Also in 1892 awaiting the next move by the financiers were the 15,000 people of the city of Schenectady. What had been the impact of a big, by 1890s standards, Machine Works on this little, even by 1890s standards, city? That is the question this chapter will address. That question will be examined first from inside the Works, then from inside the city.
The Edison Machine Works in Schenectady originated, as noted, in two buildings abandoned by an unsuccessful venture into locomotive making. That Works immediately outgrew those two original buildings. It quickly expanded into a Works exceptional in size and scope for the 1880s. Few production sites of any kind employed its wide range of technologies. Of the many products soon emerging from the Works, two were most important. One was dynamos (a term then used to encompass both electricity generators and electric motors). These were high precision carefully machined, intricately wired devices used to turn mechanical energy into electromagnetic energy, or vice versa. Dynamos were at the leading edge of 1880s technology, and earned the Works' highest profit rate.
The second largest business was by contrast hot, dirty, dangerous, relatively low tech, low in profitability but essential to fulfilling an Edison commitment. The Wizard had promised not to send his electricity through dangerous overhead wires, but safely underground. To satisfy this commitment another New York City company had been formed, the Edison Tube Company.
It was managed by John Kruesi. In a process developed by Kruesi himself the "tubes", 25 foot long sections of iron pipe, were threaded with copper wire, and then force filled with a molten asphalt-based insulating material. The tubes could then be lowered into ditches in New York Streets and connected up. Filling in the ditches left all transmission wires safely underground, fulfilling Edison's promise.
The Edison Tube Company also moved to Schenectady in the fall of 1886, providing the works with its hottest, most exhausting and most inflammable factory. In 1892 it would ignite in the greatest fire in the entire history (so far) of the Schenectady Works. The fire briefly threatened to go out of control and consume the entire works. It was, however, put out with contained damage and, miraculously, no fatalities. Evidence that at least some women worked in the extremely unpleasant conditions of the Tube Shop is contained in a resulting headline: "Edison Works Fire. Tube Shop Destroyed. Girls are saved." (48)
Between those two extremes, the works took on the whole range of tasks aimed at getting electricity to users, and enabling them to use it in new ways. In addition to dynamos and tubes, the product list included, condensers, wire and cable, junction boxes, switches, and those Sims-Edison torpedoes, as well as non-electrical products such as pulleys, shafting and castings. (49)
One major Edison product was not made at the Works which 20th Century Schenectady boosters would label "the city that lights and hauls the world". The Works never manufactured any incandescent light bulbs. These were made at Harrison, NJ. The end products that were made in Schenectady ranged from over all the rest of the system that brought electricity to those light bulbs, and powered electric trolley cars. In addition, those electrical products were only the tip of an industrial iceberg. Behind them were intricate machines for using copper wire to direct electricity in just the right amounts to the places where it was wanted. Meanwhile, other machines or hand processes applied insulating materials to keep the electricity from going where it was not wanted. All this required not a single big factory building, but a whole industrial village. (50)
For example, in a building, reminiscent of a cotton mill, whirring machinery applied insulation to wires, while young women scurried around fixing breaks and keeping things running. In another building, the mica shop, human dexterity chopped mica into thin layers needed to insulate a key component of DC electric generators and motors called a commutator. The human dexterity with mica was also mainly supplied by women. This owed less to particular female skills than to the fact that women were paid on the average half the daily wage of men.
Coil winding occupied another shop. It operated at a medium level of mechanization. It also had a gendered work distribution. Women wound the smaller more intricate coils for half the pay of the men who wound the larger, heavier ones.
Not all the work was shop labor. By 1890 the sales and bookkeeping forces occupied a main office building that would, an observer noted, have graced a small town. The drafting department was housed in a building described by that visitor as spacious and elegant as a billiard hall. There was a small brass foundry, and a large iron foundry which, when not fully occupied with Works needs sold its services to the local economy. To complete the industrial village analogy the works had its own transportation department, police force, and 200 man volunteer fire department. For the firemen, management purchased a steam powered La France fire engine superior to anything possessed by the then still all volunteer Schenectady Fire Department.
The Works labor force grew from 300 at the end of 1886 to 2500 in 1891. These new arrivals fit right into the community. In April, 1887, for example the Edison Machine Works Baseball Team defeated a "picked side from this city". The Edisonians also provided new customers to local businesses. This likely included Ranch 10, a "disorderly house" located near the Works. It was raided by the police in that same month of April, 1887. (51)
The new work force that had these impacts was diverse in origins and occupations. Late 19th century industrialization is often characterized as replacing skilled craft workers with unskilled operatives. This was not the whole story in Schenectady. Before the arrival of the Edison Machine Works, Schenectady's distinctive employment category had been machinists. A machinist is basically a person who uses a machine to cut metal into parts that will be used to make other machines. Machinists were employed, pre-Edison, at Schenectady's Locomotive Works, as well as at smaller Schenectady firms building such products as agricultural machinery, steam power for ships, and, two decades earlier, the turret mechanism for the Civil War ironclad Monitor.
The Edison Works did not replace this machining skill with unskilled machine tenders. Instead, the demands of the electrical industry required more and better machinists, as well as a range of other skilled crafts such as moulders, tool and die makers, blacksmiths, patternmakers, and model builders. The Edison Works did employ more operatives and laborers than had ever been assembled at one Schenectady location before, about 1000 in all. There were also, however, more than 1000 skilled craftsmen, mainly machinists, also an unprecedented number for a single Schenectady location.
The remaining few hundred employees might be labeled white collar workers and managers. They ranged from the sole Works gatekeeper up through bookeepers, clerks, draftsmen, engineers, foremen, and a handful of top managers led by Samuel Insull. Consider all these layers of employment, one layer at a time. Start with the operatives and laborers. An employee log of operatives and laborers in the Armature Winding Department Edison Machine Works for 1890-1893 survives. It includes a tabular listing of over 1000 employees, giving the date they started, their names, addresses, specific occupation, pay rate, previous occupation and date of termination, often with the reason. (52)
About one third of the operatives were women. Both women and men were mainly in the age range 15-30 years. About one in seven, however, was listed at the lowest listed age, 14 years. A bill recently passed by the New York State Assembly had put 14 as the minimum age for work in factories. A comparison of the employee log with census records by Catherine Haag showed that some 60 of the workers were actually under that age limit of 14, in violation of the law.
Only about 1 in 10 of the workers were over 30. The oldest was 52. Among the women, only about 1 in 10 was married. The average wage was about a dollar a day, typical for what laborers earned throughout the later 19th century. However, that average was within a doubly peaked distribution. The women and 14 and 15 year old boys essentially all made $.50-$.70 a day. The men almost all made $1.00 to $1.35 a day. The work day was 10 hours Monday through Friday and 9 hours on Saturday.
About half the operatives and laborers had previously been Schenectady residents. The most common previous occupation was "home work", followed by farming and school. These are trailed by a long list of other previous occupations: broom maker, knitting mill operative, printer, plumber, blacksmith, grocery clerk, barber and many more.
The ethnic origins of the workers are not listed, but can be inferred from their names. Like Schenectady as a whole, the majority were "Yorkers": people whose names indicated family residence in New York State or its neighbors for at least two generations. The Van surname, indicating descent from original Dutch settlers of the region, was underrepresented compared to the Schenectady population. The Mc and O' surnames, indicating Irish, and the Sch surnames, indicating German, were overrepresented. The surnames with a Di or Ko prefix, or a final vowel, indicating Eastern European or Italian origin, were present, but only in very small numbers. A larger presence of these later immigrants would be a 20th century phenomenon.
A biographical sample from this listing turns up no dramatic subsequent rags-to-riches stories. The closest is that of Andrew Geisemer, a 14 year old mica paster. His grandfather was a German born saloon keeper on Albany Hill, and his father worked at the Locomotive Works. After just two years at the Edison Machine Works, Andrew left his operative job to become a carpenter, and went on to a successful career as a building contractor. At the other extreme Mrs. Frances Tiffany had gone from wife and homemaker to a widow taking in boarders. Now, at age 52, she was earning $.50 a day as a coil winder.
Most of the known stories are somewhere in between those examples of Andrew Geisemer's upward mobility and Frances Tiffany's downward slide. Many of the children and single women were second earners, often children of other Edison workers. For example, 20 year old mica splitter Laura Dey was not only the daughter of an Edison Works employee, but also a cousin of a fellow mica splitter, 19 year old Celia Mereness.
Finally, more than half of the workers were listed as departing employment by 1893. So many are in this category to raise the suspicion that this might be a selective list. It is more likely, however, that it simply expresses two known facts about industrial operative employment in the US at the time: first, high turnover, sometimes exceeding 100% per year even in good times, and second, the frequency of depressions, such as the one that began in 1893.
Most of the departures are listed as "quit". A smaller number indicate a transfer to another job at the machine works. A similar small number indicate firing for such deficiencies as "incompetence" or "absenteeism." Only a few are listed as "laid off."
A step above the operatives and laborers were the semi skilled workers. On an August day in 1892 some thirty Metal Polishers of Edison Machine Works Building 25 posed for a group picture. A caption later applied to that picture allowed some of those metal polishers' life stories to be sketched.
Metal polishing was a semi skilled job, and a hazardous one. Giving the rough castings that emerged from the foundry a smooth finish began with filing off those castings. The process filled the air with tiny metal particles. The workers had no protective equipment to prevent them from breathing in those particles. Another step, dipping and plating, involved polishing metal surfaces with liquids that released into the air harmful vapors, from which the workers were also unprotected.
Two men in that 1893 picture were sons of John Clune, an Irish immigrant to New York City. They had followed the Edison Machine works to Schenectady. John Jr. was a shop worker and James was foreman of the dipping and plating room. They would soon be joined by brother Martin, after he completed a six year enlistment in the U.S. Marines, and later by a fourth brother, Harry. (53)
As the Clune brothers exemplify, it was often the presence of family ties that enabled some workers to stay permanently in Schenectady and sometimes even prosper. Martin Clune, for example, would by 1900 be a property owner and Republican Party Committeeman in Schenectady's Second Ward. He was also a member of the Schenectady Trades Council, a pioneering effort to organize labor unions in Schenectady. In their roles at the intersection of occupation, labor relations, and politics, the Clune brothers will be heard from again.
The next layer up were the 1000 or so skilled workers. About 300 came up to Schenectady from the Goerck Street works. A contemporary states that many soon quit and returned to New York City. This led at Schenectady to a persisting shortage of machinists. The response was recruiting, and poaching, near and far. Recruits ranged from Schenectady locomotive machinists to tool and die makers at the Singer Sewing Machine Company in New York City, to machinists at the large nearby New York Central Shops at West Albany to skilled immigrants getting off the boat at New York City, to recent journeyman from the Midwest taking the machinist's traditional post-apprenticeship wandering year.
Immigrant groups that had become numerous in Schenectady before the arrival of the Edison Works welcomed this new employment opportunity. For example, machinists Henry and Frederick Schwenker had arrived together in Schenectady from Prussia in 1861 to work at the Locomotive Works. By 1891 five Schwenkers were working either at the Locomotive or Edison Machine Works. (54)
Atop the skilled worker hierarchy were the tool and die makers. Their critical role was to design and make tools, dies, guides, and and other attachments. These enabled less skilled workers to carry out relatively simple and repeated operations, yet produce some of the precise and complex parts previously made by highly skilled craft specialists. These demanding tool and die maker posts proved hard to fill by recruiting. One resort for the foreman was to train his own.
Jacob Weller, for example, was a farm boy in a family that had resided for decades in the then rural Schenectady suburb of Scotia. In July, 1887, he crossed the Mohawk to Schenectady and walked down to the river flats to try his luck at the new machine works. A city directory lists his first occupation as laborer. In that role, however, he caught the eye of Peter Weber, foreman of the Tool and Die Department. Weber took Weller under his wing as part of what was then an informal, highly personalized system of apprenticeship. (55)
Jake Weller earned a permanent place among the 30 Tool and Die makers. He further proved his mettle on the day of the great fire of 1892. He was one of 20 men who grabbed the pump handles of a 50 year old hand pumper to douse the blaze. In the course of it, he got trapped between railroad cars, breaking his arm. He suffered other, more permanent disabilities, but his arms and hands recovered. The job of tool and die maker mainly required dexterity, not mobility. So despite lasting physical problems he was able to serve out a 44 year career as a GE tool and die maker. In the course of it, he fathered what would become a dynasty of skilled craftpersons. (56)
The next level above the most skilled worker was testing electrical equipment. That was best done by people who understood the principles of electricity. That mainly meant college men. They initially showed up on the payroll as students hired for the summer, paid at the same 50¢ per day that boys and women got. They got their hands dirty in the shops, working alongside laborers, operatives, machinists, and skilled mentors. This enriched with experience their previously only theoretical electrical knowledge.
By the end of 1891 this student category was formalized into the "Test Program". From its beginning the Test was international, with one of the first members being Kunihiko Iwadare from Japan, who would go on to become a founder of the Japanese electrical-electronics giant corporation NEC. For the next 60 years the Test would serve as the main way of initiating new engineers into General Electric. (57)
About half of the graduates of the Test would stay with the Company. The other half would often take jobs at electric utilities and other potential Works customers. For example, J. Edward Schwenker, Union College and Test Program trained scion of that aforementioned Schenectady Schwenker family, became one of the leading contractors in New York State, and likely a good customer for General Electric.
Moving up to the hierarcy, consider the 60 or so foremen. Like feudal land owners in earlier days, they had absolute rule over their local domains. They made all hiring and firing decisions within their own team, and were often accused of favoritism, and of requiring personal perks, such as free Sunday work on the foreman's home. What limited their dictatorial possibilities was their own background as workers. They knew from experience that disaffected craftsmen had ways of getting back at abusive foremen-- ways that often negatively affected the department's productivity.
Illustrating the balance between decisiveness and fair treatment was foreman Billy Madigan. He was the son of Irish immigrants living in Albany NY. In 1884, at age 15, he went to work at the West Albany shops of the NY Central. There a machinist named Soles, whom Madigan later described as "a fine old man with his beard down to his chest and always wearing a hat" took charge of him, providing a personal apprenticeship similar to that of Weller's. After five years, Madigan was told by Soles "to go out and hit the country." This wandering year was typical for machinists graduating from apprentice to journeyman status. Madigan spent his at various railroad shops around the Northeast, growing in confidence as he developed skills as a problem solver as well as a craftsman. After he returned to Albany, Soles sent him off again, in May 1891, with a letter of recommendation to William "Pop" Turner, shop Superintendant at the Edison Machine Works. Turner soon promoted Madigan to foreman. "Pop Turner liked men who were snappy and full of pep, not afraid to get into the job themselves," said Madigan.
Billy himself was not so sure about this added responsibility as a permanent career. "I never took my overalls off in my first job as foreman," he said. Pop Turner helped him make up his mind. "I was coming along one day with a handful of tools when Turner stopped me and said." "Lad I want you to take charge of 10 tomorrow" [Building 10 was one of the two original Machine Works buildings, and in the 1890s the most important machine shop]. Added Turner, "take your overalls off." (58)
Works Superintendent Turner, though just a step above the foreman level, was one of the two top shop officials. These two lords of manufacturing performed a sort of good cop-bad cop routine. John Kruesi, manager of manufacturing, was the good cop. His nickname was Honest John. He was universally respected for his combination of competence and calm. He was reputed to be the only manufacturing manager or foreman not to use profanity. (59)
Kruesi managed manufacturing by collective consensus. As Tube Shop foreman Christian Rach recalled, "whenever a large order was received, Kruesi would call together in a conference all the heads of the manufacturing departments to lay out the work." (60)
Turner was the bad cop. He was seen, a contemporary said, rarely in a coat and never a collar. He earned, in equal measure, respect for his competence and fear of his temper. Said a subordinate "he ruled with might and was usually right". Turner acted impulsively, once firing a foreman whom family matters kept from attending a Sunday foremen's picnic. Kruesi had sometimes to act as a court of appeal against Pop's excesses. (61)
At the top of the management structure stood Samuel Insull. He owed his authority as much to his special relation with Edison as to any assigned job description. He was an energetic combination of money raiser, salesman, final authority on Works matters, and active investor in local companies and real estate. Insull sometimes had to work through Turner to impose his will on long time Edisonian Kruesi. For example, when Insull wanted to introduce piecework as the way of paying the skilled employees, he instructed Turner to make that suggestion to Kruesi, to avoid a possible clash with that longer time Edisonian. (62)
Beyond rule by foremen, the Works had no formal labor relations policy. The original labor relations goal, escaping unions, had largely been achieved. In the Works' early years it experienced only a few small local strikes. Despite the workers' lack of formal rights, however, at times the scarcity of particular skills gave a few skilled workers a surprising degree of negotiating power. For example, the pattern makers were sort of sculptors in wood, making the patterns that, packed in sand, provided the molds for cast iron parts. Their particular skill, more artistry than science, was very hard to replace. So when they walked out briefly in 1893 seeking a slightly shorter work week, the management quickly and quietly met their demands. The pattern makers secured unofficial but lasting recognition as the first GE union with whom management would bargain. Their special status would survive until the 1960s. Where skills were more replaceable, GE did not negotiate with unions. In 1890, Insull was accused of firing three union organizers. He denied the charge, attributing the firings to insubordination. "We do not object to our employees belonging to labor organizations," he said, "so long as they permit us to run our business." (63)
The Machine Works had brought one employees organization up from New York City. The Edison Mutual Benefit Association continued in Schenectady its practice of collecting dues from voluntary employee participants, and making small payments for specified emergencies such as injury or funeral costs. It played no role in workplace policy.
As for safety, the Schenectady Works was not an exceptionally dangerous workplace by contemporary standards, but neither was it exceptionally safe. Pop Turner claimed in an 1890 newspaper interview that the works had only "a single serious accident" in its first four years. This claim is supported by the New York State Factory Inspector's 1888 Report. It lists several workplace accidents at other Schenectady manufacturers, but none at the Edison Machine Works. That safety record was, however, not kept up. The Factory Inspector's Report for 1892 lists more than 40 accidents at the Works. (64)
A few such accidents highlight one possible contributing hazard: the shortage of skilled hands, and a resulting insertion of inexperienced newcomers into skilled positions. For example, John McGinnis, who presented himself as a steamfitter, was sent on his first assignment into a works basement to repair a leak. He instead released a blast of steam, receiving a fatal scalding. (65)
In another episode, a skilled operator of a die casting machine was found smuggling a pail of beer into the shop. Ordered to dispose of it, he instead quit. He was replaced by a newly arrived German immigrant, Carl Sillman. On his first day on the machine Sillman reached in to remove a casting and had both arms caught in the mechanism, with "frightful" results. Never losing consciousness he walked down to the infirmary where both his arms were amputated at the elbow. (66)
Alongside its workplace hazards, improvised and informal management structure, and many opportunities for abuse by foremen and management, the Machine Works achieved the profitable financial results its owners hoped for. "They are doing a large and increasing business," the credit rating firm Bradstreet Co. concluded in 1888. "The business is said to be carefully and capably managed, and payments satisfactorily met." (67)
Turn now to the city perspective. How did the Works impact Schenectady? The answer began with a surprise. It turned out that the Edison Machine Works was not located in the City of Schenectady at all. In a quirk of boundary setting early in the 1800s, those flats by the river, frequently flooded and fertile, seemed destined for an agricultural rather than an industrial future. So despite being closer to the city center than most of the proposed city boundary, those flats were designated as outside that boundary, and instead part of the neighboring country village, Rotterdam.
This meant that the Works would not just avoid paying the high taxes of its original home, New York City. It also would avoid paying the lower but still significant taxes of the City of Schenectady. Rotterdam residents were soon complaining that the Edison Works was paying less than its fair share of even those lower county and local taxes. As one Rotterdam official put it "the Works of the Edison General Electric Company were assessed at a very low figure." By 1895, an Albany newspaper was claiming that "The personal property of the Edison General Electric Works was originally assessed at $15,000,000 but that was afterward reduced to $600,000." As the Works got these rural bargains, Schenectady city taxes went up as the city welcomed thousands of new workers. They needed to be housed, which in turn generated the need for paved streets, new sewer lines and water mains, more policemen, the establishment of a professional fire department, and new schools for the soon to arrive children of those incoming young workers. (68)
So Edison General Electric started with a big unfair advantage. It could house its workers in a conveniently nearby and modernizing city without having to pay a full share of the costs of that modernization. This did not, however, mean that Edison General Electric turned a totally blind eye to city development. Instead, almost immediately, key members of Schenectady's political and economic leadership and the very top level of Works leadership formed an informal and unofficial city improvement liaison committee.
On the civic side were two successful businessmen. Henry DeForest's biography traced Schenectady's economic evolution. He was born on the floor above the county jail, where his father served as sheriff. He studied business and became a clerk, and soon the owner of a broom making shop. Then he was a farmer growing broom corn and sugar beets on an island in the Mohawk River. Then, twice in the 1880s, he served Mayor of Schenectady. After the arrival of the Edison Works DeForest abandoned politics in favor of real estate, leading the development of new neighborhoods. (69)
Two of those DeForest developments were in the city, just outside the Works boundary. They featured new avenues named after Edison and Kruesi. Their selling point was the short walk to and from work. DeForest's aim, he said, was to "give each of the mechanics employed at the Rotterdam shops an opportunity to enjoy 365 warm dinners."
Following DeForest's lead, local realtors changed the names of once out of the way locales from the merely descriptive, such as Engine Hill or Cotton Factory Hollow to the more inviting, such as Mount Pleasant, Pleasant Valley and Bellevue. Neighborhoods in the sometimes damp or flooded flatlands were now advertised as within a short walk to the Works. Those that were significantly uphill were advertised as high and dry — and soon to be on a trolley line.
A second key player in the Works-city alliance, Willis T. Hanson was a descendant of New England Yankees and a second generation Schenectadian. He was druggist in the 1880s when he purchased the American rights to a patent medicine called Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People. This iron supplement was touted, without evidence, as cure for such ailments as arthritis and cholera. It proved popular, and made Hanson rich. When the Machine Works arrived, Hanson was in the process of improving his local image by becoming president of a new bank and helping found the Schenectady Board of Trade. Part of this civic activism was active cooperation with Edison General Electric and its successor. He will be seen, for example, leading the city 's effort to purchase and donate to General Electric some crucial property, and later receiving a reward in the form of an insider trading opportunity brought to him by General Electric's president. Hanson also partnered with Pop Turner in buying up hundreds of lots in the soon to be developed suburb of Bellevue. (70)
The reaching out to the corporation by these civic leaders was met by similar outreach to the city on the part of Edison General Electric leaders Insull, Kruesi, and Turner. When the Edison Works arrived, Schenectady was just opening its first trolley line. It consisted of horses pulling a car over a mile or so of tracks on the city's main thoroughfare, State Street. After Sprague's Richmond success, a new management promised to electrify and expand the system. After they lagged in this effort Schenectadians learned in 1890 that this local effort had been bought out by a company whose principals were Sam Insull, John Kruesi, and Pop Turner. "The road," Insull told reporters "will be a model one in every respect in order to show the new motors to the best advantage."
They emphasized that were not acting on behalf of Edison General Electric, but were their own company. They would, however install Edison General Electric's newest equipment, and give Schenectady a world class system. Said Insull, "we are willing to run the road through every street in town if it will pay us to do so." Nor did the trio stop there. Soon a second Insull-Kruesi-Turner company underbid the previous street lighting company and got the contract to light the city with electric arc lamps. "Arc lighting is something new for the Edison company," said Turner. "We intend to make this a model plant." The three went on in 1891 to buy the Schenectady Gas Company, and then the Schenectady Westinghouse Electric Lighting Company. This last purchase removed the embarrassment of a competitor supplying the city with Edison's signature product. When Henry DeForest proposed a new Edison Hotel, Insull, Kruesi and Turner were investors. This "first class" establishment held a bar, billiard rooms, a barber shop, and 30 rooms, one of them permanently reserved for the Wizard. (71)
Another Machine Works official took a more direct route into city affairs. William Gilmore came to Schenectady as Insull's secretary, but was soon promoted to assistant works manager. He moved into the elite downtown Stockade section. There, in 1890 he ran as a Republican for the post of city alderman. Despite a Democrat near sweep of the rest of the city, he won. At his very first City Council meeting, Gilmore led a coalition of the Republican minority and some Democrat dissidents against the previous Democrat majority. His local reach went further in 1889, when he married the granddaughter of the most prominent politician in that town of Rotterdam. Gilmore then saw his grandfather-in-law elected in 1892 to the U.S. Congress. (72)
On the City Council, Gilmore quickly involved himself in the the city's main public health issue. Schenectady's trademark disease was typhoid. This waterborne infectious disease was especially severe where crowded together housing placed homes' privies too close to home water wells. In response, a private investor built, and the city later purchased, a water supply system serving city needs with piped water. Unfortunately, that system's water intake was in the Mohawk River, just downstream from an open sewer called Cowhorn Creek. The Edison Machine Works now added its wastes, also entering the river just upstream of that water supply intake.
In 1891, an Albany Medical College researcher published an article identifying Schenectady as the "fountain head" of the region's recent typhoid epidemic. He singled out "the sewage of the Edison Company in Schenectady," and included case studies of typhoid contracted by Edison Machine Works employees. (73)
In response to this danger, the city's commissioners had a plan. Drill wells on the banks of the Mohawk River to reach an underground aquifer. Filtering the water through a a thick layer of sand left the aquifer untainted with contaminants. (74)
Then politics intervened. Labeling that aquifer plan as too expensive and inadequate in quantity, a coalition of economy minded politicians from both parties rejected it. They installed a new Water Commission which concluded in 1893 that the place for the new water intake was, after all, in the Mohawk River. Here Gilmore came out for quantity over quality. In the interim, the Edison General Electric Works had been connected into the city water supply. It had done so with questionable legality. Being outside the city limits, that hookup was, the city attorney stated, "directly in violation of the city charter." Legal or not, the Edison Works needed the large quantity of water that the river could supply. At this point in the debate, Gilmore gave what a reporter described as "an eloquent speech." His key message: "unless the Edison Works had a larger supply of water than at present they would be forced to shut down and this would throw 3500 people out of employment." It was an already familiar and soon to be repeated tactic of corporate bullying. Either do what we demand or we will not come here at all (1886) or shut down (1893) or move out (1895). Gilmore ignored a recent finding by Union College biologists that the proposed new input, though now located upstream from the Works outlet, had a dangerous level of bacteria per cubic centimeter due to the discharges of the dozen other industrializing cities and towns further up the Mohawk. Gilmore and his allies won the vote that approved that polluted intake. Only a courageous Mayor, Joseph Clute, saved Schenectady. He vetoed the bill that specified the Mohawk intake, saying, "the city wants pure water". He then led a turnaround that ultimately approved the aquifer plan. It took 4 years to install the new system. When it was ready, however, it proved a resounding success, providing clean, safe water in astonishingly abundant quantities. Aquifer water has met the needs of the city and the Works ever since, and remains sufficient and clean in the 21st century. (75)
If the officials of the Edison Works acted with less than perfect corporate citizenship in regard to the water crisis, they did a little better in response to another source of urban danger. The increasing scale of the Works magnified the already serious problem of dangerous transportation hazards.This danger was the flip side of the transportation access that attracted industry. The Erie Canal, still useful for carrying heavy products, passed through the center of the city. Its shallow stagnant ditch spread germs, and occasionally held the drowned body of an untended small child or intoxicated adult. Much more serious by the 1880s was the toll taken by the hundreds of daily trains passing at street level on four parallel tracks across the main downtown streets.
Commenting on this, a local newspaper editorialized that "Every working day several hundreds of the employees of the Edison Works travel up and down the railroad tracks to and from their work. It is a source of wonder that accidents are not of more frequent occurence." Two months later Alderman William Gilmore moved that a tunnel be dug to carry the trains under that crossing. This led to passage of a bill in the State Legislature and, in 1894, construction of the tunnel. This relieved the problem, at least for the crossing directly in front of the Works. The toll of railroad accidents at ground level crossings elsewhere, however, continued. The Edison General Electric Company, as a corporate resident of the adjoining village of Rotterdam, saw fit to ignore this bigger city of Schenectady portion of hazard that its presence had amplified. (76)
So to sum up, what was be the impact of this big, by 1886 standards, Machine Works on this little, even by 1886 standards, city? In the main, it was just one example of a wave of 1880-1900 industrial relocation that created one of the world's greatest industrial belts. Big corporations moved into little cities in the late 19th Century for some of the same reasons they would eventually move out of those cities in the late 20th Century. They sought abundant and cheap land on good transportation, a lower wage rate, and an escape from political interference, taxes and labor unions.
As the Edison General Electric Company scaled up its Works just outside the little city of Schenectady, it completed the process of turning a transportation break into an industrial city, a process the Locomotive Works had begun. Schenectady went from a population mainly concentrated within half a mile of the original city center to a downtown surrounded by a ring of densely populated multi-family home neighborhoods. As it thus reshaped Schenectady, the Edison Machine Works would stand outside the city's boundaries, paying the city no taxes. As it did so, it subjected Schenectady to the costs of growth, such as the flow of more pollution into its unfortunately placed water supply intake. If city leaders protested, the company would bully them with threats of departure.
All this added one more nicknamed little city — the Electric City — to the list stretching from the Shoe City of Lynn, MA to the Collar City of Troy, NY to the Rubber City of Akron, OH to the Glass City of Toledo, OH to the Plow City of Moline, IL. These repurposed little cities filled a parallelogram bounded by Boston, Baltimore, St Louis and Minneapolis that was fast becoming one of the world's greatest industrial belts.
At Schenectady, the managers of the Edison Machine Works, Insull, Kruesi and Turner, were big frogs in a small pond. At the same time, their managerial fates, as well as the fates of their Schenectady work force, were being determined by the much bigger frogs in the nation's biggest pond. Down in New York City, a small group of financiers were busy creating the giant corporation that the Wizard had wanted not to happen.
Notes
- Schenectady Daily Union 25 July 1892.
- Insull to Thomas A. Edison 3 Aug 1887 D 8736 ADC. Edison Papers.
- Descriptions in this and the following paragraphs adapted from Martin, Thomas Commerford. 1888. A day with Edison at Schenectady, Electrical World, 25 May 1888.
- Schenectady Daily Union, 3 and 6 April 1887.
- In her 2023 Ph.D. dissertation, Mainstream Radicalism. U of Albany, pp. 170-180, Catherine Haag gives a thorough and illuminating analysis of this employee log that the account here draws on and superficially skims.
- The Clune Family story was traced using that original picture and later caption in the Schenectady Works News, census and occupational directory records, and the Schenectady County Historical Society Family Files [free PDF viewer required].
- Warrensburg NY News Thurs Nov 29 1956; Schwenker Family File, Schenectady County Historical Society. Daily Gazette, 10 May 2013.
- Works News 22 June 1945.
- Works News 4 Dec 1925; 22 June 1951. Weller Family History, MiSci.
- Wise, George. 1979. On Test. IEEE Transactions on Education. E-22. 171-177. Letter from T. Hashegawa to Thomas A. Edison, 11 July 1888. D880 5AEJ, Edison Papers. HF E-193A. Albany Times Union, 13 Feb 2025.
- The above is based on item L 3068, Hammond File, MiSci, and an interview with Madigan in the Works News 4 July 1924 pp. 12-13.
- John Kruesi papers, in possession of Evelyn Kruesi Joyce, Schenectady, N.Y. Recollections of H. F. T. Erben, E184, Hammond File, MiSci. National Cyclopedia of American Biography, p. 100.
- Edison Tube Co., Christian Rach. Poulin Archive, Book 20. Schenectady County Historical Society.
- Recollections of F. F. Schwentker; Recollections of H. F. T. Erben. Poulin Archive, Book 20. Havens, Morton. 1927 Recollections. PTM Magazine. 2.4.
- Insull to Thomas A. Edison 31 Aug 1887. D 8736 ADR. Edison Papers.
- On the pattern makers strike, see Schenectady Daily Union 9 June 1893. Insull's quote is in Schenectady Daily Union 22 Sept 1890.
- Rochester, NY Democrat & Chronicle 26 July 1890. Annual Report of the Factory Inspector of the State of New York for the Year Ending Dec. 16, 1888. Troy Press. Eighth Annual Report of the Factory Inspector of the State of New York. publ. 1894 Lyon, Albany, covering years 1892-1893. pp. 682-712.
- Schenectady Evening Star, 18 May 1891.
- Schenectady Evening Star, 10 Dec 1891, 14 Dec 1891.
- Report from Bradstreet Co., Edison Machine Works, Oct. 1, 1888. Edison Papers.
- Legal Testimony, Edison Machine Works, Samuel Insull, 1888. Edison Papers. Schenectady Evening Star 29 Dec 1892. Albany Morning Express, 24 Apr 1895.
- Schenectady Daily Union 30 Sept 1889, 14 Nov 1889, 22 Aug 1890. "Sketch of Henry De Forest" Family File, Schenectady County Historical Society.
- Willis T. Hanson Jr. Papers, Schenectady County Historical Society. Schenectady Evening Star 18 Sept 1894.
- Schenectady Daily Union 3 and 11 June 1890; 17 June 1890. Albany Morning Express 7 Oct 7, 1890. Schenectady Daily Union 17 and 29 Oct 1890, 8 and 12 Nov 1890. Albany Morning Express for 31 July 1891. Schenectady Evening Star 30 July 1891. Schenectady Daily Union 10 July 1891; 29 Jan 1892. Schenectady Daily Union 30 May 1887; 12 July 1889.
- Schenectady Daily Union, 7 May 1890. Schenectady Daily Union 28 Mar 1890, 2 April 1890. Schermerhorn Genealogy and Family Chronicles, Schenectady Digital History Archive. Schenectady County Historical Society.
- Schenectady Evening Star 12 May 1891, summarizing an article by Dr. Craig in the public health journal Sanitarian. The full paper is Craig, Joseph. 1891. Intestinal Diseases in Albany and Vicinity. 1891. Sanitarian, July 1891. #260, pp. 212-234.
- Schenectady Evening Star, 5 and 12. April 1893.
- Schenectady Evening Star 11 Jan 1893. Schenectady Evening Star 20 July 1891. p.4. Schenectady Evening Star 26 April 1893; 9 Aug 1892; 26 April 1893; 4 May 1893; 10 May 1893; 16 May 1893. The full story of the Schenectady search for safe water is in Wise, George. 2014. Edison's Decision. [free PDF viewer required] Schenectady County Historical Society
- Schenectady Daily Union 6 Feb 1890 p. 3 claims 250 trains passed through Schenectady per day. See Schenectady Daily Union 31 Dec 1889 for list of railroad accidents. Schenectady Evening Star 22 Nov 1892. Schenectady Evening Star 11 Jan 1893, 16 Feb 1893.