the original rival of electric lighting wasn't so much candle makers as gas light utility companies and Kerosene lamps. For the most part, gas light companies did nothing, it helped that Edison Electric was backed by the most powerful Gilded Aged interests of Wall St such as J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family who owned interests in various gas companies but knew that it would be more profitable for them to own large interests in the new technology which they could control monopolistically through patents than futility try to stop it. The Vanderbilt family had that sort of business mentality: the late patriarch Cornelius Vanderbilt had built his original fortune in ferries and steamships, when Railroads began to become popular in the 1840s rather than seeing them as competition to his current business he saw them as the next business venture he could master.