Electricity Building
The International Exposition was held in a building which was devoted to electrical exhibits. Van Brunt & Howe of Kansas City designed the building, and was constructed into fruition for a cost of $410,000.
General Electric Company (backed by Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan) had proposed to power the electric exhibits with direct current originally at the cost of $1.800,000. After this was initially rejected as exorbitant, General Electric re-bid their costs at $554,000. However, Westinghouse, armed with Nikola Tesla’s alternating current system, proposed to illuminate the Columbian Exposition in Chicago for $399,000, and Westinghouse won the bid. It was a historical moment and the beginning of a revolution, as Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced the public to alternating-current electrical power by illuminating the exposition. All the exhibits were from commercial enterprises. Thomas Edison, Brush, Western Electric, and Westinghouse had exhibits. The public observed firsthand the qualities and abilities of alternating current power.
Tesla’s high-frequency high-voltage lighting produced more efficient light with quantitatively less heat. A two-phase induction motor was driven by current from the main generators to power the system. Edison tried to prevent the use of his light bulbs in Tesla’s works. General Electric banned the use of Edison’s lamps in Westinghouse’s plan in retaliation for losing the bid. Westinghouse’s company quickly designed a double-stopper lightbulb (sidestepping Edison’s patents) and was able to light the fair. The Westinghouse lightbulb was invented by Reginald Fessenden, later to be the first person to transmit voice by radio. Fessenden replaced Edison’s delicate platinum lead-in wires with an iron-nickel alloy, thus greatly reducing the cost and increasing the life of the lamp.
Nikola Tesla’s achievements and his abilities as a showman demonstrating his seemingly miraculous inventions made him world-famous. Although he made a great deal of money from his patents, he spent a lot on numerous experiments over the years. In the last few decades of his life, he ended up living in diminished circumstances as a recluse in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, occasionally making unusual statements to the press. Because of his pronouncements and the nature of his work over the years, Tesla gained a reputation in popular culture as the archetypal “mad scientist”. He died impoverished and in debt on 7 January 1943.
In the centre of the building, and forming a part of the exhibits of the General Electric company, is the Edison tower, the so-called tower of light, its shaft encircled by thousands of miniature lamps, arranged in unique innumerable pieces of crystal, and at its base a pavilion, surrounded by a circular peristyle, and containing a number of electroliers and globes exhibited by a Pittsburgh company, these also illumined at night by electricity. Thus, when at the silent touch of an unseen hand, the twoer from base to apex is arrayed in robes of scintillating and many colored lights, we have here the very incarnation of electric science.
The Edison Electric Tower
Tesla Motors is named after Nikola Tesla.
Nikola Tesla’s Display
Columbian Exposition, 1893
In addition to the Edison exhibits of electrical appliances, forming a portion of the General Electric company’s display, is a section in the southwest gallery containing the instruments of the Edison Manufacturing company; and in this locality, more perhaps than elsewhere in the Exposition, is represented the genius of the inventor. When first it was reported that Edison had constructed a machine which would store conversations, speeches, songs, orchestral music, and any other sounds given into its keeping, and reproduce them at any future time there were many who refused to believe it, and not until his phonographs were displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1889, were all the skeptics converted. Since that date the sheet of tin foil then used for the purpose has given place to the hollow cylinder of wax, upon which, as it revolves, the point of the diaphgram cuts the lines of sound. Apart from the amusement derived from this machine, it is rapidly finding favor among professional and business men, taking the place of the amanuensis, while through its records scientists are enabled to make a more thorough investigation as to the nature of wave sounds.
Edison’s Phonograph Exhibit
Edison’s Apparatus
Electricity Building Interior
Photo by C. D. Arnold
The South Entrance to the Electricity Building
The Inter Ocean
11 Oct 1893
Architectural drawing of the Electricity Building
1891
Architectural drawing of the Electricity Building
1891
Electricity Building
1893
Electricity Building
not very many facts
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Chicagology started 15 years ago as an exercise in website development. It has since evolved to a full research project focusing on the early architecture and infrastructure on the city using unedited period sources.
Some of the over 1,400 pages on the site have not yet been updated using period sources as each page does require time consuming research.
Chicagology’s staff consists of one person which, of course, means revisions to these pages takes time.
The Electrical Building is one of these pages. I will update the page shortly with more accurate information on the building and its exhibits and only use Tesla/Edison references as they appear in the source material.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.