Prelude to Brilliance
Dan Taft received a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and a Master of Engineering in Electric Power from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has over forty years’ experience in the electric power industry, including protective relaying, ground fault interrupters, and surge suppression at General Electric and Hubbell, Inc. He was an Engineer in the Office of Electric Reliability at FERC. At Con Edison he was a Senior System Operator and a Manager of Transmission Planning, prior to his present role in Protection and Controls Engineering.
From the dawn of creation, time was divided into the hours of daylight and the hours of darkness. While this provided a natural rhythm to life daily, it imposed obvious limitations on human activities.
Fire, of course, had been tamed to controllable flame for lighting indoors and out by various familiar means including oil lamps, candles, and torches for millennia, but these all offered only a meager glow against the enveloping void of night, and they required constant tending to maintain the flame.
Against this backdrop, a whole new form of artificial illumination was introduced to the City of New York on March 26, 1823, when the state legislature granted a charter to the New York Gas Light Company, direct corporate forebear to today’s Consolidated Edison.
To commemorate its bicentennial this year, Con Edison was invited to ring the opening bell of the trading session at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, March 27. It’s by far the longest listed company on the Exchange.
Gas lighting had first been introduced to the public by William Murdoch in a grand outdoor display at the Soho Foundry in England in 1802 to the utter astonishment of the local population. Five years later, Pall Mall in London was illuminated by gas streetlamps.