Wabash's Blinding Light: First Electric City

About this episode

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. 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