The important point is that cities had almost no regulations to ensure the safety of overhead wires and sometime they fell on the people with fatal consequence. Beginning in the late 1870s city governments began demanding that the telegraph and telephone companies put their wires underground. The companies refused, insisting that the underground wiring was technically unfeasible. Opposition to overhead wires was especially strong in New York, which probably had the largest concentration of such wires in the world.

By 1880, this opposition was sufficient to convince Thomas Edison to use underground wiring for his first central electric-lighting system at Pearl Street in lower Manhattan. By 1882 he had demonstrated that electrical power could be reliably transmitted through underground cable.

Throughout the 1880s urban reformers continued to demand underground wires in urban areas, with increasing success. Nevertheless, technical problems and political corruption slowed the removal of overhead wires in New York and other cities. By the early 1890s most large American cities had plans to eliminate overhead wires from their urban centres. But these plans were threatened by the demand for overhead wires to power the new electric trolley.