Prof. Elihu Thompson

Let us, In opening what will be but a brief outline of the development of the electrical industry in Lynn, look back to the conditions about 1876. In that year the Centennial Exposition was held in Philadelphia. This was the first large exposition in the United States and was in commemoration of the Declaration of Independence at that time, and of course can speak from a very intimate knowledge of things as they were. To give you some idea of the difference between that time and this, I have simply to mention that during that exposition no buildings were kept open at night; there were no means of lighting such buildings at night with any kind of ease or safety. All the power that distributed, nearly all the machinery the exposition was in one building - Machinery Hall - and the hall was traversed from the center in four directions by enormous shafts, with enormous belts and pulleys driving every piece of machinery in that hall. The engine, - a very large Corliss engine it was called - of 1400 horse power, was geared by great wooden cogs to a jack shaft below, and that jack shaft by bevel gear and belting, distributed power to the line shafting which ran the length of the building. This may give you some notion of the condition of power supply. There was a railway running through the grounds; of course it was a steam road; nothing else could have been thought of - nothing in the way of trolley cars; nothing in the way of electric railways.

Now, what did we find there in the way of electrical display? There were exhibits chiefly of telegraph instruments, and a small exhibit of telephones, but nobody believed that such an instrument was of any account, although it was used for the first time during the Centennial Exposition to transmit articulate speech over a line, and Lord Kelvin, who was then Sir William Thomsen, was one of the witnesses called to testify the fact that it did transmit speech. Even then it was two years before the telephone became recognized as a useful instrument of communication. Just try to imagine what the limitations were at a time when it was impossible to light any large building with any ease and without danger; perhaps with gas

The above article was originally delivered by Prof. Thomson as an address before the body of apprentices of the General Electric Company in Lincoln Hall, West Lynn, Mass. The lecture was prepared in compliance with a request by Mr. Maguus W. Alexander, who is in general charge of the apprentices. It was stenograph-ically reported as delivered, and as now first given out in printed form, has been fully and carefully revised by Prof. Thomson and adapted to the wider audience reached by the pages of this magazine.

lights; perhaps with candles; perhaps with kerosene. I should say, however, that there were but two exhibits in that exposition which concerned electric lighting. One of these was the Gramme Electric Company's. The Gramme machine was made in Paris and was used to furnish current to a single arc light. A machine to work two lights, three, four or more lights, was unknown. There was a dynamo in the Gramme space (a little space, too), which drove as a motor another machine, and this motor worked a pump and ran a little water-fall. This was the first typical exhibit of the transmission of power by electricity in the United States, I think. It was the germ of a great industry. I was very naturally interested in all this - deeply interested. I had been building small dynamos, even before that time, and had experimented in a general way with electric lighting and so on, and I was much interested in seeing even these comparatively small exhibits.

In 1878, at the Paris Exposition, one of the Streets of Paris - the Place de l'Opera and the Avenue de l'Opera - was for the first time lighted by a system called the Jablochkoff. In this system two carbon pieces were put up parallel to each other and the electric current passed across a white insulating material between. This was kaolin. This lighting created a very great sensation. Each of the large globes contained a number of the Jablochkoff candles, as these double carbon sticks were called, because these only lasted about an hour or an hour and a quarter, and when one was burned down the next had to be switched on, and so the last in the globe. But they made a splendid effect for those times and attracted universal attention.

I was naturally interested, and went to Paris partly to see this exhibit. I made the trip abroad at that time to get all the knowledge I could in relation to this new electric development, but came away believing the Jablochkoff candle was not the thing for lighting; that it was beautiful but expensive, and not in the direction in which it was proper to work. On getting back I set about producing what was finally called the Thomson-Houston system, joining energies with P'rof. Houston, who was, like myself, teaching in the Philadelphia High School at that time. We produced a dynamo and lamps. My first machine, intended for running an actual electric light, was built in 1876, but was very moderate in size, and very small in the matter of light. I could, by the use of a foot lathe, get a small arc light out of it. By working very hard and perspiring a great deal I could keep the light going for about a minute or so.

In 1878, however, I built a machine which was capable of giving about 120 volts and 10 amperes. I made the patterns and put the machine together absolutely without any planing, having only a foot lathe at command. The armature was made up of cast-iron discs strung on a wooden hub or shaft, yet the machine certainly worked and was shown in operation at the Franklin Institute during the winter of 1878-79. It weighed about 350 pounds and was not a continuous-current dynamo but would give alternating currents. One could take from one end of the shaft continuous current, or direct current, and from the other end alternating current. More than that, one could get alternating current in two-phase relation. It was, in fact, a two-phase alternating-current machine, self-exciting, and the old machine has been preserved in the model collection at the Lynn works. This machine was in reality the beginning of our actual arc-lighting work on which was founded this industry.