Night Baseball and the Birth of Electric America
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
On the evening of June second, eighteen eighty three, a crowd gathered at a baseball field in Fort Wayne for something no one had quite seen before. The Jenney Electric Light Company had attached seventeen arc lamps to the outfield fences, each lamp producing four thousand candlepower. Three more hung from the grandstand. One sat behind the pitcher's box. The rest lined the baselines and outfield.
When darkness fell, they switched on the lights, and a professional team from Quincy, Illinois, played a local college team under electric illumination. Quincy won, nineteen to eleven. More importantly, night baseball was born.
The man whose lamps made it possible was James Jenney, who had arrived in Fort Wayne in eighteen eighty one to manufacture an arc lamp and dynamo of his own design. His backers included a local entrepreneur named Ranald MacDonald, who had the vision to see that electric light was not just a novelty but the future of everything.
Within a year, Jenney's lamps lit the New Orleans World's Fair. The year after that, they were the first lights ever to illuminate the Statue of Liberty. Fort Wayne, of all places, was at the center of the electrical revolution.
Jenney's company was acquired, reorganized, and eventually absorbed by General Electric in eighteen ninety nine. What became the GE campus on Broadway would grow to employ at its peak in nineteen forty four almost a third of Fort Wayne's entire workforce, building motors, transformers, and during the Second World War, superchargers for military aircraft. The factory that started with arc lamps and a baseball game ended up powering a war effort.
The original field where those seventeen lamps burned is long gone. But the address on Broadway where Jenney's early workshop stood is the same ground where General Electric eventually built one of the largest motor plants in the world.
