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Excerpt

Chapter 1
A Young Man Reinvents Himself

The dread sound of a fire bell in the night roused Clarence C. Hobart from his sleep. It was just past one o'clock in the morning of April 30, 1890, when the bell a block away atop City Hall began to clang. A sickly orange glow flickered in the east. Hobart ran to the back of his frame house and pushed aside a curtain. Flames were licking from the windows of a two-story brick factory building, the building occupied by the Hobart Electric Company. Hobart sprinted back to his bedroom and began pulling on his clothes with the haste of a man who knew his business was grossly underinsured. His wife, Lou Ella, sprang up in bed, alarmed. She was four months pregnant. Edward, their sixteen-month-old son, cried in the room next door. The responsibilities of the moment crowded in on Clarence Hobart as he hurried to his factory to see what he could do.

By the time he crossed the alley, the entire twelve man fire department of Middletown, Ohio, had arrived on the scene. With the building fully involved in flames, there was little they and their horse-drawn pumper could do but contain the blaze. Hobart did not have time to collect his thoughts and ponder his next move. A reporter from the Middletown Signal was soon on the scene asking him questions. Hobart confessed that he only had $200 worth of insurance but that the building contained about $3,800 in equipment and material, including a $1,100 dynamo, which had been assembled yesterday and scheduled for delivery to the twine factory later that day. Noting this ill-timed coincidence, the fire two years before before at this site, and Hobart's role in the ongoing dispute among advocates of gas lighting, Brush arc lights and Edison's generators, the reporter claimed the fire "was thought by many to be the work of an incendiary." More importantly, despite the blow, Hobart did not hesitate to tell the reporter his intension to rebuild.

For Clarence C. Hobart or "C.C.," as he was known to family and friends starting over was nothing new. He had changed plans, changed residences, and changed careers several times in his thirty-five years of life. However, by now he knew, with even more certainty than after the fire two years before, that electricity was the energy source of the future, and that his future lay in the building of electronic equipment.

Clarence Charles Hobart was born on September 30, 1854. He was the fourth child of Charles and Parthenia Hobart who lived in the small town of Westford, Vermont, where Charles earned a living as a carpenter who built homes and churches. In September 1854 Franklin Pierce was president of the United States. That fall a man named Lincoln challenged Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas for his support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, claiming it would spread slavery into northern territories. The Civil War lay less than seven years in the future. An Englishman named Darwin was hard at work on a book he would publish five years later as The Origin of Species. The telegraph, the steamship, and the railroad were revolutionizing the world Clarence Hobart's parents had know. However, the first wave of the Industrial Revolution was already cresting. The era dominated by coal, iron, and steam, an era when most innovations came from Great Britain, would soon be overwhelmed by a second more powerful wave lead by oil, steel, electricity, and inventions from America. In five years Edwin Drake would strike oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, with the world's first oil well. Charles Bessemer was already perfecting the process that would make steel an economically viable building material. In that same autumn of 1854 Thomas Edison,a seven-year-old boy, would overhear his teacher tell a school official that Thomas was "addled" and not worth keeping in school. People born in the preindustrial world had trouble understanding the builders of the new era. He would not realize it until he was almost thirty years old, but Clarence Hobart would become a builder of the new industrial age.