Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1843
Yesterday I asked: Does anyone know what EEI stands for? There were lots of responses including a reference to this site:
http://forgotten-boston.com/lights%26utilities/boston.electric/utilities.html
and another reply from Doug Wynne:
Good morning, Earl.
My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think this hatch bears the initials of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. Not sure if it dates to the struggle between Thomas Edison (locally-generated Direct Current) and Nikola Tesla (regionally-generated Alternating Current), which Tesla obviously won. Edison held patents dealing with the commercial-scale generation of DC, but once the ability of AC to be transmitted over longer distances was proven, DC faded and Edison adapted. However, I did read somewhere recently that as late as the 1940’s there were still small urban pockets served by DC. But I digress. My interest in such matters stems from the fact that my siblings and I owe our existence to Boston Edison. Our eventual mother was the secretary to the contracts manager at the Edison when one of their contractors, Thomas Wynne Cox of Cox Electric (corner of Broadway and L Street in Southie) introduced her to his “English cousin” who had immigrated to apprentice to him. Charlotte and Ed hit it off, to put it mildly, and the rest is history. Pretty good for the days before eHarmony. Heck, almost the days before radio!
Today’s illustration is self-explanatory.
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