Edison, Tesla and Westinhouse: The War of the Currents

The dispute that led to the war of currents was the following question: how will electricity in the United States go from the power plant that produces it, to the customer's home. Will it be direct current, DC, or through alternating current - AC

The following article is derived from the script of the episode 'The War of the Currents', from a podcast Making history! With Ran Levy, click to listen

The war of currents was a war whose results affected each of us. Although no bullets were fired, some died. Mainly dogs and cats. But also one fillet. Participating in the battles were three of the most brilliant minds in the history of mankind: Thomas Alva Edison, the famous inventor, George Westinhouse - an influential industrialist and a brilliant inventor in his own right, and Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest electrical engineers of all time.

The dispute that led to the war of currents was the following question: how will electricity in the United States go from the power plant that produces it, to the customer's home. Will it be direct current, DC, or through alternating current - AC. To those who have just become aware of the matter, this seems to be a completely technical debate. When I sit with some of the engineers at work, we have more or less the same discussions - where is this chip, how much voltage will come here, at which restaurant will we have lunch... But the debate about the method of electricity transmission is completely different, and as always - it's because of money involved , in the story - a lot of money.

The period in question is the end of the 19th century, the height of the industrial revolution, on the verge of the beginning of the electric age: the United States and the world are ready for a revolution that will bring electricity to every home. Everywhere there are already electric lamps, and this is also the main use for electricity in general (televisions, air conditioners, etc. had not been invented yet). If the electricity supply market for household lamps seems to someone to be a secondary and unimportant market, he is welcome to visit with me a small village in Mexico that I visited that does not have electricity. At six o'clock in the evening you go to bed. Night falls, there's nothing more to do. This is the only way to understand how important the light bulb is. Electricity should reach every home, then, but how exactly will the electricity arrive? Whoever controls the form of electricity transmission will make a lot of money.
Those who dealt with it already then, understood that power plants to generate electricity would be established everywhere. Also for private use, but also in government and military tenders that have a lot of budgets. There will be no shortage of customers - everyone is a customer.
The accompanying infrastructures are also quite a business: cables, motors, transformers, maintenance and repairs...
And another important point - control over the products: if you produce electricity at a voltage of one hundred volts, all the companies that produce electrical products must align according to your standard. There is a serious monopoly here, and a monopoly is usually worth a lot of money. So I hope you now understand the enormous motivation that all parties had to try and impose their electricity transmission method on the American market.

, Thomas Aloha Edison. From Wikipedia

Our story begins with Thomas Edison.
Who has not heard of Edison. The greatest inventor of all time. He was called 'The Wizard of Menlo Park' (where his home and development lab were).
Edison began his career as a telegraph operator - he won the job after saving the telegraph stationmaster's son from being run over by a train.
He was partially deaf, which may have helped him ignore annoying background noises and become a better telegraph operator.
Edison chose to do mostly night shifts, so he could do experiments, and there he developed an automatic receiver and transmitter for the telegraph.
In the end, Edison was fired from this position after one of the experiments spilled battery acid on the boss's desk.
The first invention that published it was the 'phonograph' (the first device for recording and playing sounds). In those days the phonograph seemed like a magic device to the public: voices from within
Box, who ever heard of it? Edison was nicknamed 'The Wizard'.
Edison's best-known invention was the light bulb (there was already a light bulb earlier, actually, but he developed the bulb that was suitable for mass production).
He had, however, many other inventions - including a method to synchronize image and sound (preliminary technology for cinema), and the first microphone. Throughout his career he registered over 1300 patents.
His genius is even more impressive when you find out that his entire formal education lasted only three months. Edison made up for this educational disadvantage with hard work.
He said - 'genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent hard work'. In English it rhymes perfectly.
Besides being a great inventor, he was also an excellent businessman. He had a lab with lots of engineers and they worked on developments that Edison registered as a patent.
Another testimony to Edison's business acumen: he immediately realized that with the development of the light bulb it would also be necessary to develop the electricity and distribution network - without it, the light bulb is worthless.
Edison hastened to establish a number of electricity supply companies, which later became one large company called "General Electric."
The electricity plant he established in New York was the first of its kind in the world.
Edison chose to put his money on the direct current method. This was the de facto standard at first in the United States.

A short explanation, what is direct current:
Electric current in general is a movement of electrons. The electrons in a metal, for example, are relative
Free to move within the material, but without intention they move in all directions randomly so that each current
Electrons in a certain direction are canceled out by a current in the opposite direction.
But if an electric voltage is applied to the conductor, the electrons will move in one direction
arranged. Direction of movement depends on the direction of the electric voltage: the negative electrons
will move towards the positive, plus part of the voltage.
In direct current, the current always moves in the same direction.

And after we understood what direct current is, we will move on to the person who invented alternating current - Nikola Tesla.
Tesla

Tesla is originally of Serbian origin, and immigrated to the United States. Already in Europe he was recognized as a genius, where he was nicknamed 'The Wizard of the West' (kind of reminds me of Edison, doesn't it?).
In the United States, Tesla is considered one of the greatest electrical engineers in history, and I will not hide that as an electrical engineer, I have a lot of empathy for him.
As a child, Nikola was gifted with a photographic memory. Tesla would experience epileptic-like flashes of inspiration: some word or object would be a trigger, and then he would see whole inventions before his eyes, which he realized.
These flashes, or perhaps for another reason, brought him to a nervous breakdown at a certain point.
In Europe he was one of the pioneers of telephony, and was responsible for establishing the Hungarian telephone network. In Hungary, Tesla invented the first loudspeaker.
The wireless field intrigued Tesla in a special way. He conducted many experiments regarding the possibility of transmitting electricity through the air - in many of his pictures
You can see the enormous lightning and flashes of electricity - millions of volts - passing through the air during his experiment.
He envisioned sophisticated weapons that would transmit energy through the air, a sort of 'death ray', that would destroy planes and ships from hundreds of kilometers away.
Tesla even demonstrated to the United States military wireless control of small ships. It took several more decades for this pioneering field to receive proper attention.
Every time you drive the car in the parking lot, think of Tesla - the invention of the electric spark plug for the car, plugs, is credited to him.
His work on changing magnetic fields was groundbreaking, and apparently - the physical unit that indicates the strength of the magnetic field flux is named 'Tesla' after him.
Touched many fields, some of them so advanced that they seemed strange - such as the conduction of electricity through the air and lightning (it was photographed excellently) - an image of a 'mad scientist' was created for him.
Towards the end of his life, Tesla suffered from an obsessive-compulsive behavior syndrome that focused on the number 3 - he did everything in threes, stayed in hotel rooms divisible by three, etc. Disease
This only intensified his eccentric image.
Tesla, unlike Edison, was not a great businessman. For example, the story about the radio:

Tesla is the one who invented the radio minister first, and demonstrated it to people in several lectures.
Unfortunately for him, a fire consumed his laboratory before he could make his discovery public.
A year later, Marconi invented his radio, but Tesla managed to register a patent in his name before him.
Tesla was convinced that his patents were safe and locked. He even told another engineer that he didn't mind Marconi continuing to work, as he was using 17 of his patents.
As a result of this (overblown, it turns out) confidence, Tesla neglected to sue Marconi for using the radio patent.
Marconi received financial and public support in the United States from Edison and Andrew Carnegie, two influential industrialists - perhaps as part of the war of currents that we will talk about later.
Suddenly, in 1904, the US Patent Office decided (perhaps under pressure from these industrialists) to transfer the patent for the radio to Marconi's name.
Tesla struggled with this decision, but in vain - he was not rich enough to fight the great Marconi company.
A few years later, as if to add insult to injury, Marconi won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the radio.
Only in 43, after Tesla's death, the court decided to return the stolen patent to him - perhaps because Marconi's company
sued the United States government for using the radio during World War I, and the United States government sought to resolve the issue
In this way.

alternating current and direct current

Tesla started thinking about alternating current, back when he was working in Paris - at the 'Edison Company', of all places.
Direct current, Tesla knew, had some significant drawbacks. Let us review them.
A basic property of electricity is its voltage. In the direct current method, high voltage cannot be converted to low voltage. We won't go into the technical considerations, but it's difficult, trust me.
The meaning arising from this fact is that the power plant is required to produce the same voltage that the customer receives.
Copper, from which the electrical cables are made, has a certain resistance. When a current flows through it, some of the electrical energy is wasted on heating the cable.
More current means more heating, more waste. In extreme cases the cable can heat up to the point of melting.
For those who like numbers, the loss according to the current squared times the resistance: which means that if the current doubles, the loss quadruples!
It was impossible to absorb too many energy losses following the heating of the copper: it is expensive. This phenomenon can be combated by creating cables
Copper is thicker, has lower resistance - but copper is very expensive.
The second solution to this problem is to keep cables short, to minimize the loss of energy during transmission. The power station, therefore, had to be
No more than three kilometers from the customer's house. This was good for Edison, of course, as more power plants were needed.
Also, since a suitable voltage level was needed for each purpose, there were special voltages for bulbs, motors, etc. - a lot more wires!
In several cases, people were killed when power poles loaded with snow fell on them, electrocuting them.
Tesla knew these shortcomings, and realized that the method to deal with them was the alternating current method.
What, then, is alternating current:
If in direct current the current moves in one direction, in alternating current it changes direction all the time - sometimes forward, sometimes backward.
This change of direction is done because the voltage on the cable is changed - remember that the negative electrons are always
are attracted to the positive voltage. Sometimes you put the positive voltage on one side of the cable, sometimes on the other side...
Alternating current has two excellent advantages:
Alternating current comes out of the factory at low voltage, like direct current - but it is easy to convert it to high voltage. Much easier than direct current.
What is the importance? The electric power, actually the energy that flows in the power line, is a product of current
and tension. This means - it is possible to transfer 4 watts (the unit of power) by a voltage of 2 volts and a current of 2 amperes (ampere is the unit of current),
But it is also possible to transfer the same 4 watts, the same energy, by a voltage of 4 volts and only 1 ampere.
Remember, that the losses on a copper line depend only on *current*, and not on voltage. Therefore in alternating current
Lose much less energy on heating the cable: raise the voltage to several tens of thousands of volts,
Then the current that flows is relatively little and there are not many losses. Hence, a lot of energy can be transferred on fairly thin copper wires.
At the customer's home, the high voltage is converted back to low voltage. Edison's direct current does not
Can do. This means that power stations are farther from the customer's house, and therefore fewer stations - hence it is cheaper to produce electricity.
Also, alternating current is particularly useful, Tesla discovered, for motors:
An AC motor works like this. A magnet in the presence of a magnetic field tries to align itself with it - a magnetic field has a direction, and a magnet has a positive pole and a negative pole, and it always strives to align them in the direction of the magnetic field.
The alternating current creates a magnetic field inside the motor, but this field is constantly changing due to the change in the direction of the current.
If you connect several separate power lines to the engine, and arrange them in the correct timing, it is possible
Make the motor shaft follow the continuously changing fields.
The idea of ​​connecting several alternating current lines to a motor (or other product) is called 'multi-phase'. So when you
Turning on the central mini air conditioner, think of Tesla who invented the three-phase electricity.

Tesla and Westinhouse

Tesla, as we mentioned, worked for the Edison company in Europe.
When he moved to the United States, his boss gave him a letter of recommendation for Edison himself. "I know two great people," he wrote, "one is you and the other before you."
At first, Tesla worked for Edison as a full-time engineer. But he was good, not just good, brilliant, and therefore progressed until he was put to solve the biggest problems.
Edison did not believe in Tesla's alternating current idea. He was an excellent practical inventor,
But alternating current electricity is hard to really understand without a mathematical background (which Edison didn't have, as his formal education was minimal), and Tesla was good at it. Edison thought
That Tesla's idea is good in theory, but not practical in reality.
Edison naturally sought to improve his engines. He promised Tesla fifty thousand dollars, a large amount of money (about a million dollars in today's terms)
If he manages to improve the company's engines. But even though Tesla worked day and night, and succeeded in the task - Edison did not keep his word, and did not pay the money. Edison told Tessel: 'You don't understand the American sense of humor.'
Tesla didn't even get a raise of a few dollars, so he resigned.
His difficult financial situation forced him to work in menial jobs, to the point of digging ditches - for the Edison company, ironically. Tesla harbored a deep grudge against Edison for this.

Over time, Tesla filed seven patents covering the entire alternating current electricity cycle, from production to home lighting.
After several unsuccessful attempts to start a company with his AC-current idea, an industrialist named Georg Westinhaus heard about AC-current.
George Westinhouse was himself a prolific inventor from a very young age. Already at the age of 19 he held the first patent for a type of engine.
When he was 22 years old, he was involved in a near train accident - the train barely braked in front of a block on the tracks.
Following this near-accident, he invented the 'air brake' - a device that uses the tremendous force of compressed air to brake the train.
He incorporated the invention into an automatic braking device, and this invention advanced the railroad industry and made it safer, and subsequently the entire American industry.
The company he founded - 'Westinhaus' - became an industrial powerhouse - electricity, gas, ovens, refrigerators, sewing machines, washing machines, tumble dryers, televisions, lamps, ventilators, air conditioners, irons, mixers, flashlights, tossers, percolators, radios, radio tapes …even generators for ships.
Westinhouse believed in the idea of ​​alternating current, and thought it was an excellent solution to the problem of power transmission over long distances. He bought the patents from Tesla for about sixty thousand dollars.

Cruel propaganda

Backed by the wealthy Westinhouse, Tesla began pushing the idea of ​​alternating current.
Soon a war began between Tesla and Edison, head to head, over the implementation of the method for the transmission of electricity
in the American economy.
Edison began a very brutal propaganda battle, trying to
To influence the public to reject the exchange current and accept the current
straight. He had a great influence, we will remember, and the public knew him well thanks to inventions such as the light bulb and the phonograph.
The direction that Edison turned to was 'the danger from alternating current': he tried to create in the public a fear of the high voltage
which are reached by wires from the power plant. he said-
"Direct current is like a big quiet river, while alternating current is like a raging river."
Edison even hired a professor named Harold Brown, so that he would make demonstrations that would prove how dangerous the alternating current method is.
These demonstrations included the electrification of dogs and cats, cattle and horses.
The height of cruelty was the execution of the elephant 'Topsy' - the circus elephant killed three people (one was an evil trainer, who tried to feed her burning cigarettes), and Edison proposed to kill her with alternating current. He even filmed the execution.
But without a doubt the height of cynicism in this war, was the following fact, that it was absolutely unbelievable. Harold took a Westinhouse generator, and with its help he invented the electric chair.
His intention here was to link in the public's mind the dangerous electricity of the execution and the electricity in the house. The first chosen to try the new throne was a murderer named William Kemler. But because it was only an initial attempt, Kemler did not die smoothly, but "horribly, much worse than hanging," as the execution was described. And Steinhaus said it would have been better if they had used an axe. Edison tried to coin the phrase 'Westinhousing', as a synonym for execution by electric chair.

What is the truth, then? Who is more dangerous?
The truth is that both are dangerous. Alternating current is dangerous because electrocution can cause heart palpitations, and direct current electrocution can lock the muscles on the conductor. In any case, they both pass through lines with a sufficiently dangerous voltage level: in simple numbers: a person's resistance is about 1000 ohms. According to Ohm's law, one of the basic laws in electrical theory, a voltage of 200 volts through such a resistance creates a current of two hundred milliamperes. Thirty milliamps may be enough to kill a grown man.

The World's Fair

A turning point in the war of the currents occurred at the World's Fair in Chicago, 1893. The World's Fair has always been a very influential exhibition in the world of technology, and all the who's who of science and engineering, as well as influential politicians, would come to it. Westinhouse competed against Edison's General Electric in the tender for the right to light the fair with XNUMX light bulbs (this was the main innovation of the exhibition).
GE gave an offer of one million dollars, with most of the money directed to the construction of the thick copper cable network. Westinhaus, with alternating current, did not need so much copper, and gave an offer half as cheap. She won, of course, and it was the president who pressed the start button and lit up the entire exhibit with Tesla's machines. When people saw Tesla's small and efficient generators and motors compared to Edison's large and heavy cables, they were convinced.

The next turning point was the utilization of Niagara Falls to produce electricity - an ancient dream of the Americans, who have been trying to take advantage of this natural wonder for many years. The administration established a special committee to examine ways to utilize Niagara Falls for energy production. There were many suggestions - most of them impractical, such as using water to push compressed air, and even ideas that involved using buckets and ropes. The committee rejected them all, of course.
Edison's proposal to operate a direct current generator using the power of the blower faced that of Westinhouse. Lord Kelvin, the celebrated British physicist, was the chairman of the committee. At first he was opposed to the idea of ​​the exchange stream, but after the world fair he changed his mind - and pushed Westinhaus to win the tender.
The work lasted five difficult years, mainly for the financiers - among them some of the richest people in the United States: Rothschild, Morgan, Astor - but at the end of it, the electricity flowed in abundance, lighting up a large part of the East Coast of the United States, and also the Broadway apartments in New York, where the magnificent lighting there became to the trademark of the street.
the end of the war

The Niagara Falls project marked the end of the current war, which was decided in favor of the alternating current. The struggle impoverished Westinhouse, and the company was in danger of collapse. In his regret, Westinhaus asked Tesla to be released from the economic contract between them, and it agreed. Tesla tore the agreement to shreds, to some extent.
He did save Westinhouse's company, but he created enormous financial difficulties for himself, which continued with him for the following projects as well. In the end, he died poor and heavily in debt. Edison, for his part, always regretted his choice of direct current. His company, General Electric, decided to quickly move to Tesla's side, and survived its difficult period. Tesla and Edison did not receive a Nobel Prize: perhaps because the members of the prize committee knew that neither of them would agree to receive the prize, if the other received it too...
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