AC or DC? How Nikola Tesla Enabled George Westinghouse to Win the War of Electric Currents Against Thomas Edison.
Westinghouse won the no-holds-barred battle to electrify America.
The smoke rises under each of the legs of the animal wearing copper soles. A few seconds later, the enormous mass staggered, tilted, and collapsed. In front of Thomas Edison's camera, on January 4, 1903, the elephant Topsy, guilty of having killed a man, died, crossed by an alternating current of 6,000 volts.
What prompted Edison to immortalize the circus animal's death? Was it the prolific inventor's passion for his latest baby, the camera? Or a morbid evocation of the “war of the currents,” lost a decade earlier, during which the sinister electric chair became a communication argument
Thomas Edison was the most admired genius of his time. “A man who filed his first patent at 21, raked in his first million dollars nine years later, and whose every statement, like the Delphic oracle, is reproduced on the front page of the New York Times. A man revered as a wizard by the president of the United States and most citizens,” describes Paul Cravath, the hero of Graham Moore's historical fiction “The Last Days of Wonder.” A precursor of science fiction, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam made him the hero, creator of a humanoid woman, of his novel “The Future Eve” (1886).
In January 1880, Thomas Edison, already credited with the telegraph and the phonograph, pioneer with Graham Bell of the telephone, filed patent no. 223898, the most lucrative patent in history: the incandescent light bulb. Electricity, still poorly understood and mysterious is on the way to becoming what Jules Verne imagined as early as 1870 in the voice of Captain Nemo: “A powerful, obedient, fast, easy agent, which bends to all uses and reigns supreme on board. He lights me, he heats me, he is the soul of my mechanical devices.”
Edison's light bulb, the first to work overtime, illuminated the first neighborhood in Manhattan in 1882. A miracle of modernity. Zola recounts it in the store of his “Au Bonheur des Dames” (1883) while “one by one, electric lamps were lit.” “When all burned, there was a delighted murmur from the crowd, the great white exhibition took on a fairy-tale splendor of apotheosis, under this new lighting.”
The Edison system spread in America and elsewhere. But it stumbles on a constraint: the distance. The direct current is quickly lost during its transport. Generators were needed near consumers. In cities, it works. And yet. The low chimneys of the factory supplying the Paris Opera House caused complaints from the residents. In Dijon, the neighbors complained about the noise, the vibrations, and the smoke.
George Westinghouse, who had made a fortune with his air brake for trains, rushed into the electrical Eldorado. In 1886 he won his first contracts with the Edison system. But it was in Europe that he discovered another option: alternating current, developed by the Englishman Gibbs and the Frenchman Gaulard, with Siemens generators. Thanks to a transformer, which increases the voltage at the exit of the power station and then lowers it at the point of distribution, the alternating current is transported far and in quantity. The distance was no longer a problem. In 1886, Westinghouse made Great Barrington (Massachusetts) its showcase. But the technique was not yet perfected.
Between Edison's direct current and Westinghouse's alternating current, one man made history: Nikola Tesla.
Born in Serbia, the tormented and whimsical engineer set foot in the United States in 1884 with a letter of recommendation for Thomas Edison. The two men shared an appetite for science and a taste for entertainment, playing with the electricity fairy, which they mastered like no other. Edison was a hit at every World's Fair. Tesla, later on, achieved enormous success by letting hundreds of thousands of volts pass through him and with his wireless experiments.
But in 1884, the collaboration came to an end. There was one genius too many in the workshop. The American, nine years older than the European, did not believe or did not want to believe, in the alternating current advocated by Tesla, the advent of which would ruin his investments. Misunderstood, and poorly paid, Tesla slams the door. “I was dependent and couldn't work. When I got out of that situation, ideas and inventions flowed through my brain at an impressive speed,” Tesla said afterward.
In his New York laboratory, Tesla designed a complete alternating current system, including the motor, which he presented to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on May 16, 1888. It was a triumph. It attracted the attention of Westinghouse. For 1 million dollars and 1 dollar in royalties per horsepower installed, the industrialist bought his patents from Tesla. Westinghouse is “the only man on this planet capable of taking over my system, and winning the battle against the power of prejudice and money,” Tesla will say.
Prejudices? Thomas Edison, a talented communicator with a fondness for the press, took it upon himself to spread some about alternating current. “As certain as death is, Westinghouse will kill one of its customers before six months,” writes the “Wizard of Menlo Park” (named for his first workshop) at the time of the Great Barrington opening. Harold Brown, part entrepreneur, part lobbyist, is in charge of the campaign. In an Edison laboratory, he summoned journalists. Stray dogs bought for 25 cents from street kids, calves, and horses, are electrocuted, surviving 1,000 volts of direct current, dropping dead after 300 volts of alternating current discharge.
At the same time, the authorities questioned the inhumanity of hangings. Death by electricity interested them.
On December 17, 1887, the New York Times wrote: “It would be to the credit of the State of New York to be the first community to substitute a civilized for a barbarous method of inflicting capital punishment.” Brown is, for this most peculiar use, an advocate of alternating current.
Thomas Edison, who rejects the death penalty, brings the full weight of his aura to the debate. What better counter-advertising for his rival? Edison's lawyer, Eugene Lewis, suggests that, as with Joseph Guillotin and the guillotine, a man could be said to be “condemned to the Westinghouse. It would be a subtle tribute to the services rendered by this distinguished man.”
In 1888, the New York Sun published 45 letters exchanged between Edison or his employees and Brown. Were they stolen at the behest of George Westinghouse, as the film The Current War (2017) argues? Westinghouse has no doubt: “Brown conducts his experiments in the interest of and being paid by Edison Electric Company,” he writes.
Brown gets the contract with New York State. “Edison's spokesman in the battle against the alternating current was now being paid by the state to build an instrument of enforcement.” He designed, with Westinghouse equipment, the electric chair on which William Kemmler, murderer of his wife, was executed on August 6, 1890, in Sing Sing, the only prison equipped with a generator. But instant death was not to be. It is necessary to repeat it several times. The scene was despicable.
For Edison, it was too late. John Pierpont Morgan, another giant of the time, a banker, married his company with Thomson-Houston. Thus was born General Electric in 1892, which immediately adopted the alternative. Thomas Edison was only an advisor. In his autobiography, he deplores that once an inventor “gets there, the sharks of the business world use our wonderful laws and our wonderful legal procedure to ruin him.”
In 1893, the contract to illuminate the Chicago World's Fair was won by George Westinghouse. His victory was also Nikola Tesla's victory. The former owed so much to the latter: in 1890, when the collapse of Barings shook the stock market, his company was threatened with bankruptcy, strangled by the royalties that were swelling at the galloping rate of installed power. Tesla abandons them to George Westinghouse. Like Edison with the cinema, he still had so much to invent, like the radio.
In 1917, the alternating current had conquered 95% of the United States. In Europe, until the Second World War, the young distribution companies used the war of currents as a marketing argument. Thus this representative to whom his competitor in Lyon had already sold “current” to a private individual. “But which current? Alternating current, sir, current that comes and goes! Me, sir, I sell direct current!”
Alternating current is finally imposed with the development of more and more powerful generation units. Ironically, direct current is taking its revenge in the 21st century, with the batteries in our digital devices, innovation in high-voltage lines, and above all, the emergence with renewables of a decentralized system, much like Edison had imagined.
So who won the war on power, Westinghouse or Edison? The answer lies at the edge of Niagara Falls. The awarding of the construction of the hydroelectric plant in 1895 was the consecration of Westinghouse. General Electric, converted to AC, was responsible for the transmission. Nikola Tesla's patents won twice. And it is the statue of the iconoclastic genius that faces the falls he said he had dreamed of taming as a child.
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