Cornwall Electric: 100 Years of Service by Karen Carter-Edwards, and: An Early History of Electricity Supply: The Story of the Electric Light in Victorian Leeds by J. D. Poulter

Abstract

694 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and shaft and electricity, steam turbines, hydroelectric power, and the use of power in mining. William D. Sawyer Mr. Sawyer has been the historical consultant to the Cable Car Rehabilitation Project in San Francisco and is now working on a book about George H. Corliss and the Corliss engine. CornwallElectric: 100 Years ofService. By Karen Carter-Edwards. Corn­ wall, Ont.: Cornwall Electric (1001 Sydney Street K6H 5V3), 1987. Pp. x + 335; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $C30.00. An Early History of Electricity Supply: The Story of the Electric Light in Victorian Leeds. By J. D. Poulter. London: Peter Peregrinus for the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1986. Pp. x + 212; illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $45.00. Terry S. Reynolds’s 1984 review of Thomas P. Hughes’s Networks of Power in this journal noted that “previous scholarship in the field has largely been restricted to the evolution of particular utility companies or the evolution of power systems in a single country.” These books perpetuate the tradition to which Hughes’s work was an exception. Both are local, narrative studies with the strengths and weaknesses of their genre. Neither presents a general interpretive analysis, but both provide detailed material from primary sources useful for research into the political economy of utilities. Although each addresses various technical and institutional themes, both authors arrange their studies around the issue of ownership. At different times the question has been asked: Should utilities be publicly or privately owned? Both studies throw light—so to speak—on this. Karen Carter-Edwards’s centennial history of the company that supplies power to the St. Lawrence River manufacturing town of Cornwall traces its founding as a private venture and its merger with the local street railway company when both were purchased by Sun Alliance Assurance around 1900. It remained until the 1970s one of the few private electricity companies in Ontario. She suggests that Cornwall was so long an exception to the general rule because low rates made the status quo popular; these in turn derived from the company’s cross-subsidization of power generation with its streetcar and freight-handling interests. The decline of those activities after World War II helped create the conditions for municipal takeover in 1977. One infers, though, that fear of unfriendly outside influence overshadowed economic calculations. This persuaded Cornwall’s vot­ ers several times to turn down a takeover by the publicly owned On­ tario Hydro. Equally, Sun Alliance’s eventual decision to sell Cornwall Electric pushed the city to buy the company itself rather than have it pass into the hands of a strange outside corporation. We are left with TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 695 Carter-Edwards’s assertations (and some evidence) that Sun Alliance itself had been friendly to Cornwall, but company histories are often uncritical of their subjects. J. D. Poulter’s book has more edge to it, partly because it is chron­ ologically restricted to the creation of a public electricity supply in the Yorkshire city of Leeds at the end of the 19th century, partly because his sources tell a story of what he calls “amazing efficiency by a private company and amusing incompetence by the City Council” (p. ix). He shows how technical problems, legal uncertainties, financial misfor­ tune, but particularly protracted municipal debate and vacillation hindered the provision of general electricity supply, so that one of Britain’s largest industrial centers was only the fifty-sixth town in the country to receive service. This was despite the city council’s early installation of electric light in its own buildings. Supply was finally provided in 1893 (more than hve years after Cornwall, Ontario) by a private company, but a combination of financial and ideological ar­ guments led to the city’s purchase of the undertaking in 1898. Leeds and Cornwall had sharp contrasts in experience, but common concerns too. Early municipal ownership guaranteed Leeds, among other things, against takeover by a large private company, and the council decided against installing a three-phase AC system in 1902 so as not to depend solely on Westinghouse for equipment. These two books suggest, therefore, that debates over ownership of utilities con...