J. J. Owen published the San Jose Mercury, the newspaper that would eventually become the Mercury News. In 1879, he visited San Francisco and witnessed the city's electric street lighting -- among the first in the world. Owen returned to San Jose with a vision: a single tall tower fitted with arc lights powerful enough to illuminate the entire city center, cheaper than maintaining gas lamps on every block. He designed the tower himself, estimated it would cost $5,000 and take a month to build, then raised just under $3,500 through public subscription. Groundbreaking took place on August 11, 1881, and the tower was dedicated on December 13 of the same year. The Mercury boasted that San Jose was the first town west of the Rockies lighted by electricity, a claim the paper conveniently forgot was undermined by San Francisco, the very city that had given Owen the idea.

As built, the tower rose 207 feet from a brick foundation, topped by a platform holding six arc lamps, a protective shield, and a 30-foot flagpole that brought the total height to 237 feet. The Sacramento Union reported its light was bright enough to throw distinct shadows a mile away and that standing beneath it was as bright as a half moon. Businesses named themselves after it. Photographers climbed it for bird's-eye views. Harper's Weekly featured it, and the French electrical journal La Lumiere Electrique praised it. A Santa Barbara newspaper called it "the favorite electric tower of the world." Christmas lights and banners were hung from its beams, making it perhaps the first structure in the American West to serve as a canvas for seasonal decoration. Some have argued the tower influenced the design of the Eiffel Tower, built eight years later. In 1989, San Jose staged a mock trial suing the estate of Gustave Eiffel for copyright infringement; the judge ruled the Paris design emerged independently.

Owen sold the tower in 1882 to pay off construction debts, and it passed through corporate hands until the San Jose Light and Power Company owned it. When a rival, the Electric Lighting Company, won the city's street lighting franchise in 1890, Light and Power refused to let them illuminate the tower. The standoff became known as the San Jose Electric-Light War. The Electric Lighting Company obtained permission from the City Council to overrule the objections -- the tower sat on public land, after all, and had been funded largely by public subscription. They rewired it for incandescent light and re-illuminated it in February 1891. Light and Power retaliated by sending a work crew on a Sunday, when California law prohibited serving injunctions, to cut the wiring, remove the lamps, and stand guard. Just before midnight, the Electric Lighting Company's manager and vice president climbed the tower in a storm and rewired it themselves. A judge voided the injunction and fined both companies $50. The legal battle dragged on for years.

The tower's ecological impact was unintended and bizarre. In May 1900, after the city relighted the tower following a period of darkness, the arc lamps attracted a massive swarm of beetles. Insectivorous birds followed the beetles. Some of both were electrocuted by the lamps, and their falling bodies drew stray cats to the base of the tower in a scavenging mob. The scene -- insects, birds, and cats spiraling around a tower of electric light in downtown San Jose -- was surreal enough to make the San Francisco newspapers. It was a small preview of the larger truth that the tower's plumbing-pipe construction was not built to last. The joints had been rusting behind the paint for years.

On February 8, 1915, a windstorm badly damaged the tower. A Tower Committee raised $6,100 for repairs, and a bracing platform was under construction when, on December 3, winds of 56 miles per hour finished what rust had started. The tower collapsed into the intersection. No one was injured. The city paid an estimated $4,000 to clear the debris. In 1977, a half-size replica -- 115 feet tall, lit with 620 clear sign lamps and topped with a beacon of four 400-watt metal-halide lamps -- was erected at History Park in Kelley Park to celebrate the city's bicentennial. In 2019, the San Jose Light Tower Corporation launched a competition for a modern landmark at Plaza de Cesar Chavez, drawing over 960 submissions. By 2025, the effort had stalled after spending nearly $900,000 on promotions with only $35,000 remaining. The original tower is gone, its replica stands in a park, and San Jose is still trying to decide what kind of monument to build in its memory.