08 Jun

Edison vs Tesla: The Battle for Electric Power–Part 2

The battle of Edison vs Tesla

So, what exactly changed on May 1, 1893?

Lighting up Chicago

Westinghouse had managed to win the bid to illuminate the Chicago World’s Fair, the first all-electric fair in history. The previous year, financier JP Morgan had facilitated the merger of Thomas Edison’s various companies into the General Electric Corporation. GE also bid on the World’s Fair, but lost out because of the high cost of laying copper wire to accommodate DC power transmission.

27-million people witnessed President Grover Cleveland push a button bringing the fair to life and from that point forward, 80% of all electrical devices sold used AC power.

And New York…

Later that year, Westinghouse was awarded the contract to harness the power of Niagara Falls and when the plant came online in 1896, even the remaining Edison systems were forced to convert to AC power.

But the War of Currents cost everyone involved. JP Morgan, hoping to wrest full control of all hydroelectric power, manipulated the stock market to try and force Westinghouse to sell Tesla’s patents. Tesla saved Westinghouse, grateful for his patron, and asserted his own nobility over profits by tearing up his contract.  Westinghouse would survive, but Tesla would forever after be in debt and mostly forgotten…

Forgotten Genius

Despite his remarkable achievements in electrical power, including radical experiments designed to transmit unlimited power wirelessly through the air to consumers – for free – Tesla is generally only remembered as the inventor of the Tesla Coil, which you probably recall best from those old Frankenstein movies. The Tesla Coil builds up lots of high voltage electricity quickly and efficiently and is also a powerful radio transmitter.

While Edison is memorialized for his inventions and quotes, Tesla is all but forgotten by the average person, even though many of the theories he proposed inspired the work of physicists like Einstein, Hawking and Heisenberg (the scientist, not Walter White’s alter ego). He also had breakthroughs in radio, radar, x-rays, solar energy, and even robotics. His technological advances were years ahead of his time, even today.

To be fair, Edison wasn’t completely wrong. DC power is still used very prevalently today – especially in computers. That thick brick in your laptop, printer and desktop cable? It’s constantly converting AC to DC to protect your sensitive electronics from the “raging waves” of alternating current.

Who knew electricity had such a “shocking” history?

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01 Jun

Edison vs Tesla: The Battle for Electric Power

The battle of Edison vs Tesla

The year was 1887…

It was a battle royale – Jefferson vs Adams, the North vs the South, Hulk Hogan vs Randy Macho Man Savage, Jobs vs Wozniak, Trump vs Clinton… AC vs DC.

And when the dust settled, the guy who won really lost and the guy who lost became the champion that everyone remembers.

Back in the day before anti-trust laws forced the breakup of the remaining empire, the source of electricity – the power company – was known by one name… Edison. The name still lingers at Con-Ed in New York, SoCal Edison in California, and smaller units scattered all across the United States.  But the power that comes into your house wasn’t the famous inventor’s idea.

First Meeting

In 1882, Nikola Tesla left his phone company job in his native Serbia and headed to Paris where he found employment with the Continental Edison Company. There, he so impressed his superiors that they recommended his transfer to the United States, noting that his genius rivaled that of their founder.

Tesla was excited to meet one of his heroes, a man who had accomplished so much with so little training. But this hope quickly died. The very genius that should have brought them together, because of their mutually high opinions of themselves, in fact created a rift almost immediately.

Self-taught Edison preferred to do tedious trial and error experimentation – hence his famous quote about finding 10,000 ways that didn’t work – while Tesla was a trained engineer and creative dreamer who preferred to come up with theories before testing them practically. Which drove them both somewhat crazy.

Tesla lasted less than a year working with his former hero.

While Edison is famous these days for his quotes on productivity – “Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration,” Tesla believed that mindset was Edison’s biggest stumbling block:

If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once, with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search… I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of his labor.–Nikola Tesla

The War of the Currents

But the most famous falling out between the two men came to become known as the “War of the Currents.”

Edison stood by direct current (DC), while Tesla advocated for alternating current (AC).

The man who became a household name after his invention of the light bulb, the phonograph, the movie camera and countless other helpful, soon to be household items, didn’t want to bring “dangerous” alternating current into every home.  He was convinced the best way, and certainly the safest way, to power the world was through single direction DC power.

But Tesla, with his theoretical approach, pointed out that DC power had severe limitations that would impact the future. In the 1880’s, DC technology only allowed for a power grid with a one-mile radius from the power source. And while DC only went one way, AC power allowed the flow of energy to go both ways, creating a much more practical solution for transmitting large quantities of energy to power an industrial city, which he predicted the United States would rapidly see more of in the coming years.

Unfortunately, Tesla did not always employ his considerable prognostication techniques to his own life. In his efforts to prove his former mentor wrong, he made a deal with a Pittsburgh industrialist whose name would also become a household word – George Westinghouse. Westinghouse paid Tesla a handsome fee, including residuals, for his AC motor and electrical transmission patents and began a campaign to make the public aware of his newly purchased invention.

In retaliation, Edison launched his own propaganda campaign against alternating current, even sending Professor Harold Brown on a “speaking” tour, where he routinely used AC power to electrocute dogs, horses, elephants and a convicted ax murderer in New York.

But everything changed on May 1, 1893—stay tuned next week to find out!