Politicians mediated this process. Did the new electric utilities and traction companies sell commodities in a free market or did they, like the police and fire departments, control essential parts of the infrastructure? Should their activities be considered natural monopolies? Should they be run by municipalities or by private corporations?
By 1905 more than seventy-five books and hundreds of articles sought to answer such questions. Most U.S. cities, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and New York, chose not to invest scarce resources in owning utilities but, rather, tried to regulate them. Progressive reformers in a few cities (notably Cleveland and Seattle) kept them in the public sector. Nationally, private enterprise consolidated its dominance through mergers into large regional networks and through construction of long-distance transmission lines, which together provided economies of scale in generation and concentrated engineering expertise. Private companies also formed a powerful public-relations organ, the National Electric Lighting Association (NELA), which coordinated political lobbying, national advertising, and attacks on public power. When NELA came under Congressional investigation during the late 1920s and after, the ensuing revelations paved the way for tighter regulation of the industry and for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Association. These New Deal programs brought power to rural areas, completing the national grid (1940s). They also provided a yardstick to measure the cost of private power, which still controls four-fifths of the market.
From 1880 on, Americans continually rediscovered that electricity was an enabling technology with unexpected applications. Railroads took more than a decade to discover the telegraph's advantages in overseeing their operations, and advertisers waited just as long before discovering the electric sign (1890s). Manufacturers prone to fire or explosion (for example, cotton and flour mills) adopted the light bulb quickly, but electric motors, furnaces, and cranes entered the workplace much more slowly. Electric power proved a necessary precondition to developing the modern assembly line and was crucial to doubling U.S. productivity between 1900 and 1925.
Well before 1900 Americans also embraced electricity for symbolic uses in the realm of consumption, at expositions, theaters, department stores, and hundreds of new amusement parks built near electric trolley lines. Before 1910 Americans primarily experienced electricity in public places, as it was used to transform the city into a scintillating night landscape. Spectacular lighting provided symbolic validation of the urban industrial order, highlighting skyscrapers, outlining bridges, emphasizing monuments, and editing the landscape. New York City's Broadway became the archetypal "great white way," soon copied on a smaller scale across the nation. In 1905 New York's Times Square began what was to become its yearly ritual, in which vast crowds chanted in the New Year in a brilliantly illuminated countdown.
The night skyline and the artificially illuminated landscape became subjects for painters and photographers, including John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Joseph Stella, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and many others. Pictorialist photographers aestheticized the newly lighted skyscrapers, and painters struggled to depict the almost cubist skyline, in which scale and perspective were flattened and distorted. Architects and engineers used electricity to deliver artificial daylight, climate control, and rapid vertical movement on escalators and in elevators, facilitating the construction of new urban environments. These included skyscrapers, giant department stores, amusement parks, assembly-line factories, and the subways of the early twentieth century and extended to the malls and covered stadiums of later decades. By the 1950s if the power failed the city was plunged into darkness, its factories, offices, transportation, communications, law enforcement, and entertainment paralyzed.
Likewise, from the telegraph to the Internet, modern communications systems have depended on ubiquitous and reliable electricity. The instantaneity of electricity has become fundamental to monitoring and controlling financial markets, the military, the media, factory production, transportation, inventory, sales, and entertainment. Middle-class Americans became the world's most intensive electricity consumers, building electricity into the suburban landscape. Until around 1970 few worried about the ecological consequences of hydroelectric dams, coal-burning power plants, atomic reactors, and high-tension lines needed to provide this new necessity. Since then conservation and adoption of renewable sources of power have slowed but not halted increases in electricity consumption. Scarcely a century after the first electric lights were turned on, a vast system of fiber-optic cables, high-tension lines, satellites, appliances, televisions, and computers had been interwoven into every aspect of American culture.
Delbourgo, James,A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Harvard Univ. Press 2006).
Doheny-Farina, Stephen,The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster (Yale Univ. Press 2001).
Jonnes, Jill,Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (Random House 2004).
Nye, David E.,America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (MIT Press 2003).
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang,Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Univ. of Calif. Press 1995).
Technology in American Business
Chronicling America: Nikola Tesla (Library of Congress)
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Electrification" (by David E. Nye), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=294 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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