IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2021 - 90

1877). An -article about the history of
arc light carbons published, in Electrical World on 5 January 1891, stated
that " the present high position of the
American carbon industry is due to two
men, the celebrated inventor, Charles F.
Brush, and Washington H. Lawrence,
one of the founders with Mr. Brush of
the Brush Electric Company, and now
president of the National Carbon Company, Cleveland, Ohio. " In 1877, Brush
and Lawrence began a search for the
best raw material for making arc carbons. They found it within a mile of the
Brush factory, in the last product of the
distillation of crude oil, which formed
at the bottom of the stills of Standard
Oil. This nonconducting refuse became
a successful commercial arc carbon
material after it was converted to a conducting state.

Brush Central Stations
The concept of a central station serving
multiple customers would have been
familiar where distributed gas service
was available. Indeed, Scientific American published the following comment
in 1857:
From a grand reservoir of batteries, the electric fluid could
be supplied through insulated
wires to work engines in ev-

ery part of a city, in the same
manner that gas is furnished to
support illumination in stores,
houses, and workshops.
Table 1 presents the earliest docume-
nted electric central stations, all erected
in the 1878-1880 period. First, some
comments about the non-Brush stations.
Electric streetlights powered from central stations made their debut in Europe,
in 1878, in Paris and London. They
used low-intensity arc lamps called
-Jablochkoff candles, which were invented by Russian electrical engineer Pavel Nikolayevich Yablochkov (Павел
Николаевич Яблочков), who
resided in Paris. Manufactured by
Société Générale d'Électricité, the
Jablochkoff candle was publicly introduced in 1877. It crossed the Atlantic
but did not thrive in the United States.
Jablochkoff candles lacked commercial
staying power mainly because each one
lasted only about 2 h, and no automatic
mechanism for changing them had been
developed. Table 1 provides clear evidence that Brush Electric was the pioneer of long-lasting commercial central
station electric lighting.
Brush arc lights were initially used
in isolated plants in 1878. More than
600 lamps for isolated plants were
sold in 1879 for use in manufactories,

mills, mines, hotels, stores, parks,
steamers, seaside resorts, and places
of similar character throughout the
United States and other countries. I
am omitting the story of the improved
lead-acid battery Brush invented for
use as an accessory in central stations
when demand for power was low because Brush's batteries were not widely adopted.

April 1879: Cleveland
Cleveland was the logical target for
getting approval from municipal authorities to replace gas streetlights, for
the first time, with arc lights. Telegraph
Supply installed the first electric streetlights in the United States in Cleveland
in April 1879. A Brush No. 7 dynamo
fed power to 12 arc lights that replaced
105 gas lights at Monumental Park
(now Public Square) under a contract
with the city, giving more illumination
at a lower cost.

September 1879: San Francisco
The Brush series arc lamp system powered by the No. 7 dynamo was used
by the central station installed in San
Francisco in 1879, thought to be the
first central station for multiple customers in the world. Canadian George
H. Roe and partners incorporated the

table 1. Central stations for electric lighting systems in 1880.
Lamps
Year

City

Location of Lights

Dynamos

Type

Number*

Purpose

1878

Paris

Streets

Gramme

Jablochkoff

142

Streetlights

1878

London

Thames embankment

Gramme

Jablochkoff

Streetlights

1879

Cleveland

Monumental Park

Brush

Brush arc

Streetlights

1879

San Francisco

Private buildings

Brush

Brush arc

Multiuse

1880

Montréal

Wharf

Brush

Brush arc

Wharf lights

1880

Grand Rapids,
Michigan

Private buildings

Brush

Brush arc

Multiuse

1880

Detroit

Private buildings

Brush

Brush arc

Multiuse

1880

New York City

Broadway and an
armory†

Brush

Brush arc

Multipurpose

1880

Menlo Park, New
Jersey

Edison's laboratory and
vicinity

Edison

Incandescent

~500

Experimental

*Initial number.
Initial locations.

†

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