[imgabe]

I highly recommend Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes as an excellent book about this time.

> Why go for this very broad market first? Why not build smaller generators in the basement of department stores, lighting up just single buildings or single streets?

Generators are noisy and dirty. At that time they were powered by coal. It would take some extensive modifications to a building to put one in a basement, if it were even possible. Probably it wouldn't have been worth it just for an extra hour or two of people shopping.

[taneq]

Also you had to be a mechanic (an engineer, literally) to run one. You couldn't just turn a key.

[schoen]

How about on the roof, with a smokestack exhausting into the sky? Would it have been too much work to get the fuel up there?

[imgabe]

Probably. Remember there's no elevators, coal is heavy. The roof wasn't structurally designed to support a generator and a bin filled with coal.

IIRC, a few wealthy people (I think JP Morgan, who was a big investor in both Edison and Westinghouse) installed generators at their homes so they could host dinner parties and show off the electric lights, but they did complain about the noise and the fumes.

[rtpg]

There’s something funny about becoming so wealthy that you decide to set a private generator up in your home (slowly poisoning you in the process). I would say tragic but I don’t know how much sympathy I have for titans of industry.

Reminds me of how rich Italians hated tomatoes cuz silverware interacted with the tomatoes meaning you were slowly ingesting metal (compared to poorer people with wooden utensils and the like)

[cperciva]

I think it's more than just a matter of acid leeching from metal utensils and plates. Italy -- rather like early America -- consisted of a relatively urbanized and wealthy North and a poorer and more rural South. Tomatoes (and pizza!) were a staple of Southern Italian cuisine but snobby Northerners ate more pasta and meat.

[rtpg]

I don’t think it’s just that!

I can’t find the sourcing for this but what I read was that contemporary descriptions of the taste of tomatoes were outright wrong from certain people, but would make sense if you were indeed eating tomatoes with metal.

This combined with an idea that eating tomatoes makes you sick that persisted… same deal! Tomatoes will make you sick if you’re poisoning yourself in the process.

Now I remember reading this on a pretty barren old fashioned web page so…maybe complete BS

EDIT: this article seems to substantiate my claims a bit https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-w...

[jacobolus]

Everyone at the time already had private coal furnaces in their basements poisoning their own homes.

[dredmorbius]

The safety elevator dates to 1852, and by 1867, nearly two decades prior to Edison's power station, Otis had a factory in New York City.

Buildings of over 5--6 storeys in height would likely have had elevators. And probably coal-fired heating as well.