Lightning streaks across the sky. A child walks across a carpet on a dry day then gets a shock when touching a doorknob. The size of the event is different, but the force that drives both is the same: electricity. Electricity has captured peoples imaginations since the ancient Greeks, but it was only about 125 years ago that Thomas Edison finally captured in a bottle the force behind lightning. He called it an electric light. Within a year Edison had his first commercial order. Strangely enough, it was from Portland, Ore., 3,000 miles from his Menlo Park, N.J. laboratory. Oregon Railroad and Navigation wanted to illuminate a new ship. Electricity came in small doses to the Northwest for the next decade: A hotel in Portland. A silver smelter in Hailey, Idaho. A mill in Tacoma, Wash. Street lights near the Spokane River from the Northwest's first hydroelectric dam. But 'long distance' transmission didn't come to the U.S. unitl 1889 when - again a Northwest first - the WIllamette Falls Electric Company sent power from its dam at Oregon City to Portland streetlights 14 miles away. Electricity was the high technology of the day. But few electric companies could afford the cost of building generators and transmission systems.
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