Pearl Street Station opens
Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan began commercial operation on September 4, 1882, as the world's first central power station serving paying customers. It burned coal to drive steam engines that turned dynamos producing 110-volt direct current, distributed through underground cables to roughly 80 buildings across a few blocks. By the end of its first year it served 500 customers and 10,000 lamps. The plant was small, dirty, and inefficient, and it lost money for several years — but it proved that coal-fired electricity could be sold as a utility. Within forty years, almost every Western city had a coal-fired grid, and electricity was the backbone of every subsequent industrial advance.
Pearl Street's customers included J. P. Morgan's office at 23 Wall Street, which was wired before his home. Morgan was Edison's main financial backer and ran Edison Illuminating's books out of his bank — making the first electrical utility a Morgan-financed venture from the start. The financialization of power generation was simultaneous with its invention.
02 · King Coal
Once Watt's steam engine made coal-to-motion practical at scale, every breakthrough in industrial production rode on top of it: railways, steamships, mechanized factories, telegraph wires, electrical grids. Britain sat on the largest accessible coal reserves in Europe, and that geological accident turned a small Atlantic kingdom into the world's first industrial empire. By 1850, Britain produced more iron than the rest of the world combined. By 1908, it produced 25 percent of the world's coal. Wealth concentrated in factory owners, railway financiers, and shipping magnates — a new merchant aristocracy whose money came from burning rocks.
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