William Stanley (1858-1916) devised an innovative electric distribution system using an alternating-current transformer. In Horace Day’s rambling, vacant rubberwear factory on the Housatonic River, he and his assistants L.L. Jenkins and Reginald Belafield demonstrated its practicality on March 20, 1886, by powering lights in offices and stores on Main Street in Great Barrington. The innovation allowed efficient long-distance transmission of power and helped launch the larger battle of the currents, as Mary Sherwood Hopkins simultaneously had an Edison direct-current system installed at her new Kellogg Terrace on South Main Street to provide power to neighboring businesses. Stanley’s mentor George Westinghouse and alternating current ultimately prevailed. Stanley later established a manufactory in Pittsfield in the 1890s that evolved into General Electric, returned to Great Barrington in 1898 to build a factory on Church Street for electric watt-hour meters and later all-metal insulated Stanley bottles, and became linked indirectly to a later transformer-production innovation using polychlorinated biphenyls, whose reckless handling and disposal caused major contamination of the river.

Photo: Larry Gertner

Photo: Larry Gertner

Photo: Larry Gertner

Photo: Larry Gertner