There was a long road ahead of this. Almost half a century earlier, in 1879, the company Siemens & Halske demonstrated the first electric street lighting along Unter den Linden. Soon the gas lanterns at Potsdamer Platz and along Leipziger Straße also made way for incandescent lamps.
However, electricity was needed to turn on the street lights. That is why Oskar von Miller and Emil Rathenau, the two directors of the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft für angewandte Elektricität (later AEG), founded Europe's first public electricity company in 1884: the Städtische Elektricitäts-Werke zu Berlin .
Electrical substation
The power company commissioned its first power station near Gendarmenmarkt in 1885, and a second power station followed a year later on Mauerstraße. There you will find the Buchhändlerhof substation. There, the high voltage from the power plant was converted into lower voltages.