September 4 - Happy Birthday Electricity, Kodak, Google

Pearl Street, NYC, first U.S. power plant.

1882 - Pearl Street Station (255-257 Pearl Street, Manhattan) was the site of the first U.S. central power plant.  It began with one direct current generator. It started generating electricity for 400 lamps at 85 customers. Two years later it lit more than 10,000 lamps at 508 customers. The station was built by the Edison Illuminating Co.,  headed by Thomas Alva Edison. It became Consolidated Edison, or ConEd.

1888 - In Rochester, NY George Eastman received a patent for his new, easy-to-use camera, the Kodak, a name he invented to make it unique.

1998 - Google was first incorporated, the creation of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford. Their search engine was better than the ones that counted appearances on a Web page; their metric was harder to fake - it counted how many times each relevant Web site was linked to from other relevant Web sites. This idea, via targeted advertising, has produced revenues of $5.52 billion in the second quarter of 2014.