Lately, I’ve been feeling quite nostalgic about old inventions and innovations. Things that made life meaningfully easier in simple ways that didn’t feel to threatening or high stakes. Think cameras, refrigerators, fountain pens, lights…
The Pfister’s lighting is one of those stories about innovation. When it opened in 1893, it was groundbreaking. Here’s what actually went into it.
The Pfister opened electric, not gas, and it generated its own power to do it. When the hotel opened in 1893, electricity was still the exception. Most hotels of the era ran on gas. The Pfister opened fully wired, powered by its own on-site plant, at a moment when that was a genuine technological gamble, not a given. It also made the hotel safer. The building itself was constructed to be fireproof, and skipping gas and candles for electric light removed one of the biggest fire risks of the time.
Every fixture was designed by a company solving a brand-new problem: how to make electric light beautiful. All the electric fixtures in the hotel were designed and manufactured by the Archer & Pancoast Manufacturing Company of New York. Their philosophy was that a fixture’s first job was to let the lamps do their work, and only after that was ornament allowed in. Nothing overdone, nothing superfluous.
The install was local, and wealthy Milwaukeeans noticed. W.E. Goodman, Milwaukee’s largest dealer in gas and electric fixtures at the time, put up every fixture in the hotel and supplied all the cut glass globes. His chandelier designs were so popular that wealthy residents started commissioning smaller versions for their own homes, so pieces of the Pfister’s lighting ended up scattered around private homes in the city.
Some of those fixtures are still lighting the hotel today. The Imperial Ballroom’s gold-plated chandeliers are the same ones that have hung there since the hotel opened, restored rather than replaces through the decades. It’s a rare thing, walking under light fixtures that are still doing the exact job they were designed for well over a century ago.
Archer & Pancoast designed the fixtures in Brooklyn. W.E. Goodman installed them here in Milwaukee. A power plant ran quietly in the basement so the whole building could glow at once. None of it happened by accident.
That’s the kind of innovation I miss thinking about. Progress had a face. You could point to Goodman’s chandeliers in someone’s parlor and know exactly where the idea came from.
— Megan