How the world’s first electric grid was built

Summary

In 1883, Sir Coutts Lindsay, owner of the Grosvenor Art Gallery in Bond Street, decided that he wanted to illuminate his paintings without the smoke produced by gas lanterns. He installed a small generator, first in the yard and then in the basement of the gallery. This was a cutting-edge status symbol at the time. The generator turned out to produce more than enough electricity to power his gallery lights, so he started to supply the excess power to his neighbors via overhead cables. In 1887, after being pitched by a professional engineering team, Sir Coutts formed the London Electricity Supply Corporation. To spare passersby the noise of the generator, to gain access to cooling water, and to allow it to buy cheaper coal transported by river, the corporation moved to a new base in Deptford. The Deptford facility was linked by cables to substations at the Grosvenor Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Blackfriars. By 1891, the world’s largest generator and one of the world’s first modern power stations was up and running.Get the print magazineSubscribe for $100 to receive six beautiful issues per year.Subscribe Deptford Generating Station For its first decade, the project struggled as cost overruns, frequent fires, challenges meeting public demand, and a fatality during a government inspection made profits elusive. The story of Coutts Lindsay and the London Electricity Supply Corporation is typical of the early days of electricity supply, not just in the UK, but around the world. Uncoordinated local efforts struggled with growing demand and the absence of economies of scale. In New York, Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station, completed in 1882, became one of the first centralized power plants. It served an area of one square mile. The early market for electricity generation and distribution was chaotic. The first two decades of the 20th century saw UK local authorities and a grab bag of private companies locked in bitter and counterproductive competition with each other. B...