May 01, 2018

Wabash's Blinding Light: First Electric City

13 minutes

Wabash, Indiana, 1880. The city council was in the middle of a heated fight over gas lamps and municipal lighting costs when a Cleveland inventor named Charles Brush offered them something nobody had tried before. He would install his arc lighting system on top of the county courthouse for $1,800. The vote barely passed. On the night of March 31, 1880, four lamps capable of producing a glow equal to 3,000 candles each fired from the courthouse dome. The streets below flooded with light. Wabash, a town of 15,000 people, had just become the first city in the world to light its streets with electricity.

This episode features TJ Honeycutt, collections assistant at the Wabash County Historical Museum, who walks through the original sources, the courthouse that still stands on its hill overlooking the town, and the arc light still on display inside the museum. If you go to the Wabash Wikipedia page, someone has called this claim a farcical notion. TJ has spent years gathering the evidence to the contrary.

TIMELINE

1870: The original Wabash County Courthouse burns down. The county builds a new one, taller and fireproof, on a hill visible for miles.

March 31, 1880: Four Brush arc lights activated on the courthouse dome. Wabash becomes the first electrically lit city in the world.

1880: The town purchases the full lighting system after the successful demonstration.

1882: Thomas Edison opens Pearl Street Station in New York City, two years after Wabash.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Wabash beat every major city in the world to electric municipal lighting, and most people have never heard of it. The courthouse where those first lights burned still stands. The clock they installed still keeps time. And one of the original arc lights is still inside the museum two blocks away. Sometimes the biggest moments in history happen in the smallest towns.

Episode 1 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

If you liked this: Episode 140 (Cleveland, Ohio) tells the story of Charles Brush and how he illuminated a city and changed America forever.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

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