telephone, but we don’t think of it as all being powered by the same thing.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right, yeah. So Edison’s Kinetoscope thing, if you were to open that box, you got an electric light. You’ve got an electric motor. And so this was another application of electricity, and in ways that people had– you know, no preconception before came up with that.

ED: And these things all emerged in just a few years.

BERNIE CARLSON: Exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, essentially, again as I often tell people, remember that in the mid-1870s you the telephone is introduced in 1876 and 1878. Edison starts showing his phonograph, in 1879 he invents the incandescent light. I mean, you know, that is an incredible amount of disruptive technology in less than five years.

ED: But they don’t really come to fruition till 1893.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right, that’s where the engineers–

ED: You can see them all in one place.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right. Yeah. But that’s where the engineers, the manufacturers, the business people all have to take those inventions and shape them into commercially viable products. And you know, this book that I brought with me has–

ED: It’s a very impressive book.

BERNIE CARLSON: Right.

ED: Tell us about this book.

BERNIE CARLSON: It is about 700 or 800 pages, titled The World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893. The book really walks you through the major exhibits. My favorite passage at the end of this chapter about all the things that electricity can do is this. And it says, besides these will be found in endless profusion exhibits of wires and cables, copper in all forms for electrical purposes, instruments for measuring the current in various ways, and motors push buttons and bells. In fact, every known appliance for any and every purpose. In truth it can be said that a house could, from the contents of the electricity building, be so completely equipped electrically, that there would not be the slightest necessity for lighting a match in it from one year’s end to the next.

ED: Wow, no matches.

BERNIE CARLSON: No matches. That’s your horseless carriage. That’s the future.

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JOANNE: Bernie Carlson is a historian of technology at the University of Virginia and the author of Tesla, Inventor of the Electric Age.