Roselle, New Jersey, earns its place in tech history when the first electric lighting system employing overhead wires goes into service.
The system was built by Thomas Edison as part of an experiment to prove that an entire community could be lit by electricity from a shared, central generating station. A steam-driven generator sent the juice through the wires strung overhead to a store, the town’s railway depot, forty or so houses, and a hundred and fifty streetlights. The First Presbyterian Church of Roselle made electrical and ecclesiastical history three months later when it installed a thirty-bulb electrolier and became the world’s first church to be lit by electricity. The electric chandelier still hangs in the church. In the centennial year of 1983, a bronze-and-granite marker was dedicated at the original site of Edison’s generator, at the corner of Locust Street and West First Avenue, in Roselle.
Edison, one of the most prolific inventors of all time, was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park. That predates, apparently, the age of visionaries, geniuses, and gurus. Among Edison’s 1,093 U.S. patents are the incandescent lightbulb; the phonograph; the stock ticker; and the kinetoscope, an early film projector. (We could put an Edison patent on nearly every page of this book, but you’d lose interest pretty fast.) Whether Edison was the actual inventor of everything he patented remains debatable; in fact, doubtful (see here, here, here, and here). But there’s no denying that the man knew what he was doing (see here, here, and here).—TL