The classic book on this is "Electrical Manufacturers 1875-1900".[1] Published by the Harvard Business School, it has Edison's business plan for the Pearl Street station. As I recall, the plan claimed the investment would be paid back in 18 months. It took twice that long.<p>It was very much a startup. Then came consolidation and mergers, resulting in General Electric.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Manufactures-1875-1900-Competition-Entrepreneurship" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Manufactures-1875-1900-Com...</a>
Edison didn't stop experimenting with the simple light bulb.<p>Adding a third connection through the glass to an electrode a distance away from the hot filament was found to conduct some current across that space and was dubbed the Edison effect.<p>Which is what vacuum tubes are largely based on.
I highly recommend <i>Empires of Light</i> by Jill Jonnes as an excellent book about this time.<p>> Why go for this very broad market first? Why not build smaller generators in the basement of department stores, lighting up just single buildings or single streets?<p>Generators are noisy and dirty. At that time they were powered by coal. It would take some extensive modifications to a building to put one in a basement, if it were even possible. Probably it wouldn't have been worth it just for an extra hour or two of people shopping.
Following a point raised by a former post in this page looking for a text: coincidentally, all (three at the time) books mentioned in this page are immediately available on the Library within Archive.org . So, here they are, for convenience, and as a reminder that the Archive may contain texts you are looking for.<p>-- Passer, Harold - The electrical manufacturers, 1875-1900 : a study in competition, entrepreneurship, technical change, and economic growth<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/electricalmanufa0000unse" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/electricalmanufa0000unse</a><p>-- Hammond; Pound - Men and volts; the story of General electric<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich</a><p>-- Jonnes, Jill - Empires of light : Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the race to electrify the world<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/empiresoflighted0000jonn" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/empiresoflighted0000jonn</a>
We'd be better ditching LEDs and switching back to incandescents, it would be far better for the environment.<p>All our power comes from renewables and nuclear, to a rough approximation, so if you're turning wind and rain or really excited neutrons into electricity you're not emitting things that change the climate. Converting that into a lot of heat along with light isn't worse for the environment than converting into not a lot of head and light, even if it means using more electricity.<p>What about the lamps themselves?<p>An LED lightbulb is a technological marvel made of a bunch of different plastics, fibreglass, copper, bismuth and tin for the solder, gallium arsenide in the LEDs, tantalum in the capacitors, assembled in huge factories using processes involving all sorts of hideous chemicals and a terrifying amount of energy.<p>On the other hand, an incandescent lightbulb is a milk bottle with a coil of wire in it and all the air sucked out.<p>Again, to a very rough approximation, something you can make in a blacksmith's forge is probably going to be better overall for the environment than something that requires a multi-billion pound factory.<p>Go renewable, and go incandescent.