Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

MAIN STREET, 1900
The marvel of the age, however, was not steam, whose power could
only be used in place, but electricity—power made portable over wires.
And the turn of the century saw the greatest threat to further development
of electric power removed. The reciprocating steam engine had about
reached the extreme limit of practical size for the production of electricity
when it was replaced by the high-speed steam turbine. Originally designed
for the propulsion of battleships and ocean liners, the new turbine proved
a peerless electric generator.
The commercial application of electricity, beginning with the tele-
graph, was half a century old, but checked by hit-or-miss methods of de-
velopment, costly power sources, and the natural conservatism of the public,
its promise had been redeemed only in the last decade. In urban transporta-
tion electric trolleys were rapidly replacing the old horse cars. Electri-
fication of the elevated railroads in Boston and New York would soon end
the noise, smoke, and ash of the overhead steam trains. It had made
practicable the 5 miles of subway recently completed in Boston, and New
York and Chicago planned similar systems under their streets. New York's
rapid transit line, begun in 1900 and completed 3 years later, ran 9 miles
under Manhattan, from City Hall to the Harlem River. As ground was
broken there was talk of extending the line by a tunnel under the East River,
connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Beginning with a single strand on poles set up between Baltimore and
Washington in 1845, electric telegraph wires now festooned city streets
everywhere and followed the railroads from coast to coast. A new develop-
ment was a printing telegraph, in which the Postal Telegraph Co. and the
Associated Press were interested. More amazing were the reports of
Guglielmo Marconid's experiments in transmitting electric signals without
wires. His signal had already spanned the English Channel. In December
1901 he would astound the world with his demonstration of transatlantic
wireless telegraph.
If the telegraph was everywhere, the telephone, even with more than
half a million subscribers, was still found only in the largest cities and
towns, in business houses, shops and factories, and the homes of the well to do.
Even Edison's electric lamp, invented in 1879 arid first sold commercially
3 years later, was still a novelty. His Pearl Street power station opened in
September 1882 with six generators of 125 horsepower each, sending current
along 13 miles of wire and lighting a few streets and shops with arc and
incandescent lamps.2 But in 1900 most of the streets in New York, as else-
where, were still lighted by gas lamps, and except in the city homes of the
2 Only one generator was used that night in September, to light 400 lamps for 85 cus-
tomers. By 1904 a single generator supplied enough current to light 100,000 lamps; by
1914 it lighted 1,700,000 lamps.
3