IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023 - 19

About 30 years later, there were 291,000 miles of telegraph
wires and 34,000 miles of telephone wires,
the telephone having been introduced circa 1876
which was beginning to push the telegraph to near
obsolescence.
There is some irony in Morse's having started the
revolution marked by poles and wires. He was a
landscape painter who lectured on landscape gardening
and painting. An article in 1846 in Yankee
Doodle Magazine mocked Morse by sarcastically
referring in a cartoon to his " great national historical
work of art " a rather ugly picture of poles and wires.
Starting in the early 1880s, the public saw yet a third
set of wires on poles: electric power lines. Interestingly,
initially, some telegraph wires were used to
convey small amounts of power: in 1896, Western
Union Telegraph used its wires to carry energy from
a hydroelectric installation at Niagara Falls to New
York City.
Following Morse's work and the spreading of
wires, several major intellectuals were so enthralled
that they used metaphors of electricity in their writing.
Wuebben quotes Emerson, who asserts that
" the Poet " had a power " transcending all limits and
privacy " and was a " conductor of the whole river
of electricity. " Later, in 1855, Walt Whitman in his
Leaves of Grass has a poem " I Sing the Body of Electric, "
which uses a metaphor of electricity as a juice
swimming from body to body. Melville had also used
electricity as a metaphor in discussing kinds of fish
in Moby Dick, while Thoreau warned that the telegraph
would clutter minds with useless news. Wires
and poles found their way into landscape painting.
Most notably just nine years after Morse's wires connected
Baltimore and Washington, Asher Durand, a
major American landscape artist, exhibited a painting,
Progress (The Advance of Civilization), depicting
its left trees, forests, and Native Americans, while on
the right, impinging on them, were steamboats, railroad,
wagon trains, and telegraph wires.
Because of the benefits of telephone, telegraph,
and electrification, the public was initially accepting
of the appearance of wires and poles. The principal
exception was New York City, especially Manhattan,
where a forest of these artifacts was soon evident.
Wuebben shows us an illustration from Harper's
Weekly of July 1889: a dreadfully dense thicket of
wires and poles at the corner of Broadway and John
Street which over the next two decades were to be
replaced with buried wires. The book mentions
September 2023
90-ft poles carrying 30 cross arms each with up to
300 wires. If you visit Manhattan today, there is no
sign of wires anywhere. Aside from their ugliness,
the burial of wires in Manhattan was motivated by a
number of fatal accidents involving pedestrians who
came in contact with downed conductors or were
crushed by poles. In the period between 1887 and
1889, 17 New Yorkers were killed by electric shocks,
in many cases from wires in the street. The blizzard
of 1888 in New York served as a further catalyst for
burying wires. Telephone, power, and telegraph
poles came down in abundance; communication to
and from New York was paralyzed, while telegraph
signaling between New York and Europe, which
involved cables buried in the ocean, was, ironically,
unaffected.
Power Lined is book-ended by two geographical
regions: New York in the late 19th century and
California in the 20th. However, California in a way
had an early start: in 1879, three years before Edison
began selling electricity in New York, San Francisco
had an electric light system: unlike Edison's installation,
it used arc lamps instead of Edison's later,
incandescent lights. The California story of electricity
has its roots in the late 19th century when it was
realized that distant streams and rivers would provide
power to generate electricity. As early as 1895,
40-ft cedar poles supported wires at 11,000 V, three
phases, from Folsom, CA, to downtown Sacramento,
where it found a use (after the voltage was reduced)
in street lamps, street cars, motors in shops, mills,
and breweries. Hydroelectric power flourished so
that by 1924, 23.5% of California homes had electricity
when compared to just 2.5% nationwide. In 1910,
Los Angeles could boast of having the highest consumption
of electric power of any city in the United
States.
The high-voltage lines crossing the state of California
were supported not by the familiar poles that we
see in most residential neighborhoods in the United
States, but by enormous pylons or towers, many
times longer and wider than poles, which maintained
power lines carrying kilovolts of potential, hundreds
of feet above the ground. Power companies, aware
of public concerns about these enormous structures,
began to incorporate images of towers and lines in
their reports and stationery, trying to convince the
public that their spread was part of the romance,
starting with pioneers, of settling the West. By 1917,
Southern California Edison was the fifth-largest utility
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023

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