

Scranton Select Council passed the Peoples Electric Light and Power Co. Scranton, then head of the Scranton Gas & Water Company, was instrumental in building the first electric power plant along the Lackawanna River. In the early days of electricity, electric illumination was under the control of a number of companies, with a few of the mid-valley towns operating plants of their own.

They were followed by incandescent bulbs. The first electric lights in Scranton were arc lamps.
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The other boroughs did not install street lights until electric lamps had become a tried and true innovation. Aside from Scranton, only Dunmore and Carbondale lit their streets. Before electricity, city streets were lighted by acetylene gas lamps – no more than a couple of hundred in all. Theater owner Arthur Frothingham, a native of New York, is credited with promoting the use of electricity for street lighting. Guests attended in the costumes of various authors and their characters, treating the assembly to their impersonations of those characters. This festival continued for a week and was considered the most brilliant social event of that generation. Its purpose was to raise money for the building fund of the Young Men’s Christian Association. The public first saw electric lights demonstrated in the city of Scranton at an event called the Author’s Carnival, which opened on April 25, 1887. These were all industrial establishments, and, in fact, establishments that were themselves known for innovation.

The Dickson brothers installed electricity at their Dickson Works on Penn Avenue on October 21, 1882. The Scranton family’s steel mill was the second plant to install electric lighting – which it did on February 23, 1881. Thomas Edison had only recently improved the electric light bulb to the point that made it usable for commercial use, and he had received his patent just months before, in January of 1880. On that date, electric lights were introduced at the Dickson Locomotive Works. The city of Scranton took its first step toward earning its reputation as the Electric City on December 6, 1880.
