On 4 September 1882, Thomas Edison activated the Pearl Street power station in Manhattan and lit New York's financial district with commercial electricity. He was not the first to light a bulb or generate current, but he was the first to combine generator, distribution network, consumption meter, and filament lamp into a viable urban service. The Pearl Street station defined the architecture of 19th-century urban electrification: direct current, low voltage, limited distribution radius. Those limitations would be the weakness that Tesla and Westinghouse's alternating current would overcome the following decade.