Hartford Electric Light Company Records

The Hartford Electric Light Company received its charter from the Connecticut General Assembly in 1881 and began service in 1882 to provide electricity for the city of Hartford, Connecticut. The company's board of directors elected Austin Cornelius Dunham as president. The company's first initiative, in 1883, was to install arc lighting to the Asylum Street railroad station; by 1900 Hartford was the first city in New England with an all-electric streetlighting system.

The company, better known as HELCO, was soon known as an innovator in the generation and distribution of electricity and was the first to make practical applications of several important new developments that were destined eventually to become the industry's standard practices.

HELCO was the first public utility in the United States to transmit three-phase alternating current at high voltage for any considerable distance. In 1893 the company transmitted three-phase alternating current at between 4000 and 5000 volts from the Rainbow Hydroelectric Station in Windsor, Connecticut, on the Farmington River, to its Pearl Street station in Hartford, where its steam power plant was located at that time.

In 1896 the company was the first to use a storage battery in connection with a hydraulic plant, making it possible to supply the peak load requirements from water power that would otherwise have gone to waste during periods of relatively small demand.

The company was the first public utility in the United States to use steam turbines to drive its generators. The first turbine, nicknamed "Mary Ann" and weighing 91,700 pounds, was installed in the company's 266 Pearl Street generating station in Hartford in April 1901. It was a Westinghouse - Parsons type turbine manufactured by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a turbo-generator capacity at 1500 kilowatts. Considered obsolete by 1908 it was relocated to the company's Dutch Point location.

By 1908 President Dunham invented an electric range complete with broiler, cooker, and roaster. The company marketed the range for the use of its customer and soon 20,000 ranges were installed in homes in the Hartford area. Dunham also received patents for his inventions of a radiator with an electrical unit, a device to heat water, and an ice-making machine and by the mid-1910s these electrical appliances were commonplace in Hartford households.

HELCO built a dam and powerhouse at Tariffville, Connecticut, in the town of Simsbury, on the Farmington River, in 1899. It had two pairs of 1300 horsepower water wheels connected to two 750 kilowatt Westinghouse generators. The company again scored a first when they used aluminum for the conductors in the transmission line. The Tariffville dam and powerhouse were destroyed in the Flood of 1955.

In 1915 HELCO and the Connecticut Power Company, which served New London, Middletown and northwestern Connecticut with generating stations at Falls Village (a hydro-electric station on the Housatonic River) and Canaan, entered into a power exchange agreement where they would work cooperatively to supply power to each others' customers. Samuel Ferguson, who served as president and/or chairman of HELCO from 1924 to 1946, arranged to acquire common stock in the Connecticut Power Company and the companies consolidated their engineering, purchasing and construction operations.

A power station was built in 1921 at South Meadows in Hartford, which became the site of another first when, in 1928, the company installed one of the first commercial mercury cycle generating units in the world (this was soon discontinued due to improvements in conventional steam turbines).

In 1900 HELCO had 3200 customers. By 1950 that number was up to 89,000, in a 245 square mile area of Greater Hartford.

In 1958 HELCO merged with the Connecticut Power Company, and in 1982 the company formally merged into Connecticut Light & Power.