The word electricity comes from the Greek word ELECTRON, for amber. The bases of the modern concepts of electricity can be traced to the Greeks, who discovered the fact that certain rocks - lodestone or magnetite - attracted each other. Later it was learned that certain substances, when briskly rubbed, would attract small objects. Thus, static electricity was produced when a piece of amber was rubbed with a cloth.

Throughout the ages, people speculated on the principles underlying natural phenomena, but it was not until the 16th century that theorists began to achieve a pattern of methodical experimental investigation which eventually would lead into modern science. An English physician, William Gilbert, published his pioneer work DE MAGNETE in 1600, setting forth the results of nearly 20 years of experimentation with substances known to possess electrical properties.

In 1660, Otto von Guericke invented the first electric machine - a rotating globe of sulphur which, when electrified, attracted such substances as lint and feathers. Most important, he observed small sparks and heard their crackling, and noted the repulsion of what now are called similarly charged bodies.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, new principles of electricity and their applications were discovered. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning is a form of electricity. About 1790, the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani discovered the existence of a current of electricity, which previous to that time had been developed only by friction. A fellow countryman-physicist, Alesandro Volta, developed the first electric battery about ten years later, and in 1820, Hans Christian Oersted of Copenhagen, Denmark, discovered the magnetic effect of an electric current. The names of Andre Ampere, Georg Ohm, Karl Friedrich Gauss, Michael Faraday, Joseph Henry, and James Clerk Maxwell are equally significant to that era of research and theorizing about electricity.

The Advent of the Electric Age
When Thomas Davenport of Vermont invented the electric motor in the late 1830s, he called it a "toy" because it could do no useful work. It was not practical. Although the electric motor eventually would broaden the uses of this new energy source, for the next half-century electricity remained little more than a laboratory curiosity. It remained for others to make electricity practical - others such as Charles Parsons, inventor of the turbine-generator (1884); Nikola Tesla, inventor of an alternating current (AC) system (1888) which used the first AC motor, a generator, and transformers; George Westinghouse, who, shortly after Tesla's discovery of how to alternate current, developed high-voltage AC electrical systems better suited for commercial use; and Thomas Alva Edison, who invented the incandescent electric lamp and almost single-handedly launched the electric utility industry.

Also during that time, the invention of the telegraph, electric bell, electric signals, fire and burglar alarms, arc lamps and batteries gave birth to the electrical manufacturing industry, and by 1869 the Gray and Barton Company (which later became Western Electric Company) had become a leading producer in the field.

The first electric arc lamp was developed in 1809 by the English chemist, Sir Humphrey Davey. It produced a brilliant light when electricity was discharged between two electrodes. At that time, however, there were no generators or other economical sources of electric power, so it, too, was merely a scientific curiosity. In 1845, the first patent for an arc lamp was obtained by Thomas Wright, but it was not until 1876 that the first commercial arc lamp was exhibited, in Cleveland, by Charles F. Brush.

The year 1876 can also be said to mark the beginning of the electrical manufacturing industry because the city of Philadelphia held a Centennial Exposition at which, among other demonstrations, Alexander Graham Bell exhibited his new telephone. Two direct current (DC) generators were also exhibited. (Alternating current, or AC, was a later development.) Thus, the Centennial Exposition focused public attention on the potentialities of electricity which, until then, had been limited.

The world's first company to use the term "electric" in its name was the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City. It was incorporated on October 15, 1878, with capitalization of $300,000, for the expressed purpose of financing Thomas Edison's development of a practical incandescent lamp. (The first incandescent lamp was produced in 1802 by Sir Humphrey Davey, who demonstrated that strips of metal could be heated to incandescence by an electric current. However, the metal heated in air was quickly oxidized.) The world's first company organized to produce and sell electricity was the California Electric Light Company, incorporated in San Francisco on June 30, 1879. Three months later, it furnished current from a central generating station for lighting Brush arc lamps.

The early arc lamps used solid carbon rods and were also called carbon arc lamps; light was obtained almost entirely from the incandescent carbon rather than from the arc stream. Unlike modern, sealed high-intensity arc lamps, carbon arc lamps burned in the open. They were noisy, they flickered, and in summer they attracted clouds of insects. Their carbon rods had to be trimmed daily to maintain proper gap spacing. A better means of illumination was still needed.

Edison's Wonderful Inventions
That better means was attained in 1879 when Edison perfected the incandescent light bulb. After hundreds of failures, Edison and his associates made an electric lamp which used a filament of carbonized sewing thread enclosed in a glass globe from which the air had been withdrawn, creating a vacuum. It would produce light for 40 hours or more without burning out. It also gave a good luminous output and was safe to use indoors. The Edison lamp was put on the market in 1880.

With that achievement, Edison believed he had the basis for making generation and distribution of electricity commercially feasible. Acting on this belief, he started to build the world's first two commercial power plants intended for incandescent lighting of homes, offices, and factories. One opened on January 12, 1882, at Holborn Viaduct in London, England; the second, at Pearl Street in New York City, started generation in September of the same year. The Pearl Street Station was constructed under the auspices of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, incorporated on December 18, 1880, with a capitalization of $1,000,000 for the purpose of furnishing electric light to New York City. The financing group included J. P. Morgan. Edison personally supervised construction of the station. On September 4, 1882, he directed that a switch be closed and 59 customers in lower Manhattan's business and financial district instantly had electric lights to replace their gas lights.

Pearl Street was the nation's first central electrical power plant: i.e., all components for generating electricity were housed in one building. When it began commercial generation, DC power for incandescent lighting was produced and distributed on a mass scale. It had one engine which generated enough power for 800 electric light bulbs. During the first year of operation, the number of customers increased to nearly 500 and the company's lines extended from the Battery, at the lower tip of Manhattan Island, as far north as 59th Street. By 1899, the lines reached to 95th Street and were serving 11,000 customers.

Initially, the Pearl Street Station ran only at night, but it signaled the dawn of the electric age. It was the progenitor of every commercial central station for incandescent lighting. Within a few years, hundreds of such stations were built and operating all over the country. The infant industry's capacity to produce electricity rose meteorically. People clamored for this new way to illuminate the night.

With the development of the transformer in 1885 - thanks to the Stanleys, father and son, who were founders of a WMECO predecessor company (as told in that section of this history) - it was possible to generate and transmit electricity at higher voltages and thus extend service over a greater area. The supplanting of DC by AC likewise contributed to the extension of service, although DC did not disappear altogether and remains even today in many applications such as batteries.

The Electric Age had begun. Soon electricity was lighting homes, offices, schools, stores, and churches.powering appliances, factories, and entire industries.and becoming such an indispensable part of society that life without it is now virtually unthinkable. Dr. Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University from 1869 to1909, paid tribute to this infant but burgeoning power source with these words inscribed over the main entry portal to the railroad terminal, Union Station, in Washington, D.C.

Electricity --
Carrier of light and power,
Devourer of time and space,
Bearer of human speech over land and sea,
Greatest servant of man,
Itself unknown.

Electricity's Beginnings in NU Territory
The electric utility industry began in NU territory in 1881, when The Hartford Electric Light Company (HELCO) and the Springfield Electric Company were independently organized to provide street-lighting service in those cities. It took two years more for the Hartford company to begin commercial generation, but the industry nevertheless developed rapidly, with many local electric companies springing up throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts. Some of the gas illuminating companies in NU territory - whose story is told later - also undertook the production of electricity for illumination and eventually became predominantly electric operations.

Being in their technological infancy, the first electric companies gave very poor service by today's standards. Interruptions were frequent and of long duration, and service was considered to be more of a luxury than a necessity.

The average price per kilowatt-hour (kWh) at that time (1885-1900) was 25 to 30 cents. However, if we account for the effect of inflation over a century's time, taking the lower figure (25 cents) and using 1990 as the base year for comparison to translate that price into 1890 dollars, the real cost of electricity per kilowatt-hour 100 years ago for the typical household would be about $4.50! In actuality, the real cost of electricity rapidly declined. The development of more efficient generation and transmission equipment, economies of scale in utilities' operations, and increasing public use of electric-based technologies led to a tremendous decrease in the price for this new form of energy. Between 1889 and 1920, the real cost to the consumer fell tenfold. And on the NU system, from 1930 until the present, the real cost has declined about another threefold.

By the turn of the century, as electric motors replaced horses, mergers occurred between the formerly horse-drawn street railway companies and the early electric companies. For example, in Waterbury, Connecticut, a business known as The Waterbury Horse Railroad Company began to use electricity instead of animals - horsepower without horses - to propel its cars; it also began to supply electric service in the area. It later became The Waterbury Traction Company and was authorized "to produce, use, and sell elect ricity in Waterbury and Naugatuck."

Around 1906, these electric and gas properties came under control of The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company which, in 1910, split off the electric and gas business from the traction business. It conveyed the energy properties to The United Electric Light and Water Company, which at that time supplied electric service in Waterbury, New Britain, Norwalk, and Greenwich, and gas service in Norwalk and Naugatuck.

Over the years, many small gas and electric companies, initially created to serve very limited geographic areas, were joined together into larger and larger companies to gain economies of scale in generating and distributing electricity and gas, and to improve the quality of service. The Connecticut Light and Power Company (CL&P), for example, which was formed in 1917 - as described later - resulted from a combination of four such companies serving cities and towns in western and southwestern Connecticut. Similarly, in eastern Connecticut, an amalgamation of small companies grew into the Eastern Connecticut Power Company, which merged into CL&P in 1929. And during most of that time, HELCO grew into the state's second largest utility, acquiring gas operations in 1958 when The Connecticut Power Company was merged into HELCO. CL&P's similar acquisition of HELCO in 1982 combined all of NU's electric and gas utility service in Connecticut into a single company, CL&P.