Let’s see. What historical figure do I want to highlight today on The Last Word? Oh! A light bulb just went off in my head. I’ve got it! Thomas Edison. I want to know what connections he had to the City of Erie.<\/p>\n
Let’s go back to 1887. The Edison Electric Light and Power Company begins offering incandescent lighting to the city. Remnants of the company’s power station can still be seen on French Street between 10th and Eleventh Streets. Mark Tanenbaum, an Erie history buff, tells me that the Erie plant was built only five years after Edison constructed his first power plant.<\/p>\n
“I think he originally did one in New York City and then expanded other ones in the State of Pennsylvania. Erie had one of them,” Mark says proudly.<\/p>\n
Let’s not forget about Erie naming a school after Edison in the 1930s. The school district kept the name when they replaced that old school this year. It was a three-year construction project.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt no point during the course of that was there a conversation to rename Edison after somebody else or something else. It wasn\u2019t even brought up as a topic of discussion,\u201d says Neal Brokman, Assistant Superintendent of Operations, Erie\u2019s Public Schools.<\/p>\n
On October 22, 1929, Erie joined the rest of the nation to honor Thomas Edison on the 50th anniversary of his discovery of incandescent light. I\u2019m now visiting Erie’s contribution to that celebration. The Edison Fountain in Perry Square. The base of the fountain, the bronze border on top, and the water nozzles are the same as they were 97 years ago. The fountain used to have a moat surrounding it. The moat would collect the water that fell. Generations of kids flocked to the Edison Fountain to take a dip and to enjoy the park. Jerry Skrypzak remembers his visits to the fountain that occurred decades ago with his family.<\/p>\n
“Between Sixth and Seventh was a little barbeque shop and we would stop sometimes when dad would get a hankering for a barbeque,\u201d remembers Jerry. \u201cWe’d stop and we’d get one and we’d come in the park and sit on a park bench and eat them.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight by the fountain?\u201d I ask. \u201cRight by the fountain,\u201d Jerry replies.<\/p>\n
Jerry Trocki is a former city engineer and longtime caretaker of the Edison Fountain. He says the moat was removed in 1988 after a drunk driver crashed into the basin wall. New modern technology was eventually added to the fountain. Originally, the fountain had a cycle of 6 colors, 36 light patterns and 16 spray patterns. It put on a show every twenty minutes. And the water shot a lot higher back then.<\/p>\n
“That center spray, it used to go up about 30 feet,\u201d remembers Trocki. \u201dThey throttled it down because it kept getting the whole park wet. Yeah, it was beautiful. It still is.”<\/p>\n
Thomas Edison. Erie still salutes you.<\/p>\n
Thomas Edison was very familiar with this region. He married Mina Miller, the daughter of the co-founder of Chautauqua Institution. He was a frequent visitor to Chautauqua.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let’s see. What historical figure do I want to highlight today on The Last Word? Oh! A light…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[126450,45625,126448,126451,136,138,137,126449,15810,15811,126447],"class_list":["post-308650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-chautauqua-institution","tag-edison-elementary","tag-edison-fountain","tag-edison-power-plant","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news","tag-incandescent-light","tag-john-last","tag-the-last-word","tag-thomas-edison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}