The Night They Turned the Lights on in Wabash

The Night They Turned the Lights On in Wabash Peter Tocco* This is the story of how Wabash, Indiana, became the first town in the world to be generally lighted by electricity. When first pro- posed, the lights seemed expensive and exotic to many town resi- dents, some of whom staunchly opposed them. The Age of Electricity was not yet born, light was still produced by fire, and work was large- ly done by muscle power. This story examines the context in which electric lighting emerged, the key role Americans (and midwestern- ers) played in the process, and the brief claim to fame by Wabash as the world’s first electrically lighted town.’ Since Ben Franklin became the first person to put electricity to work by flying a kite, capturing an electrical charge, and using it to ring a bell in his laboratory, Americans have shown a penchant for electrical invention. Franklin’s discovery earned him international fame long before his career as a foreign diplomat. Although Euro- peans such as Michael Faraday formulated many of the earliest electrical theories, Americans excelled at putting electricity to work. By Thomas Edison’s time, Americans had already produced a series of groundbreaking inventions: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1792)’ Robert Fulton’s steamboat (1806)’ Samuel Colt’s revolver (1835), Samuel Morse’s telegraph (1844)’and Christopher Sholes’s typewriter (18671, for example. French author Alexis de Tocqueville noted the Ameri- can flair for invention as early as the 1830s. But in the sphere of electricity, Americans carved a special niche that remains at the core of their identity. With the likes of Alexander Graham Bell’s tele- * Peter Tocco is a technical illustrator and writer living in Columbia, Mary- land. 1 The Wabash arc lights were designed to illuminate when a dc voltage was placed across two carbon rods approximately one-half inch thick and twelve inches in length, placed vertically one on top of the other and separated by a slight gap. Soon after Alessandro Volta invented a battery in 1800, scientists discovered that a spark would leap across two wires connected to a battery’s terminals, but it took approximately eighty years for inventors to develop the right kind of voltage generators, carbon rods, and a means of regulating the gap as the rods burned in order to produce a commercially practical light. The incandescent bulb invented by Edison in 1879 was, however, a vacuum-chamber glass bulb much like today’s lights, which contained a small high-resistance paper carbon filament, and burned much cooler and dimmer than the arc light. Today’s incandescent bulb features a tungsten filament, invented around 1910. See “Creating the Electric Age,” Electric Power Research Institute Jour- nal, 4 (March 19791, 19, 25. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, XCV (December 1999). 0 1999, Trustees of Indiana University. WABASHCOUNTY COURTHOUSE Reproducedfrom Thomas B. Helm, History of Wabash County (Chicago, 1884),240. 352 Indiana Magazine of History phone (1876), Edison’s phonograph (1877), and scores of other inventions up to and including personal computers, Americans have had a special way with electrical devices. At the stroke of eight o’clock on March 8,1880, a dark and driz- zly Wednesday night in Wabash, Indiana, four arc lights of three thousand candle power suspended from the courthouse flagstaff were turned on. An eyewitness described the peculiar crowd reaction: Suddenly from the towering dome of the courthouse burst a flood of light, which under ordinary circumstances would have caused a shout of rejoicing from the thousands who had been crowding and jostling each other in the evening’s darkness. No shout or token ofjoy, however, disturbed the deep silence that suddenly settled on the vast crowd that had gathered from far and near to witness the consummation of a singu- lar enterprise. The people, almost with bated breath, stood overwhelmed with awe as if they were near a supernatural presence. The strange, weird light, exceeded in power only by the sun, yet mild as moonlight, rendered the courthouse square as light as mid-day.’ A number of people who had been present at the lighting shared their reminiscences at the event’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in Wabash. One of them recalled an elderly man living on the edge of town who, unaware of the experiment, was in his barnyard when the lights went on. “Down on your knees, Mary!” he exclaimed, running into the house with bulging eyes, “The end of the world’s here!” Anoth- er eyewitness, Dr. James Biggerstaff of Wabash, recalled, “I was just a boy, but it was one of the greatest thrills of my life. I remember that five miles away you could see the horse and buggy cast a shad- ow, so you know the light was far-reaching.” The town was packed with visitors, many of them highly skeptical, he recalled. “And such a hurrahing and shouting as went up from those thousands of per- sons when the light flashed on, after a minute of stunned silent sur- prise-you never have heard!”3 So great was the initial interest in the lighting that Wabash’s Western Union office worked late into the night telegraphing infor- mation to large daily newspapers across the country, which ran the following headlines: “Wabash Enjoys the Distinction of Being the Only City in the World Entirely Lighted by Electricity,” “The Entire City Brilliantly Lighted and Shadows Cast at Midnight on Buildings Five Miles Away,” “The Test of the Brush Electric Light Witnessed by 10,000 People and Councils of 19 Citie~.”~ The Indianapolis News, however, paid scant attention to the event, mentioning the next day in its state news summary only that a preliminary test of the lights in Wabash had been a complete suc- cess. Two days later, the News printed this brief report in its state news summary: “The average report of the illumination of Wabash 2 Thomas B. Helm, History of Wabash County (Chicago, 1884), 240. 3 Wabash Plain Dealer, July 26, 1930. 4Zbid. The Night They Turned the Lights On 353 is that the electric light made the streets exposed to its direct rays almost as light as day, but those in the shadows were correspond- ingly dark, and offered unusual facilities for the operations and escape of thieves and burglar^."^ Important journals such as the Scientific American were more favorable. “Wabash, Ind., boasts of being the first town to adopt the electric light for general illumination. The tests were said to be satisfactory. Many visitors from the adjoining towns were present to witness the first trial of the new meth~d.”~One of Wabash‘s two newspapers, the Wabash Plain Dealer, wrote that “Yesterday morning the city of Wabash woke up and found itself famous. It is today the best advertised town in the United States. From Maine to California the telegrams of the Associated Press flashed the intelligence that the problem of lighting the streets of an entire city solely by electricity had been In fact, the Wabash Plain Dealer played a pivotal role in procur- ing the lights and also in putting down opposition to the lights. The paper’s chief editors, T. P. Keator and Thad Butler, had first come up with the idea for the lights. Keator was strolling one night through Wabash, with its elegant one-year-old courthouse perched high on a hillside overlooking the town, when he remarked to Butler that, “If you had a barrel of tar on the dome of the court house and set it on fire it would light up the whole city.”*The idea of electric lights fol- lowed naturally as inventor Charles Brush had made headlines the previous year when he tested his electric lights in a public square in Cleveland. Keator and Butler traveled to Cleveland to meet Brush, who was eager for an opportunity to test the latest improvements to his lights. At the time, Wabash‘s gas street lights, although not exten- sive, were a considerable drain on the town budget. The prospect of a far cheaper system was probably a key factor in the town council’s decision to authorize Keator and Butler to strike a deal with Brush whereby the town would pay Brush one hundred dollars to install the lights for a trial peri~d.~The terms also specified that the lights should illuminate a half-mile radius with the brilliance of a stan- dard-size gas burner at all points, thus lighting most of the town. This was a distinction upon which Wabash would later base its claim to being the world’s first city to be “generally” lighted by electricity. If fully satisfied, the Wabash council could purchase the lights and generating equipment for $1,800. shdianapolis News, April 1, 3, 1880. 6 “A Town Lighted by Electricity,” Scientific American, 43 (May 1880). 7 Wabash Plain Dealer, July 26, 1930. 8 Thad Butler, “Recollections of Wabash, 1864-1881” (paper delivered at the Diamond Celebration and Old Settlers’ Meeting, Wabash, Indiana, September 7,1910). 9 Ibid. CHARLESF. BRUSH Reproduced from Charles F Brush, “The Arc-Light” Century Magazine, LXX (May 1905), 111. The Night They Turned the Lights On 355 In the weeks preceding the lights’ debut, the Wabash Plain Dealer tried hard to arouse public interest. Only three months prior to March 1880, Thomas Edison’s light bulb had begun attracting great attention in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Edison had spent more than a year working on the lights and had made some premature and boastful claims about them. Not until the New York Herald’s exclusive story on Edison’s lights in late December of 1879 prompt- ed thousands of people to travel to see the lights did the cloud of doubt begin to subside.

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