The City of Light

On the night of November sixteenth, eighteen ninety-six, a switch was thrown at a power station near Niagara Falls and electricity traveled twenty-two miles to reach Buffalo. It was the first long-distance transmission of alternating-current power in the United States, and it worked because of a war that had already been won.

The war was the War of Currents, a technical and commercial battle between Thomas Edison, who championed direct current, and George Westinghouse, who had bet on the alternating-current system developed by Nikola Tesla. Direct current could not travel more than a mile without losing too much power to be useful. Alternating current, stepped up to high voltage for transmission and stepped back down at the destination, could travel essentially any distance. Niagara Falls was the proof.

The Niagara Falls Power Company had sunk tunnels into the bedrock beneath the falls to capture the energy of the plunging water. Turbines designed using Tesla's specifications generated electricity at two thousand two hundred volts. Transformers stepped that up to eleven thousand volts for the transmission line. Twenty-two miles away, in Buffalo, transformers stepped it back down for distribution. The city's streetcar system was the first customer.

Within a few years, Buffalo was lit as almost no American city had been lit before. Electric streetlights replaced gas lamps. Factories that had run on steam began converting to electric motors. The Pan-American Exposition of nineteen-oh-one, which burned a quarter million bulbs on its fairgrounds, was possible only because the power of Niagara Falls was already running into Buffalo's grid.

Buffalo embraced the new identity. The city called itself the City of Light. It was not a metaphor. It was a boast, and in eighteen ninety-six, the boast was accurate.