PI: As Edison was thinking about how to design this new direct, coupled dynamo, one of the problems was he needed a very specific kind of steam engine, very high speed steam engine. So he had to go the engineers involved in steam engine design and ask them to work with him, in developing a specialized steam engine for that purpose.

Edison had begun laying the mains and getting a central station set up in, in the spring of 1881. And they were still at it in the summer of 1882; they'd been working at it for quite a while. The mains were getting closer to being finished but there were still a lot of work to be done. The station itself was in much better shape. But Edison still had to spend a considerable amount of time. Samuel Insull, who was his secretary, recalls that they would go late at night to the central station. Edison would confirm with the people who were there and he'd often, in fact, take a nap on the cot there, he'd spend the night at the station.

And so, over the course of the summer, things neared completion and by the end of the summer they were ready to begin testing the system itself and the first time they turned on a couple of dynamos, they linked them together because this was the way they were planning on running the station, having the several dynamos linked together.

The first time they do this, lo and behold what happens is the whole thing begins to shake. And they realize that the coupling was a real problem and that they were going to have a difficulty in running the system if they couldn't figure out a better linkage between dynamos and Edison had to go back to work tying to figure out how you're going to solve that problem.

PI: As Edison tried to figure out how to solve this problem with linking up different dynamos in the central station, one of the things he recognized, that part of the problem was the steam engines themselves. And so he had to go to Armington Sims, a different steam engine manufacturer and have them redesign steam engines. They built another special set of engines for these dynamos. And then as they began to test the system, testing the conductors to make sure they were working properly, they also discovered another problem, which is that one occasion there was apparently some leakage from one of the junction boxes, and as these horses would come down the street, they'd be shocked. And, this made the papers, and Edison had to mollify the public that this was in fact a safe thing and that he'd solved the problem. It was a little bit of a setback but not much of one.

Well, finally, on September 4, 1882, Edison was ready to demonstrate his system. And I'm sure he was somewhat nervous that everything would work properly, since they'd had all sorts of problems getting it set up in the first place. He left his chief engineer of the station at the station, synchronized his watch, went over to the J.P. Morgan offices, looked at his watch, threw the switch at the office at the same time the fellow at the central station started up the steam engines, threw the switch to put electricity in the system, and lo and behold, everything worked perfectly. And, later on, a reporter talked to Edison and asked him what he thought, and he said, well, I've done everything that I set out to do.

PI: Edison had gone to the J.P. Morgan office as the place where he was going to show his system to the investors, because Morgan was one of the principal investors in the system. He was one of the principal financial figures in New York and [became] even more important in the years afterwards. But at that point he was the man that Edison wanted most to impress with the system.

PI: When Edison had been doing the research and development of the light, reporters had beat a path to the laboratory. He was often front-page news with his different pronouncements on where he was at. But by the time they finally got Pearl Street lit after the long time it took to lay the system, the public had actually begun to lose interest.

And there were only small stories in the newspaper; it wasn't that big a deal in the long run, because in fact it was the earlier demonstrations at Menlo Park that had showed the system worked and this was just a commercial installation. And in fact this proved difficult for Edison because people weren't beating a path to his door, and the door of the Edison Electric Light Company.

And in fact after about six months he decided that he needed to go out and promote the use of central stations. He gave up working in the laboratory for a while, and became what he called a businessman for a year in order to be able to promote and install central stations in a lot of the manufacturing town up and down the east coast and Midwest.

PI: Edison's vision had always been the central station -- you would put a central station in an area in a city, light up several blocks, set up another central station, light up some more blocks. The problem was that central stations were very expensive. And the investors in the Edison Electric Light Company were already beginning to make money from people who were installing smaller systems in their own buildings, like, mills and printing plants and so forth. And so they weren't interested in investing in these much more expensive central stations. And so Edison had to set up his own company. He called it the Thomas A. Edison Construction Company. Samuel Insull, his secretary, did the day-to-day running of the business, while Edison worried about the technical details of each station. Some of his chief assistants became the engineers who established the central stations. And over the course of the next year, Edison installed about a dozen or so central stations, and proved that in fact this was a very effective way of lighting up manufacturing towns, and so more and more competition began to emerge from other companies that also began to install their own systems. And this is where Samuel Insull cut his teeth. Insull would later go on to have a rather magnificent career in Chicago, installing large network of electrical systems in the Chicago area. And it was working for Edison in the construction department that he really cut his teeth on the business.

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