Most people take electricity for granted. And why not? It's almost always available at the flip of a switch. Under only the most extreme weather or unexpected conditions do we lose power for any extended period of time.

But there was a time when electricity didn't flow. Before power lines and poles, gas lamps and kerosene lanterns were the only sources of light after the sun went down.

The month of March brings the anniversary of two significant advancements in the use of electricity — and both happened in Indiana.

In March 1880, 125 years ago this month, Wabash became "The First Electrically Lighted City in the World" when four giant electric lights atop its courthouse were turned on for the first time. For blocks in all directions, to the edge of town, the lights illuminated the city below.

In March 1935, 70 years ago, Indiana passed the REMC Act — the first of its kind in the nation. The law lit the way for the formation of countywide consumer-owned electric cooperative utilities. For the first time, electric light — and all the conveniences of electricity — would be extended from the edges of towns into the vast areas of rural Indiana that had no electricity. With the help of the federal Rural Electrification Administration, co-ops sprang up nationwide. Boone County REMC became the first REA co-op in the nation to electrify lines.

Here's the story of these two "bright" Indiana electrification achievements.

Electric light on the Wabash

The evening of March 31, 1880, was dark and rainy in Wabash. Still, a crowd of people — estimated to be between "thousands" to "10,000" or nearly twice the town's population — came from near and far that night to see a wondrous event that was to herald the dawn of a new age.

They came by train, horseback and buggy. Excursion trains from both Anderson and Elkhart were run just for the event. Reporters and correspondents from some 40 Indiana and national newspapers, including The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, were on hand. Representatives from 19 other cities, as far away as Toledo, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Mich.; and Danville, Ill., came to see, too.

All around the courthouse and town, folks stood in the damp evening dusk, gazing toward the courthouse clock tower. They waited for zero hour — 8 p.m. That's when four new electric lights, mounted to the flag staff above, were scheduled to, as the weekly Wabash Plain Dealer put it, "commence shedding their effulgence over the hitherto dark streets of the city."

That "effulgence" would shine the international spotlight on the small northcentral Indiana county seat. If successful, the experiment would make Wabash the first city in the world to be entirely lit by electricity and would help launch a technological revolution.

"Some towns had a city block illuminated with electricity," noted Wabash County historian Ron Woodward. "Wabash was the first municipality to light up the whole town."

The night's proceedings were the climax of several months of work. In the winter of 1879-1880, Wabash city leaders started looking for better lighting for the town. Like most towns at the time, Wabash was lit by gas street lamps. Electricity was still just a scientific novelty to most people, but the leaders of Wabash saw the potential and began investigating the possibility of lighting the town electrically.

A few months earlier, in October 1879, Thomas Edison successfully tested his incandescent light bulb at Menlo Park, N.J. But for several years before Edison, Charles F. Brush, an inventor in Cleveland, had been experimenting with the electric arc light and electricity generation.

The arc light used a sustained discharge of electricity in a gap between two carbon electrodes. Burning at thousands of degrees, the arc heated the tips of the electrodes making them glow with a blinding brilliancy. Most of the light created by an arc light came from this incandescent glow of the electrodes, not the arc itself.

Arc lights were not new. But Brush made them more reliable and practical. In addition, he improved the electrodes and designed his own dynamo to produce the electrical charge needed to initiate and sustain the arc.

In 1878, Brush installed his first commercial arc lamp in Cincinnati. A year later, in April 1879, he further developed the promise of outdoor electric lighting with a display of 12 arc lamps around a park in Cleveland. Thousands of people gathered to watch the exhibition.

Brush continued seeking more public tests of his arc light to prove its usefulness. In their search for new lighting, Wabash leaders crossed paths with Brush and agreed to pay him $100 to test his lights. On Feb. 16, 1880, the Wabash council agreed to purchase Brush's "Dynamo Electric Machine;" four 3,000 candlepower arc lamps and hangers; 100 copper-coated carbons; and 450 feet of copper wire for $1,800 — contingent on a successful test.

The decision was made to mount the lights in one central location — high atop the courthouse located on a hill above downtown. The courthouse dome could be seen for miles.
Brush said the lights would illuminate an area one mile in diameter. He guaranteed that a half mile from the courthouse, the illumination would equal the light from a typical gas street lamp positioned 100 feet away.

The test made economic sense. The city's 65 gas lamps — deemed inadequate — cost $1,105 per year, not including repairs and maintenance. The Brush lights would light the same as 500 gas lamps equally distributed around the town for less than $800 a year.

Brush's electricians arrived in mid-March. They mounted the lamps to the ends of two intersecting crossbars. These were then bolted midway up the iron flag staff atop the dome. Glass globes surrounded each lamp's carbon electrodes to protect them from snow and rain.

Copper wires were strung from the lamps, across the roof and down the west side of the courthouse to the dynamo installed in the courthouse basement. For the test, the dynamo was driven by a six to eight horsepower threshing machine steam engine rolled on to the west lawn of the courthouse.

On that night of March 31, 1880, as the courthouse clock struck 8 p.m., the steam engine began turning the dynamo which generated electricity to the lights. A reporter from the Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel perhaps best described what happened next: "… the thousands of eyes that were turned toward the inky darkness over the courthouse saw a shower of sparks emitted from a point above them, small steady spots of light, growing more brilliant, until within a few seconds after the first sparks were seen, it was absolutely dazzling; a loud shout went up from the crowd, the band began to play …"

After the reported "loud huzza of applause," the Chicago Tribune correspondent went into the dome directly below the lights and looked out over the city. "For a mile around, the houses and yards were distinctly visible," he wrote, "while the far away (Wabash) river glowed like a band of molten silver."

The reporter from the Delphi Journal had a different take on the crowd's initial reaction: "… suddenly from the tower's dome … burst a flood of light …. No shout, however, or token of joy disturbed the deep silence which suddenly settled on the vast crowd …. The people, almost with bated breath, stood overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence of the supernatural."

People in the crowd looked at their watches or read newspapers to see if they could see as well as predicted. Folks reported being able to read even the smallest newspaper print blocks away.

Reporters described the light that radiated from the dome as: "noonday light,"; "brilliant moonlight" and "a pure mellow ‘solar' light." Many of the accounts noted the most serious drawback: the dark shadows in areas blocked from the single bank of lights. Businesses on the north side of Canal Street, south of the courthouse for instance, were in deep shadow. But for the most part, reporters there enthusiastically greeted the spectacle and gushed over "Wabash's glory."

In its April 2, 1880 issue, the Plain Dealer wrote, "From Maine to California the telegrams of the Associated Press flashed the intelligence that the problem of lighting the streets of an entire city solely by electricity was solved."

The harshest criticism, though, came from The Wabash Courier, the town's Democratic newspaper. The Courier had a running feud with the Republican Plain Dealer, a proponent of the lights. The Courier opined strongly against the single location setup. In its first issue after the lighting, its description of the night countered: "The lights cast a very dense shadow, and while one side of a street fairly blazes the other side is in inky darkness. … The experiment fully demonstrated the fact that it isn't possible to light a city, even as small as Wabash, when the light is fed … from one point."

Despite the shadowy controversy, two-thirds of the members of the Wabash Common Council agreed the lights worked as promised and on April 8 appropriated Brush's $1,800 payment.

With the success in Wabash, Brush arc lights soon were illuminating the streets of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Montreal, Buffalo, San Francisco and other cities.

But Wabash's lighting problem wasn't "solved" with the tower lights. By 1886, the town bought a new system: 132 smaller incandescent lights spread around town. In September of 1888, Wabash discontinued the Brush system.

A side benefit some folks thought the Brush lights would bring early on was a transformation of the growing season. In its May 14, 1880 issue, the Plain Dealer reported that some farmers in the Wabash River bottoms along the edge of town believed the rays of light falling at night on their young corn crops would double the growth. The article cited a recent lecture in London by William Siemens, a renowned German-born inventor, about the benefits of some artificial lighting on vegetation. The article included a fanciful woodcut illustration of men harvesting corn with ladders and handsaws.

"… we look for a crop on the Wabash bottom lands near town this autumn that will even excel the illustration … and astonish the world," the Plain Dealer reported. "Electricity is surely destined to revolutionize agriculture."

Eventually, electricity did revolutionize agriculture, but not in the way the paper mused. It took another 55 years and another group of forward thinking Hoosiers. When the rural electrification movement finally took electricity into the darkness beyond town, rural America changed for the better — and forever.

REA co-ops take lights beyond town

In 1933, the United States was entrenched in the Great Depression. Foreclosures and the Dust Bowl were driving farmers from their land. To make matters worse, rural Americans lacked the infrastructure needed to improve their lot in life — namely central-station electricity.

Without the electricity that by this time had become a necessity throughout the urbanized world, rural Americans were destined to a poorer quality of life on the farms and in their homes and schools. Less than 10 percent of rural America was electrified. But that was about to change.

I. Harvey Hull, then Indiana Farm Bureau Cooperative Association general manager, envisioned a better life for rural Indiana and rural America, especially after an eye-opening trip through Northern Europe. He and other Farm Bureau personnel traveled to London for an international cooperative conference and toured Scandinavia. He was shocked to find 65 percent of Norway and Sweden was electrified. Hull later wrote, "… from the standpoint of farm home conveniences and the use of electric power, our standard of living did not compare with the farm standard of living in Northern Europe."

In America, attempts to convince existing electric utilities to extend power lines into the countryside had been futile. Power companies maintained serving so sparse a population would be too costly to investors. The reason for Scandinavia's good record, Hull found, was that the consumers owned their electric lines.

Hull knew the cooperative business model could work with American electric utilities, too. About 50 electric co-ops were already providing power in some parts of the country. With attorney Frederick I. Barrows, Hull began drafting legislation for the 1935 Indiana General Assembly that would be the first of its kind. The Indiana Rural Electric Membership Corporation Act allowed for the statewide establishment of electric cooperatives to provide electric service to the unserved areas of Indiana. Introduced in February 1935, the bill sailed through the Statehouse. Gov. Paul V. McNutt signed the Indiana REMC Act into law on March 9, 1935 — 70 years ago this month.

The Indiana Farm Bureau board then created the Indiana Statewide REMC to promote electric co-ops and provide them with various services. Indiana Statewide became the first electric co-op statewide association in the nation. All the electrically unserved land in the state was assigned to Indiana Statewide. When groups of rural residents formed their own local co-ops, that land, in turn, was released to them.

The REMC Act, though, had no funding apparatus. That problem was soon solved by the federal government. Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration as a relief agency. REA provided long-term, low-interest loans to utilities willing to serve rural areas. It later became a permanent agency.

The top order for newly incorporated Indiana Statewide and Farm Bureau was the formation of Boone County REMC as a model for other electric co-ops. One of the first REA loans went to the Lebanon-based REMC on July 22, 1935. Six months later, the REMC became one of the first co-ops under REA to set a pole. Some 500 people gathered in Lebanon for the momentous event and a brief ceremony, Jan. 9, 1936.

"We are starting to build the first unit of a countywide rural electrification project," said REA administrator Morris Cooke at the ceremony. "Even this first unit means a great deal to workers and businessmen of Boone County. It means a lot more to workers and businessmen in practically every state of the Union."

On May 22, 1936, Indiana once again led the nation in the pursuit of electrification. The first REA-funded co-op power line was energized in Boone County to a farm west of Thorntown, and the "wired hand" began changing the face of American agriculture and rural life.

The Indiana state flag features a torch — symbol of enlightenment. When it comes to electrical achievements like Wabash and co-ops, Indiana could easily replace the torch with the light bulb — symbol of bright ideas — as well.

Richard G. Biever is senior editor of Electric Consumer.

Sources: Ron Woodward, Wabash County historian; Wabash County Historical Museum; Wabash Weekly Plain Dealer, February-May 1880; Wabash Courier, March-April 1880; The Wabash Light; Power to the People by Emily Born (Schilling); and these Web sites where you can learn more about Brush and arc lighting — http://www.lafavre.us/brush/brushbio.htm and http://www.voltnet.com/arclamps/.