Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla: the history behind The Current War

And as the bulbs kept shining and generators humming, the company providing the power claimed victory in a war of competing electrical systems. Genius inventors and industrialists – with Thomas Edison on one side, facing George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla on the other – battled to lead the technological revolution that has powered humankind ever since. The success at the fair, essentially, declared the winner.

Before the War of the Currents, Thomas Edison was already a household name. By the late 1870s, and barely in his 30s, the American developed an almost-magical sound-recording device called the phonograph, and set up his ‘invention factory’ at Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Then following months of testing, Edison demonstrated the world’s first practical incandescent lightbulb. It was a defining moment in his career, but perfecting a durable, safe and mass-produced form of electric light without the means to power it would be like inventing the car without fuel or roads. Edison needed an entirely new system and infrastructure for electrical distribution. The Edison Illuminating Company used direct current (DC), where energy flows constantly in a single direction in the same way as a battery. That powered his lightbulbs and he held the relevant patents, so Edison had a practical and strongly financial incentive to establish DC as the standard across the United States.

Two systems

The first power station opened on Pearl Street, New York, in September 1882 and began serving 59 customers. As more plants followed, homes and businesses became connected and royalties soon flowed in, Edison parried press attacks from under-threat gas companies accusing electricity of being too dangerous. Yet these gains masked a much more serious problem – the unavoidable truth that DC had drawbacks.

It could not be transmitted over long distances without losing a lot of energy, so much so that plants had to be within a mile of customers. This involved more plants, more generators and more copper wiring. Plus, as DC ran at a constant rate, supplying different voltages would require separately installed lines, making it yet more expensive.

Alternating current (AC), where the flow reverses direction dozens of times per second, did not have these problems. A transformer, which went from a theoretical idea to functional use in the 1880s, could ‘step up’ the voltage, which allowed electricity to be transmitted far greater distances than DC with negligible loss. The high voltage would then be ‘stepped down’ by another transformer at the end of the line to make it safe for use. As the electricity could be transported long distances, plants could be larger – so there would be fewer of them – and cheaper to operate. AC used thinner copper too, bringing costs down further. It wasn’t perfected yet, though, as a fully functional system still missed some innovations and improvements. That was until a brilliant Serbian mathematician, engineer and visionary came along.

Nikola Tesla, having travelled to America in 1884 with just four cents in his pocket, started out working at Edison Machine Works improving DC generators. He proved good at it, once staying up all night to repair the dynamos on the ocean liner SS Oregon. Like Edison, he worked long hours, slept little and had an unquenchable drive to innovate. But Tesla always believed the future of distributing electricity relied on AC, and left the job after Edison rejected his ideas as “splendid”, but “utterly impractical”.

An undeterred Tesla spent the next few years raising money for his own laboratory, including a stint digging ditches for Edison’s wires, and developing an AC system. His induction motor used a game-changing polyphase current (AC flowed in waves, so this filled in the ‘troughs’ with multiple voltages) to generate a rotating magnetic field (meaning fewer mechanical parts to maintain). Tesla had the ideas, but not the capital and business knowhow.

A Pittsburgh industrialist named George Westinghouse had both. Unlike his competitor Edison, who enjoyed his celebrity, Westinghouse kept himself private and did not like having his photograph taken. He was a savvy businessman, having made his fortune on the railroad, and immediately recognised the importance of Tesla’s work to his own ambitions for AC. As well as offering Tesla a job as a consultant, Westinghouse bought the patents for $60,000 in cash or stock and $2.50 for each horsepower of electricity sold – all worth millions today.

Spreading shock

“George Westinghouse was, in my opinion, the only man on this globe who could take my alternating-current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power,” said Tesla later in life. “He was one of the world’s true noblemen, of whom America may well be proud and to whom humanity owes an immense debt of gratitude.”

Westinghouse Electric Company, which had been created before Tesla’s involvement, posed a threat to Edison’s monopoly. Westinghouse targeted rural areas that could not be reached by DC’s small transmission range and managed to undercut rival business in the towns and cities by selling at a loss. By late 1887, he had built 68 power plants to Edison’s 121. To make matters worse, Edison faced competition from other DC companies too, such as Thomson-Houston. With the proliferation of electrical providers came expensive lawsuits over patents, which dragged on for years.

Losing power, literally, and still struggling to make significant improvements to his own distribution, the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’ refused to acknowledge the benefits of AC. It may have been down to pride or stubbornness, or because he had invested too much, or due to a sincere concern that his rivals’ high-voltage wires endangered people’s lives. Or all of the above. Whatever the reason, Edison showed how cutthroat he could be by launching a fearmongering smear campaign.

“Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months,” he had written in 1886. Sure enough, accidental electrocutions occurred when wires had been poorly installed or insulated as thousands of volts coursed through them, and Edison regularly used these deaths as fodder in his damning evidence against AC.

“Its effect upon muscular action is so great that even at exceedingly low voltage the hand which grasps a conductor cannot free itself… the nervous system of a human being could be shocked for a sufficient length of time to produce death,” he wrote in an 1889 article, The Dangers of Electric Lighting. Nevertheless, he continually claimed that his own DC remained perfectly safe. Westinghouse later recalled how Edison once said, “Direct current was like a river flowing peacefully to the sea, while alternating current was like a torrent rushing violently over a precipice”.

His campaign would go much further than rhetoric. Enlisting the help of electrical engineer Harold P Brown, he staged a number of grisly experiments where stray dogs (bought for 25 cents from local boys), calves and a horse would be brought to one of his laboratories and electrocuted. If animals did not make his point clearly enough, Edison also became embroiled in the adoption of the first electric chair to execute a human.

While he opposed capital punishment initially, an opportunity not to be missed fell into his lap. New York dentist Alfred P Southwick approached him concerning his desire for a more humane method of execution than hanging, believing electricity could be the answer. Edison had previously quipped that the best method would be to “hire out your criminals as linemen to the New York electric lighting companies,” but to Southwick, he recommended “alternating machines”.

Although an appalled Westinghouse refused to sell any of his generators for that purpose, Brown had been selected to design the chair based on Southwick’s ideas and he made sure it used AC. Edison even coined the term ‘Westinghoused’ to describe someone being electrocuted. So when convicted murderer William Kemmler was sentenced to die on the electric chair, Westinghouse spent $100,000 on his appeal – in vain as the Supreme Court rejected the argument that electrocution constituted a “cruel and unusual punishment”.

On 6 August 1890, guards strapped Kemmler into the AC-powered chair at Auburn Prison and flipped the switch. The 17-second burst of 1,000 volts did not kill him, so he had to be hit a second time, after an agonising wait while the generator charged. With double the voltage running through his body, Kemmler bled and his hair began to singe, while the smell of burning flesh made some witnesses retch. Westinghouse, on hearing about the bungled execution, stated, “They would have done better using an axe”.

The war is won

Yet after all the bad publicity and attacks, Edison’s crusade failed to prevent the ascendency of AC or his profits from falling. His years of championing DC fizzled out as he stepped aside to pursue other projects and a merger in 1892 with Thomson-Houston turned his company into the more AC-friendly General Electric (GE).

That did not stop the struggles for power with Westinghouse Electric, and it actually would not take long for GE to catch up once the commitment to DC had gone. The news that the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 – also called the Columbian Exhibition to celebrate 400 years since Columbus reached the New World – would be powered by electricity set off a bidding war. It was another success for AC as Westinghouse won the contract by underbidding GE, providing his company with its most public and spectacular display yet.

Beyond the glittering sight of hundreds of thousands of lightbulbs outside, generators were on display in the Electricity Building and Tesla had a space to show off his work with his usual panache and showmanship. He demonstrated the theory of his induction motor by placing a copper egg into a rotating magnetic field, where it would spin on its axis of its own free will.

The fair, while a monumental triumph in its own right, also gave Westinghouse the reputation needed to secure the highly desired contract to build a hydroelectric plant on the Niagara Falls. By the time the great machinery began generating power, on 16 November 1896, for the city of Buffalo more than 20 miles away, there could be no doubt that AC had won the War of the Currents.

This article first appeared in the March 2019 issue of BBC History Revealed magazine