Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine

10. Electricity, Water, and Final Touches, 1887

125 10 ∑ Electricity, Water, and Final Touches, 1887 [We’ll search] until a depth of two-thousand feet is reached, unless the inhabitants of China demur. —Drilling superintendent, quoted in Times-Union, January 28, 1887 While the architecture and gardens of the Hotel Ponce de Leon may have harkened back to the past, Flagler wanted the most up-to-date utilities for his hotel, including electricity. It was not the first place in Florida to enjoy electricity. That honorprobablybelongstosteamshipsplyingFlorida’swaters.Thefloatingpalace steamer H.B.Plant attracted a crowd of spectators when it docked at Jacksonville in December 1882 with brilliant electric lights blazing. By the following December both the Carleton House and St. James Hotel in Jacksonville glowed with incandescent lights. When the Hotel Ponce de Leon opened, however, it would be the second largest free-standing structure in the United States ever electrified, surpassed only by the Dakota apartments in Manhattan.1 Thomas Edison promoted the use of electricity as a major improvement over gas for illumination. One of his advertising brochures stated: “The traveling public soon learns to appreciate in the hotels the advantages of a light which, while it throws out no heat, smoke or noxious gases, is a pleasant, soft and steady light, and above all, gives assurance of the maximum immunity from danger of fire or asphyxiation.”2 Flag­ler’s decision to employ electricity in his hotel may have been influenced by the fact that Thomas Hastings’s brother Frank S.Hastings had joined Thomas Edison as his executive secretary in 1883.3 126 · Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine In 1887 the Edison Electric Company shipped equipment for an electric generatingpowerplant toSt.AugustinefortheHotelPoncedeLeon.Thegenerators were manufactured by the Edison plant in Schenectady, New York, and, like all Edison dynamos, produced direct current that could not be transmitted over long distances—thus the need for individual or neighborhood plants. The four generators placed in the Ponce de Leon were 45-kilowatt, 125-volt machines, driven by three Armington & Sims steam-powered engines. The steam came from four Babcock & Wilcox boilers, which also supplied steam for the radiators heating the hotel. The boilers were housed in a large building right under the hotel ’s tall smokestack, while the generators were next door beneath the rear of the utility wing of the hotel. Across an adjacent courtyard stood several arched bays that held coal for the boilers. When all systems in the hotel were up and running, the boilers’ firebox stokers shoveled in eight tons of coal a day.4 Thomas Edison sent one of his closest associates, William J.Hammer, to supervise installation of the electric plant and comprehensive electrical system. At the time Hammer was twenty-nine years old but already an old hand in the innovative field of incandescent lighting. Hired by Edison in 1879, he had taken part in most of the early experiments with electric lamps. Hammer was an inveterate note taker and collector; his records and collection of early incandescent light bulbs are the best in the world today. After assisting with the setup of the Pearl Street Station in the business district of New York City, Hammer went to London to establish the English Edison Electric Light Company. The plant in LondonactuallystartedoperationshortlybeforethePearlStreetStation,making it the world’s first electric power plant. After initiating Edison’s electric system in Germany, Hammer returned to the United States. It was only natural that Edison would send him to St. Augustine for the Flag­ ler hotel project, especially when Hammer was also a close friend of Frank Hastings.5 Wiringthehotelwasacomplexprocessinvolvingthelaying ofperhaps50,000 feet of insulated wire—mostly placed into grooves in plaster or strung along porcelain insulators nailed to floor and ceiling beams. Along the hallways, Hammer placed panels with circuit switches and circuit breakers to control flow and prevent overloads. Outside the building, wires with a waterproof coating were buried underground. Altogether Edison claimed that there were 4,100 electric lamps in the Ponce de Leon and Alcazar hotels.6 Most of the lights were sixteencandlepower bulbs. (It is impossible to convert the luminosity of candlepower ratings to common modern units, but the prevalence of twenty-five-watt bulbs ordered as replacements in later years is suggestive of a modest light output per bulb.) Hammer served as chief engineer during the hotel’s first season, and every season thereafter the hotel employed an engineer to oversee the generators and Electricity, Water, and...