The System of Arc Lighting of the American Electric and Illuminating Co of Boston, Fully Explained
Boston, [ MA ]: American Electric and Illuminating Company of Boston 1883. First Edition. 71 pages. Cloth boards with original wrappers bound in. Separate original front wrapper title: "Electricity and Electric Illumination. The Arc and Incandescent Systems. Their Origin and History". Archival tape repair to front cover at top partialy obscuring original price of 25 cents. Generally bright and clean, noting previous owners' inked name on extra bound in flyleaf (before wrappers) and 2 penned marginal brackets highlighting specific paragraphs. Very Good. Cloth. [18411]
An early advertising piece on arc lighting, published one year after the first public lighting was installed in Boston's Scully Square (boston.gov). The stated goals from the Preface were to "diffuse among the people of New England a more general knowledge of electricity, especially as applied to electric lighting..." and "To bring to their notice what is believed to be best of the many systems of electric lighting yet invented."
But in reality this was a pamphlet no doubt handed out to potential customers positioning it against Edison's incandescent lighting system: "Mr. Edison will, we think, find a field of usefulness in which he will have ample room and opportunity to develop his system of incandescent lighting, while for the arc light there is an equally useful and wide field which it will occupy, and from which it cannot be driven." Illustrations are found in the section where they propose their own system.
The competitive nature of the electrical industry at this nascent time was intense. The American Electric and IIluminating Company bought the assets and entire business of Thomson and Houston Electric Light Company of Canada in 1884 (NY Times) - Thomson/Houston had competing standards for incandescent lighting (different bases among other things) further supporting the competitive nature of this company with Edison.
Scarce in the trade, with no copies online and only six copies in OCLC/Worldcat as of 11/2014. The work must have met with some success as a significantly larger work (120 pages) was published by the same company the following year, also present in very few copies.
ITEM SOLD