“Let us in a friendly way compare notes, tell each other all we know, tell each other anything that has been a benefit to us and can be to others.”
The annual convention of the Edison Electric Institute was held last week in Chicago, at the Sheraton Grand Hotel. The first annual convention of what was then called the National Electric Light Association was also held in Chicago, at the Grand Pacific Hotel.
That was some time ago. The first convention was called to order at 11 a.m. on February 25, 1885. A conference in Chicago in February?
Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station had started serving customers just two and a half years earlier. The electricity industry was very new.
At the grand Pacific, built just after the Great Chicago Fire, William Hovey opened the first convention with these timeless words:
Now there are other questions, gentlemen, which it seems to me, this Convention may fairly consider, because they come up every day, in the course of our business as electric light men. We are scattered all over the country. Each one of us is trying to solve these various problems in his own way.
I never went into an electric light station anywhere, large or small, with a good system or a poor one, with good engines or bad ones, with good boilers or bad ones, that I did not learn something...
I merely want to make one more suggestion; then I will sit down. It is this, there is no reason why in a Convention of this kind there should be the least reluctance to tell our experience, and the benefits which have accrued from any cause or any policy.
I take it, looked at in a large way, it is to the interest of the electric light companies everywhere, that not only the electric light companies in Boston, but the electric light company in Minneapolis, should succeed and have it known that they are a success. The two are in no way competitors.
All the general successes on the part of electric light companies, made known to the public, raise a drain on the electric light and bring it into better repute, and tend by reflex action to help all the companies.
Now, I take it, that this Convention is held upon the principle that some of us know what others do not. Let us in a friendly way compare notes, tell each other all we know, tell each other anything that has been a benefit to us and can be to others, and I think when we go home we shall all do so with increased knowledge."
As the magazine for commentary, opinion and debate on utility regulation and policy for 87 years, Public Utilities Fortnightly fosters vigorous arguments on the hottest issues of our day, and occasionally reflects on the arguments and issues of our past.
Steve Mitnick, Editor-in-Chief, Public Utilities Fortnightly
E-mail me: mitnick@fortnightly.com
