In July 1881, while Edison was immersed in his New York electrical project, France hosted an International Electrical Exposition in Paris. Unable to leave, Edison put Charles Batchelor in charge of lighting up the Champs Élysées for the occasion. At his New York machine shop, he built a giant generator to be shipped across the Atlantic. Nicknamed Jumbo after P. T. Barnum’s famous circus elephant, it weighed twenty-seven tons and generated enough electricity to power 1,200 incandescent lamps. In a dramatic eleventh hour sendoff, the machine was dismantled, boxed, and sent to the docks in a caravan of horse-drawn vans, escorted by the police. One hour before sailing time, the boxes were loaded onto the ship.

In Paris, the Edison display was the highlight of the exposition. Edison received top honors, beating competitors such as Hiram Maxim and Joseph Swan.

In January 1882, at London’s Crystal Palace lighting exhibition, Edison’s incandescent lighting again stole the show. The same month, the Edison Electric Light Company, Ltd, funded by British venture capital, finished construction on a generating station under the Holborn Viaduct. Powered by two Jumbo dynamos, the London plant was the first central generating station in the world. Sir William Preece, the chief engineer of the British Post Office, who had once expressed doubts about Edison’s electric lights, ordered the electrification of the General Post Office building in London, which became a showcase for Edison lamps in Europe.

Despite these early European triumphs, Edison faced an uphill battle at home. While the public was fascinated by the incandescent lamp, creating a system for generating and distributing electricity triggered little interest; there was nothing exciting about trenches dug in the street. People had yet to comprehend that power plants were the bedrock of Edison’s vision for a new age of technology.

To build a central power plant, Edison had to develop dynamos that could meet the expected demand. He also had to predict the electrical needs of his customers, create insulation for underground wiring, design and install the main conduit and feeders to individual households and businesses, and design and manufacture meters to measure consumption so customers could be billed. If the technological hurdles were intimidating, the financial costs were even more so. Edison knew that if electricity could not be made cheaper than gas, the public would never accept it.

As the site for his central power plant, Edison chose two adjacent buildings on Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan. While the immediate surroundings were seedy, the location was close to some powerful potential customers, including Wall Street banks and major newspapers. On the ground floor, to power the Jumbo dynamos, Edison installed four mammoth boilers and six coal-fired steam engines. The dynamos themselves were housed on the second story, which Edison had reinforced with iron columns and girders.

“The Pearl Street station was the biggest and most responsible thing I had ever undertaken,” Edison recalled later. “It was a gigantic problem, with many ramifications. There was no parallel in the world. . . . All our apparatus, devices, and parts were home-devised and home-made. Our men were completely new and without central-station experience. What might happen turning on a big current into the conductors under the streets of New York no one could say.”

Including the time Edison spent at Menlo Park planning the massive undertaking, along with the twenty months of intensive work in New York, the entire project took almost four years. On September 4, 1882, Edison was ready to inaugurate his lighting system. If it worked, its debut would mark a historic occasion, even though the Pearl Street debut would be less spectacular than the light shows Edison had staged in Menlo Park.

Because he wasn’t sure his giant generators would work smoothly in conjunction with each other, Edison piped steam into only one of the Jumbo dynamos. He inspected the system a final time before synchronizing his watch with the station’s chief electrician, John Lieb, and left Lieb with instructions to flip the switch at 3 p.m.

Edison walked a few blocks south and west to the offices of Drexel, Morgan and Company at 23 Wall Street, where he joined the directors of Edison Electric Light. Edison, whose self-confidence was legendary, was uncharacteristically anxious. To lighten the mood, Edward Johnson, the vice president of Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York, shouted: “One hundred dollars they don’t go on!”

“Taken!” said Edison, accepting the bet. A few minutes later, he pulled out his pocket watch. It was three o’clock. At the Pearl Street station, John Lieb threw the main circuit breaker as Edison flipped the switch activating the circuit at Drexel Morgan. The bank’s 106 electric lamps came to life. “They’re on!” the executives cheered. In nearby buildings, another 300 or so lights also began to glow.

The New York Times, which had fifty-two Edison lamps, noted in the next day’s newspaper that the lights were even more impressive when the sun went down: “The electric light really made itself known and showed how bright and steady it is. . . . There was a very slight amount of heat from each lamp, but not nearly as much as from a gas burner . . . The light was soft, mellow and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight to have a light without a particle of flicker and scarcely any heat to make the head ache.”

The Times then rendered its verdict on Edison’s incandescent lights: “The decision was unanimously in favor of the Edison electric lamp as against gas. One night is a brief period in which to judge of the merits or demerits of a new system of lighting, but so far as it has been tested in the Times office, the Edison Electric Light has proved in every way satisfactory.”

Edison was elated. “I have accomplished all that I promised,” he told The New York Sun. But he was far from finished. Despite this auspicious beginning, Edison still had major obstacles, both technological and financial, to overcome.

By the end of 1882, thirty-five-year-old Thomas Alva Edison had become America’s foremost inventor. His genius had perfected the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and the electric light. But his relationship with the men whose financial backing he needed to get his inventions from the laboratory to the consumer continued to be a struggle.

He frequently complained that the directors of the Edison Electric Light Company had him on a short rope. Since the company owned his patents and he had sold his stock, he had to license them when he wanted to manufacture the lamp and much of his distribution system. He was, in effect, paying for the right to produce his own inventions.

As his frustration mounted, Edison the scientist resolved to become Edison the industrialist. As he told a friend in the summer of 1883, “I’m going to become a businessman,” adding that he was “going to take a long vacation in the matter of invention.”