This question is prompted by a recent discovery of mine-I was asked by my SIL to check out a blown circuit breaker-upon entering the basement, I found that a "Boston Edison Co."nspector had checked the fusebox-in 1927!
I recall that at one time, most of the electric power companies in the USA, had the Edison name-in Boston, it was Boston edison, NYC had New York Edison, etc.
Edison died in 1931-I take it his business empire did not survive him-is this why the name went out of use?
That ConEd thing was the first thing I thought of, but it still is a good question if expanded-- when/why did the “Edison” name get phased out in areas outside of the ConEd? Are there little local companies that still hold it? What big companies now have vestiges of Edison inside their structure? I’m familiar with and find fascinating the slow disappearance of the “Bell” name from American telephony, and wonder if the story behind the disappearance of “Edison” is as interesting.
You mean like General Electric– the 2nd largest company in the world?
Edison Light(house)
There’s no story. Companies have followed a long-term trend to shorten their names:
General Motors → GM
General Electric → GE
First National City Bank → Citibank
Mutual of New York → MoNY
Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith → Merrill Lynch
National Biscuit Company → Nabisco
National Broadcasting Company → NBC
Columbia Broadcasting System → CBS
American Broadcasting Company → ABC
American Telephone and Telegraph → AT&T
International Business Machines → IBM
Hewlett-Packard → HP
New York Telephone → Nynex → Verizon
Standard Oil Company of New York → Socony Mobil → Mobil
United Parcel Service → UPS
Federal Express → FedEx
Thus
Consolidated Edison → ConEd
In the early 1890s three companies dominated the new market for electric power: Edison General Electric, Thomson-Houston, and Westinghouse. The men who ran the businesses all hated each other, but they also recognized that splitting the power world three ways wasn’t going to work. Mostly because Edison was adamant about using DC power and had the big city systems, Westinghouse had all the AC power in smaller cities, and Thomson-Houston dithered about which way to go.
Westinghouse couldn’t get himself to sell out, so on April 15, 1892 a new General Electric Company was incorporated, merging Thomson-Houston with Edison. J. P. Morgan, the financier, provided the big money. He didn’t even bother to tell Edison that he was dropping his name from the company. Edison heard it from a reporter.
They kept Edison on as a member of the board, but he had no actual power. He had no system either, since AC smashed DC by being able to transmit power over long distances, so that plants weren’t needed every few blocks in a city. Edison soon left the company entirely. He was pretty much finished by that time anyway. All his major inventions were in the past.
His name lived on in the local power companies he had established earlier, but he was never a businessman. He always spent more money than he had and was dependent on what we would call venture capitalists to fund his, um, ventures. Westinghouse was as good a businessman as he was an inventor and so his company thrived. Elihu Thomson was an excellent inventor but the businessman who controlled everything was - no, not Houston - Charles Coffin, who became president of GE and ran the company for 30 years.
Finding an inventor who was capable of running a giant corporation is extremely rare. Westinghouse is the leading exception of his day.
Details from The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America, by Maury Klein, whose history of that period is excellent.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear in my post. I know the Ed in ConEd stands for Edison-- I’m curious about the disappearance of Edison from company names in general, like in the OP’s example of Boston Edison. It reminds me of the Bell name for local/regional branches of AT&T. Post-breakup, its usage has diminished, but it’s neat to see the vestiges of the name still lurking about (the B in SBC, there’s apparently a Cincinnati Bell still around).
Thanks for the info (I will get Klein’s book). I always wondered what happened to Edison, after he lost the AC-DC war with Westinghouse/Tesla. Edison had a very restless mind-he tried his hand at electric cars, and cast-concrete houses-he even tried to mine iron ore in New Jersey (lost his shirt on that one). The man never seemed to think to try out his ideas on a small-scale basis first-he rushed projects into development, before he could establish their feasibility.
That’s not a shortening issue so much as a merger issue. NYNEX was a Baby Bell made up of AT&T subsidiaries New York Telephone and New England Telephone (hence the NY and NE). Then it was bought by Bell Atlantic, and then later, Bell Atlantic merged with GTE and the combined company changed the name to Verizon.