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Such men as J. P. Morgan the Elder, Henry Villard (capitalistic father of Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of the present Nation, pink weekly), Edward Dean Adams, Grosvenor P. Lowrey (patent attorney for Mr. Edison), Robert L. Cutting (Manhattan banker), Ernesto Fabbri (Italian-born Morgan partner) and his brother, Egisto Fabbri (shipping), S. B. Eaton (Manhattan lawyer), William H. Meadowcroft (Thomas Edison's confidential secretary), Jose D' Navarro (builder of Manhattan's first elevated railway), J. Hood Wright (Morgan partner) and Norvin Green (President of Western Union Telegraph) became actively interested in Inventor Edison's new project. Many of them were trustees of the first Edison Electric Light Co.
Some of these men are still living, most are dead. Some were "greater" financiers than others in their day. Some took more active parts than others in Edisonizing the U. S. For a broad view, however, of the background against which electric light was developed in the U. S., none of them is more typical or important than the alert little old-school gentleman who, on his 82nd birthday last month, was not the least perturbed about receiving congratulations at one moment, entertaining grandchildren the next and sitting for the portrait (see front cover) in between.
This Edison trustee, Edward Dean Adams, then as now of Manhattan, was something of a scientist himself, as his later activities were to show. He had earned his B. S. degree at Norwich University, Northfield, Vt, and studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during that school's first year, when it had no buildings of its own but only rented rooms in the midst of Boston. In 1882 he was a recently acquired young partner of the old New York banking firm of Winslow, Lanier & Co. Boston born and bred, he had already established among the more flamboyant New Yorkers a quiet reputation as a thorough investigator and sound organizer of the projects into which men put money.
When Edison Electric Illuminating Co. was formed in 1884 to introduce electric lighting in New York City, young Banker Adams went on its board of directors as a matter of course. Equally as a matter of course he left it in 1889—when he entered a sphere of activity more significant even than the early Edison companies, a sphere of historic significance in any year celebrative of Electric Light. He resigned from his Edison connection because it was necessary for him to make a fundamental decision about this new electrical industry which was growing up. The decision lay between Direct and Indirect Current.
What precipitated the question was no less a precipitation than Niagara Falls.
In 1889, a group of natives from Niagara Falls, N. Y., approached Mr. Adams about organizing a power company. Three such projects had already failed; $800,000 had been thrown away. Mr. Adams said that if he could have a six-month option, he would see what could be done. He consulted mechanical engineers, notably Dr. Coleman Sellers of Philadelphia. He cabled to Inventor Edison, who was having a triumph in Paris: "Has power transmission reached such development that in your judgment scheme practicable?"
Mr. Edisonreplied: "No difficulty transferring unlimited power. Will assist."