My friend, whom we shall refer to as “George,” was an antique dealer who specialized in the acquisition, restoration, and sale of clocks. He had no formal training in the history or manufacture of clocks, but he learned from the clocks themselves as he took them apart and sought information regarding their history and prior owners. Most of the clocks he dealt with had abundant information concerning their dates and sites of manufacture contained within their cabinets or stamped on their metal parts. The clock builder or sales agent was usually designated on the clock face, thereby facilitating the investigation into the clock’s provenance and lineage.
In 1998, he acquired a clock that provided no hint of its manufacturer or past owners. It was a great, ugly device with wires connecting different elements of its arcane electrical mechanism, but it appeared to be more than a century old. The parts used to build this clock were obviously antiques, but they provided no clue to the designer or the original owner of this machine. George looked through his books for something resembling this clock, but there were no similar devices. He had only spent a few hundred dollars to acquire this untraceable device and was happy to find a clock dealer who was willing to spend a few hundred dollars more to take it off his hands.
Within a few months, the ugly, old clock appeared in a list of time pieces for sale at a ‘high end’ auction house. The dealer who had bought it from George traced the clock to John Pierpont Morgan Sr. The clock had no manufacturer identification because it had been custom-made for the banker. Morgan was fascinated by all things electrical and wanted a clock that relied on electric motors, rather than the customary springs, weights, and escapements. Because of its association with J.P. Morgan and with an era (the Gilded Age) when electricity was just emerging as a pervasive element in American life, the clock sold for thousands of dollars.
J.P. Morgan is known primarily for his banking activities and rare book and art collections. Less well-recognized is his profound influence over what we call the power grid. His interest in the production, transmission, and application of electricity affected the character of America and of the air we breathe. He was a pivotal figure in what was called the “Current Wars” of the late Nineteenth Century.
Thomas Edison received considerable financial support from J.P. Morgan for his development of electrical systems, but Edison’s systems generated and distributed direct current (DC) electricity. One of Edison’s employees was a Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla who had developed generators that produced alternating current (AC) electricity. Although AC electricity was obviously much more easily distributed over great distances, Edison stuck to his plans to electrify cities with DC.
DC generators needed to be situated only a mile or two apart to reliably serve its customers and were dependent on fossil fuel burning. AC electricity could be transmitted over hundreds of miles and offered the option of creating power stations using water falls (e.g., Niagra falls) and other natural sources to drive electricity generating turbines (e.g., wind turbines).
Huge sums were spent by Edison and his supporters to lobby (bribe) politicians and the general public to accept his DC systems as the preferred mode for electrification of cities. Tesla relied on the much more modest resources of a financier named Westinghouse. The claims and initiatives adopted by the competing sides in this “war” bordered on libelous and ludicrous. When some states adopted the electric chair, which used AC current to kill prisoners, Edison’s people tried to get the execution process referred to as “westinghoused.”
J.P. Morgan decided that Edison was on the wrong track and shifted his support to Tesla’s vision of the future. Edison was devastated by this move and could not accept the wisdom of Morgan’s decision. He sold all of his holdings in the Edison General Electric Company and lost out on windfall profits as AC generators and distribution networks overtook America.
Morgan’s support for AC helped reduce the inevitable pollution that would have accompanied the reliance on hundreds of DC generators scattered about cities like New York and Chicago. The irony in this initiative that fostered clean air was that Morgan was a chain smoker. His daily cigar consumption guaranteed that he never profited from the reduced air pollution that his financial dealings had secured for major American cities.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in
