PI: Well from the beginning, Edison had this conception of a system. In part, he was modeling it on the gas light systems that already existed in places like New York. And one of the key elements of that, of those systems, was that the conductors were underground. And so Edison decided that that's what he was going to do with his system. But it wasn't only because he was modeling after gas. He recognized, because he'd been involved in the telegraph and telephone industries that there was a lot of pressure on the part of state legislatures and city councils to get the jumble of wires that had begun to appear in the city streets underground.

They were worried about public safety, about aesthetics, and so there was a lot of pressure to pass laws to do that. And Edison, being ahead of the curve, decided that he would develop his system with that in mind, so in 1880, when they really began to focus on developing this system, a lot of time was spent on trying to figure out the best way to insulate the wires so they could put it underground. And in fact, the first couple of methods that they used didn't work very well and it took them quite a while of research to develop an underground conductor that would work well, but eventually they did.

They also worked on various ways of manufacturing the lamp. Something that Edison was aware of from the beginning was the connection between a new invention and ways of making it so he could bring it into commercial use. And so they began to develop the tools and the special machinery that they needed to develop the lamp. They improved the vacuum process to speed up the lamp making and, in fact, took an old laboratory where Edison had for awhile manufactured another invention, and turned that laboratory -- turned that building I should say -- into the first commercial lamp factory at Menlo Park, and hired a bunch of people to work in it. They worked on fixtures, sockets, all these things that you don't think about until you begin to say, well, how are we going to put this in people's homes and offices.

And so after spending, you know, nearly a year trying to develop this system and all the components for it, Edison and his backers decided that they needed to get permission to lay those conductors in New York, and the best way to do that was to get the City Council on their side. So they hired a special train, they brought the Alderman out from New York, and they brought them into the laboratory. And it was in the evening, so it was dark, and they brought the Alderman upstairs into the darkened laboratory second floor.

And there was a little bit of grumbling, "what's going on here, I thought we were supposed to see this wonderful lamp that Edison had invented." And so everybody finally makes their way up the darkened stairs and lo, and behold, Edison gives a signal and the place is lit up, it's beautiful, there's a table in the horseshoe shape like his filament, and on it is this beautiful catered dinner from Delmonicos, champagne, wonderful meal, and so the Aldermen, mollified and quite happy to partake, sat down, and enjoyed the meal, and afterwards there were toasts to Edison, to the wonderful invention. And they went back to New York and passed the law so that Edison could, in fact, light his conductors underground, without objection. But that, in fact, was a process that took about a year and a half. Edison thought it would not take as long as it did, but it was a very difficult process to tear up the city streets, lay those underground conductors and wire everything up.

PI: In asking the Alderman for permission to put his lines underground, Edison was in fact doing them a favor, because they were quite concerned about this jumble of wires, the telegraph and telephone wires and now there were arc light wires as well, as they began to light up things like Brooklyn Bridge and some streets, and so more and more wires were being added to city streets and the Alderman were growing more concerned about this, and here was Edison saying, "I've got a solution, what we'll do is we'll put them underground" and I'm sure that was also in his favor, besides the wonderful meal from Delmonicos.

PI: Once they decided that they were going to go into New York and set up a demonstration central station in order to show the system to the public, they decided that they needed to figure out where to place the station. Their first idea was that they would go to an older manufacturing district below Wall Street, where they thought they could get a building cheap. Well, in fact, it turned out that the building wasn't very cheap, but it had the advantage of being close to Wall Street and all those other financiers who might fund other central stations, and secondly, that's where all the newspapers were, in the same general area, and so Edison had both, finance and publicity available to him, and by wiring those buildings he could garner himself very favorable publicity.

PI: There were all sorts of problems that they faced in kind of retro-fitting the building [for the central power station] and they had to reinforce it in order to put the dynamos in there, and they had to figure out how they were going to get the coal to the boilers from the steam engines, and all sorts of difficulty that they had in trying to define how the building itself should be used for a central station since they were retro-fitting them.

PI: In early 1880, in the Spring, as Edison began to figure out the different aspects of his system for development, he began to redesign his dynamo. And one of the things that he thought was that he could save on energy costs by directly coupling the generator to a steam engine. And, these direct driven dynamos would be more compact.

As Edison began to consider the elements of the central station design, in the spring of 1880, one of the things he thought about were the energy requirements. He could install a bunch of steam engines and drive belts and a bunch of different generators, or, he had a different idea: He could take a much larger dynamo, so you would need fewer of them, and directly link each dynamo with its own steam engine. And so instead of 25, 50 or more dynamos in each central station, you could have five or six. And, he thought that as well the direct coupling would reduce the amount of energy that was lost because of the belting. And so he spent a considerable amount of time with his chief engineer, Charles Clark, who because the chief engineer at the Edison Electric Light Company, in designing this new dynamo, and this is what went into the Pearl Street station, it's what he sent to Paris for the 1881 exhibition, on the same ship that Jumbo the elephant had just returned from the Barnum and Bailey circus, and so the dynamos because known as Jumbos, as a result.

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