Categories: News, Schenectady County

The irony of two men like Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz blanketed in darkness just a few hundred feet from the main gate of the General Electric Company wasn’t lost on Brian Merriam.

Last week he met with students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who have designed lighting plans to illuminate the two bronze statues of Edison and Steinmetz erected at the intersection of South Ferry Street and Erie Boulevard back in May.

“We’re not forgetting the two men that are responsible for the success and the posterity of that big, beautiful light right up the street,” said Merriam, referring to the iconic GE landmark. “We’re shining light on Edison and Steinmetz, and that was always the original plan. We’re ready to add the lighting so people can see them at night, and we’re going to make sure we get it right. To get it wrong would be sad, so we’re not going to skimp on anything.”

Merriam, representing the Chamber of Schenectady County, spearheaded the move to memorialize Edison and Steinmetz, two key figures in the electrification of America. Edison invented the light bulb and brought his Edison Electrical Works to Schenectady in 1886, while Steinmetz earned the name the Wizard of Schenectady for his work at GE implementing Edison’s vision and making it more practical and efficient.

Merriam showed up at RPI’s Lighting Research Center on Union Street in Troy Tuesday, accompanied by Vince Forte, an RPI grad and a representative of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Penn Yan’s Dexter Benedict, the artist who created the two statues. The trio listened to three groups of RPI students for about an hour and asked several questions following each presentation.

“I think I heard a lot of good ideas and some very well-done presentations,” said Forte, who is helping Merriam establish an education component to the Edison-Steinmetz Statue Project. “I think this is a great service to the community.”

Merriam, Forte and Benedict will huddle over the next few days, look at all three proposals and determine the best option for Schenectady.

“Our city is becoming a much more pedestrian-friendly place,” said Merriam, whose family-run business, Merriam Insurance Agency, has been in Schenectady for four generations. “We want people to have a good reason to walk on the sidewalk, as opposed to driving by at 30 miles an hour, look over their shoulder and wonder who those guys were.”

Merriam said he has plenty of planning ahead before work resumes on the project.

“Unless we get a real quick donation, we’ll probably have to wait until spring to install the lights,” he said. “I have to look at what they presented us today, and then get some figures back from Schenectady Hardware and Electric, which has been a huge help to us.”

RPI professor Jennifer A. Brons and the students got to inspect the statues close-up. “We went and visited the site about three weeks ago,” said Brons, who noted that five of the students are in the master’s program at the Lighting Research Center while two of the students are underclassmen and part of the five-year architectural program at RPI. “They’ve really been working on it for about two weeks. It was a conceptual lighting design project in which the students had to create renderings or artistic representations of what the lighting will look like. They used computer models to calculate how much light there will be on the statues and the surroundings, and then took that to the next level and calculated light levels and power, and therefore energy use.”

Six years after the Edison Electrical Works opened in Schenectady, it merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. While Edison never spent a lot of time in Schenectady, Steinmetz, a German-born American mathematician and electrical engineer, called Schenectady home for three decades. Nearly as famous as Edison in his day, Steinmetz also taught electrical engineering at Union College and was a big part of the Socialist administration of Schenectady mayor George R. Lunn during the second decade of the 20th century. Steinmetz died in 1923 at his home on Wendell Avenue at the age of 58.