SCALES #34: utility imperialism
Hello!
Recently I noticed a street in West Somerville called Electric Avenue: a fairly short residential street, terminating near where at least the map locates the top of Clarendon Hill. The name stood out from the surrounding set of road names—the vibe tends toward trees and surnames, though includes some surnames electric—and I wondered what kind of story was behind it. The other side of Somerville has the house with the first home telephone, so I thought maybe the street name marked some other piece of technological history.
The street nearly abuts the Tufts campus, and I discovered a Tufts alumnus had a prominent career in the era of electrification: Frederick Stark Pearson, born in 1861 in Lowell. After the death of his father, a railroad engineer, Fred Pearson started working at age 16 for the Boston and Lowell Railroad as a stationmaster at Walnut Hill near Tufts, where he met members of the faculty. Loaned money by his uncle, he enrolled at Tufts in 1879, a school not yet thirty years old at the time with fewer than 100 collegiate students. Pearson first studied chemistry and mathematics but his interests later shifted toward more applied topics of mining and electrical engineering.
After some teaching gigs at Tufts and MIT, his early career included establishing the Somerville Electric Light Company and the Woburn Electric Light Company, the former being the first provider of electricity to Somerville streets and homes. (The company’s first generating station was in Union Square; a plant later built at 110 Willow Avenue still sits along what is now the Somerville Community Path. The company was bought out as part of the expansion of the Boston Edison Company in the first decade of the 1900s.) Pearson’s career then grew to managing larger projects, starting with his hiring in 1889 as chief engineer of Boston’s then horse-powered West End Street Railway (a forerunner of the MBTA), asked to manage its electrification. In 1894, he became chief engineer of New York’s Metropolitan Street Railway, again working at the forefront of problems related to generating and transmitting electrical power.
Pearson was ambitious and the scope of his career became increasingly international, situated at a time when networks of global capital were widening their reach. He made formative connections with Canadian capitalists by involving himself with a coal-related venture in Nova Scotia. With this circle of contacts, he established a role as the technological consultant for complexly intertwined companies, chiefly Canadian-incorporated, working on international electrical infrastructure projects, notably in Brazil and Mexico. Putting his name on projects signaled technological expertise to prospective investors; more concretely, he provided advice on technical problems as well as access to a hiring pool of his network of talented American electrical engineers. One of the first projects of this type, the Canadian-incorporated São Paulo Tramway, Light and Power Company Limited, set a pattern of what can be viewed alternately as impressive feats of infrastructure building and modernization of Latin America, or the start of a “wave of Canadian-American utility imperialism”.
In travels to Europe, Pearson became drawn into the orbit of London as a center of global capital and entry point to European investors. He participated in an (again, Canadian-chartered) electrical power project in Barcelona while overseeing his interests across the Americas, many of which became enmeshed in various financial and political complications, requiring regular intercontinental travel. On 7 May, 1915, on yet another trip across the Atlantic, Fred was aboard the RMS Lusitania with Mabel, his wife, when the ship was torpedoed and sank. Neither survived.
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Pearson Road, a street on the other side of Powder House Square from Electric Avenue, is named after Fred. (There’s also a statue in Barcelona dedicated to him.) However, beyond the role of the Pearson-founded Somerville Electric Light Company in (presumably) first providing electricity to Electric Avenue, Pearson’s involvement in the avenue’s development is unclear. His address when a Somerville resident appears to have been not Electric Avenue, but on College Avenue, near present-day Pearson Road. At the time the first segment of Electric Avenue, a block-long private street, was built in 1894, Fred’s work on the establishment of the Somerville Electric Light Company was already several years in the past.
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Sources for the above: Entries for Pearson in the Concise Encyclopedia of Tufts History and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the digital record for the Fred Stark Pearson papers at Tufts, The Somerville Times’ piece on Pearson by Bob Doherty, Boston IEEE Section Techsite on awarding an IEEE milestone to the “Power System of Boston’s Rapid Transit 1889”, “The Reversed View of Massachusetts” blog post on the Somerville Electric Light Company
Still to come: digging into the history of Somerville at the time of Electric Avenue’s creation.
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Moving to energy challenges of today: I like how this piece centers a story about energy policy and air quality on everday people of industrial northeast China, affected by an aggressive coal stove-removal program: “[T]he pollution in Shanxi … dropped 20 percent in the last three months of 2017. … To be sure, many Shanxi residents complained that the cost of heating their homes with gas furnaces or electric heaters was now much higher. Often they did so while wearing winter coats, hats and scarves indoors."
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Also in New England
MIT students work with a professor and archivist to discover MIT’s first president owned enslaved people when living in Virginia in the mid-1800s.
Continue to be interested in following the downfall of New Beford’s “Codfather”. It’s not just a goofy regional story, though, as the fallout from his misdeeds affects livelihoods in the port.
The newly-minted City of Framingham (née Town of Framingham) is designing a new seal. But they’ll lose an old seal, feat. braided straw and a large wheel, commemorating Framingham’s early big businesses of straw bonnet and wheel manufacturing.
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Science!
You can see by eye, in a long-exposure photograph, the fluorescing of a single strontium ion (!) levitated in an electric field. (h/t Kottke)
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Here it is.
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—Adam