[D8839AAO], Letter from John William Lieb, Francis Robbins Upton to Thomas Alva Edison, March 19th, 1888
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Title
[D8839AAO], Letter from John William Lieb, Francis Robbins Upton to Thomas Alva Edison, March 19th, 1888
Editor's Notes
"The following extracts from a letter rec'd from Mr. Jno. Lieb, Milan, may interest you: "Mr. Dyer left Milan a few days ago, and carried with him an order for a supply of lamps for 1888. We were glad to hear of the success you are meeting in the manufacture of the new lamp. I am glad to hear that you are "threre" and hope you will continue to stay there i.e. lead the World in making the best lamp in all respects. The comportment of the lamps we are using now is not all together satisfactory; the life is good, excellent in fact, but the blackening is giving us trouble. IN order to keep up the C.P. of the "old stagers" we are required to maintain an E.M.F. of 107-108 volts while the normal should be 102 volts. One would suppose that the newly exchanged lamps would succumb under such treatment, but our mean life of lamps for the year is between 1,000-1,100 hours. ### The distribution of the E.M.F. is good but for the reasons given above we are obliged to keek it generally high. ### The lamps have an almost unlimited life when we use alternate curents. In Rome they have no difficulty in keeping the E.M.F. within a half a volt above and below the normal, and their lamp breakage is surprisingly low. ### Mr. Deu, of Messrs Ganz & Co. was in Milan a few days ago and as usual he was loud in complaints of the treatment his firm was receiving from the Edison Company; he showed me several newspaper extracts in which quotations from some Edison Company reports are given, and which speak in disparating terms of the converter system in genearl. From the drift of his remarks I believe they intend to make these publications the basis of an action tending toward the annulment of their contract with the Edison Company. Our Transformer plant in Milan gives perfect satisfaction. The steam engines made by Ganz and Company are not up to the American Standard of excellence, though. ### We use a Sieman's underground cable about a mile long and I have made continual daily observations to see how the insullation holds up. The insullation has increased very slightly. Next month we will start up a 3000 light transformer plant at Leghorn. We have already closed negotiations for a 6000 light plant for Genoa, the source of power (water) being some ten miles distant. ### It may interest you to know as a fact that up to the present time it has not been possible to run successfully alternate current dynamos in Multiple arc. Ganz and Company have all their force at work on this problem. ### We will put up an arc light station next spring, removing our Thomson-Houston Dynamos from our present plant. Our Company will declare a dividend of 4,1/2-5% for 1887 over and above a heavy reserve for depreciation and sinking fund. The new lamp if it comes up to our expectation will make our station a first rate investment. The suit between the municipality and the gas Company has been decided in our favor, and we have closed a contract with the municipality for five years. We will soon have 175 Thomson-Houson Arcson Municipal circuits. The Municipality are removing all the gas lamp posts along the streets lighted electrically." ### Trusting the above may be of some interest to you we reamin"
Recipient
Mentioned
Date
1888-03-19
Type
Folder/Volume ID
D8839-F
Microfilm ID
123:695
Document ID
D8839AAO
Publisher
Thomas A. Edison Papers, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University