Date with History: September 4

Edison lights lower Manhattan, and two Stanford students incorporate Google in a garage.

One paperback for one calendar date: what happened on September 4, and who was born on it.

What happened on September 4

1882: Edison switches on Pearl Street Station

On September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison threw the switch at Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan, and about 400 lamps flickered on for 82 customers, the New York Times among them. Six coal-fired dynamos nicknamed Jumbos, each weighing 27 tons, produced a total of 100 kilowatts. What made it revolutionary was not the bulb but the whole system: generators, underground wiring, meters, junction boxes, and a business model.

1998: Google is incorporated in a Menlo Park garage

Larry Page and Sergey Brin formally incorporated Google Inc. in a friend's garage on September 4, 1998, with the stated mission of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible. Their PageRank algorithm ranked pages by who linked to them, essentially applying academic citation logic to the open web. Search that actually worked replaced search you could buy your way to the top of.

Famous birthdays on September 4

1981 — Beyonce Knowles-Carter
Houston-born force from Destiny's Child to Lemonade and Beychella, and the most Grammy-decorated artist.

1908 — Richard Wright
Escaped Jim Crow Mississippi to write Native Son and Black Boy, refusing to make Black pain palatable.

Nearby dates

September 3 · September 5 · All September dates

Part of Date with History, a 366-book collection with one book for every date of the year. 5″×8″ paperback, cream paper.

Historical selections are editorially researched. This is a date-specific book, not a personalized or custom-made product.