[D8416BOC], Letter from Thomas Alva Edison to Willis N Stewart, May 9th, 1884
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Title
[D8416BOC], Letter from Thomas Alva Edison to Willis N Stewart, May 9th, 1884
Editor's Notes
ack various letters re Santiago Station and business in Chile; mentions Eaton has written , advising Stewart to proceed “ under our contract, at the same time do all you can for the Santiago people. I do not doubt but what the Santiago matter will settle itself eventually” The requested pamphlets, electrotypes, blue prints & canvass books will be forwarded by fast freight. ## cable key book, together with memo re Chilean cable key arrived /// Similar details covered on p 3, e.g., your orders and shipments will be attended promptly; your proposition to mail us drafts on London ok for present if you are unable to arrange cable remittances; can’t understand why your contracts have not arrived, they were sent on 2/9; will see if I can get a certified copy of the Swan decision from the German ## MOST OF LETTER IS SNAPSHOT OF NYC, and state of business for small towns, esp. Newburgh” “We have got no new contracts of late, in fact our business at the moment is rather dull. This is of course but temporary . . . when the Summer comes along we shall have plenty of work ## re Pearl Street “The central station down town is running splendidly. The collection keep up above $9,000., and only the day before yesterday we sold $600. worth of light, being the largest amount of light sold in that district, although the maximum number of lights on at any one time was only 3,500. The reason for this is that we have been having exceptionally bad weather for May, and consequently had a great deal of day lighting. A peculiar circumstance in connection with the running of our plant is that as a rule we seldom have now more than 3,000 lights on as a maximum, and that our average lamp house has gone up from five to six hours. This is owing mainly to the character of the lighting tha Mr. Chinnock is now obtaining in the district, as he now has an opportunity of choosing his customers, and in no case does he take a new consumer unless the average lighting is very high indeed. Within a few days we expect to start on the two new dynamos which have been placed in the basement of the second building at Pearl street by our Construction Department under contract with the Illuminating Co. This will give an increased capacity to the station of about 2400 lights and, judging from the results obtained during the first week in May and the month of April, it would seem to indicate that our Summer lighting in the first district is going to be equal in every respect to the Winter lighting. ## We are figuring on an uptown plant between 23rd and59th streets and 8th and Madison Avenue, and there is a maximum of 115,000 lights burning at any one time. It is our intention to divide this into two districts, the upper one starting at 42nd Street and the lower one ending there.” Further details – each district station might cost $500k don’t yet know whether they’ll be running by summer. ### “Our small town plants are running elegantly, all bugs have been eliminated. The new pressure indicator is a perfect success. A large party of us went up t Newburgh to view thing …” further details re performance
Author
Recipient
Date
1884-05-09
Type
Folder/Volume ID
D8416-F
Microfilm ID
72:670
Document ID
D8416BOC
Publisher
Thomas A. Edison Papers, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University