Select an evening from the year of work now in progress. Each night brings new circuits energized and new lessons paid for in copper and ceramic.
To Mr. H. M. Cleaves, Chief Electrician,
Halsted Municipal Electric Light Co.
My dear Cleaves — I have not yet shaken the dust of your remarkable city from my coat, and already I find I cannot keep my pen still about what I saw on Wednesday last. You will think me effusive. I do not care. The thing must be set down.
Standing at the foot of Foundry Ward at half-past seven, with your No. 3 circuit just answering the switch and forty arc-lights coming up together in their slow careful way — I tell you plainly I had to put a hand against the pole to steady myself. I have read of this. I have wired bench apparatus and read MacFarlane's papers and watched Mr. Brush demonstrate the regulator in Cleveland three winters ago. None of it prepares a man for an entire avenue arriving at once. The horses understood it first; I watched them quiet down without being told.
You and I both know what is being asked of the men we are putting out of their old work. I will not pretend, and I know you do not, that a lamplighter with twenty years on a route is something the city replaces lightly. But I watched your Mr. Hollis on the climb at Market Hill — a man who could not have set foot on a pole six months ago — and he is becoming a lineman in front of our eyes. The trade is moving. The men are moving with it where we have the wit to let them. The work is not less. It is differently shaped, and it pays better, and it asks more of a man's hands. Tell your council that, and tell it twice if they need it twice.
The technical questions I will put in a separate letter — your earth-leakage on the Riverside crossing wants a longer look, and I have an idea about the cross-arm spacing that may save you a fortnight of pulling. But tonight I wanted only to say that what you and your crews are doing in Halsted is the actual living edge of what this whole science can do for a city. Not in twenty years. Now. In your year. In the streets you walked yesterday morning to get your coffee.
Keep your filaments clean and your insulators dry. Write when the council frees you an hour.