Electric Torchlight Parade
This engraving, which accompanied a 15 November 1884 story in Scientific
American (p. 310), shows employees of the Edison Electric Lighting
Company in a 31 October presidential campaign parade. The marchers surround
a horse-drawn generating plant—dynamo, steam engine, boiler, and water
tanks—and the electricity is conveyed to the bulbs on their heads by wires
up their sleeves, as shown at upper left. Except for one stretch when mud
clogged the water pipes and stopped the steam engine, it was "one of the
most unique and attractive displays ever seen in a torchlight procession,
. . . the lights flooding every nook and cranny of the streets passed through"
and clearly showing "the perfection to which electric lighting machinery
has been brought."
