American Triumvirate (eBook)

Excerpted from the hardcover edition1. Year of Wonders At seven o'clock on a cool Indian summer Saturday evening, eager to catch a glimpse of the future, thousands of patrons began filing into venerable Mechanic's Hall on Huntington Avenue, happy to be among the first to see the wonders of the 1912 Boston Electric Show. 'Electric devices unheard of just one year ago are to be exhibited in full operation,' wrote a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, 'inventions which make the fable of Aladdin and his magical lamp seem prosy by comparison.' Emblematic of the affair, Mechanic's Hall was ablaze with forty thousand light bulbs, the largest display of incandescent lighting ever mounted, the creation of the Edison Illuminating Company of New Yorks outshone the 'Great White Way itself,' the company promised. Owing to the marvels of alternate electrical current, wide-eyed patrons wandered through the vast hall being serenaded by live opera and choir selections amplified by an invention called the microphone ('such a delicate instrument that by its agency the tread of a fly is magnified until it sounds like the clomping of a horse over the loose planks of a country bridge') and saw inventions designed to transform everything 'from the farmyard to Main Street, from the shop floor to the housewife's kitchen.' They viewed a dairy farm where cows were milked by automated machines, for instance, promising to make the drudgery of hand milking obsolete, and an electric forking machine that could unload two hundred bales of hay from a wagon and stack them in a loft in a matter of minutes rather than hours, reducing the need for hired labor. There were special motion pictures displaying how the dedicated electrical current would soon transform businesses from accountancy to coal mining, how it would count money in banks and permit a clerk in one location to inquire about a customer's account balance in a separate building altogether, achieving a response within seconds, how bakers would never need to touch the bread they sold because machines would mechanically mold dough into perfect loaves and bake them by the clock to golden perfection, how lumber mills would use power saws to mill stockpiles of flawless high-grade lumber for the booming furniture and house-building trades in minutes, not hours, how darkened streets would soon be made bright as noon by municipal lighting soon coming to market, 'pressing back the cloak of night and greatly reducing the scourge of crime and hoodlum behavior.' Perhaps the most popular aspect of the revolution on the doorstep, the show's organizers promised, would be the liberation of the ordinary housewife thanks to special electric appliances that would wash and sanitize dishes, eliminating the need for madam or a domestic to ever touch a single china plate that wasn't sparkling clean. Ovens would bake cakes and roasts according to an electric clock that would make expert cooking a snap at home. An exciting new commercial 'electric refrigerator'--the world's first, being introduced that year by the General Electric Corporation--promised to make spoiled fruits, vegetables and meats a thing of the past. 'This magical showcase at Mechanic's Hall fittingly serves as a capstone to a year that has seen one astonishment after another, all aimed at providing more leisure time for Americans to enjoy the bounty of their lives,' declared The Boston Evening Traveler. 'Many will look back and perhaps agree there has never been a year quite like it.' To be sure, it had been a year of human wonders. Despite jitters about rising Anglo-German tensions over some...