Edison switched on the first commercial power station

At 3 p.m. on September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison gave the signal to close the breaker at Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan. Six coal-fired “Jumbo” dynamos spun up, and the world’s first permanent central electric generating station began feeding direct current to paying customers across a roughly one-square-mile First District.

It was a deliberately theatrical debut. Edison reportedly threw the switch while standing in the offices of financier J. P. Morgan, one of his backers, lighting lamps in the very district where Wall Street watched.

One station, a handful of dynamos, and the template for every power grid that followed.

The early scale was modest — a few hundred lamps for dozens of customers — but it proved that electricity could be generated centrally and sold like any other utility. The plant ran for years with famous reliability, interrupted only once for about three hours, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History now displays a model of it. IEEE later named the site a Milestone in Electrical Engineering.