The Industrial Revolution beginning around 1800 began with steam power fueled by coal.1900 began the second century of the Industrial Revolution, electricity powering by coal, hydro, petroleum, and ultimately wind and solar.
American corporate power was quick to step into this war of the “Electric Currents.” Thomas Edison and his technology of DC (direct current) would stop at nothing to dominate the industry where Westinghouse and Tesla’s new and experimental AC (alternating current) was the only feasible solution.
American business giants battled to dominate and control a world wide technology of the Empires of Light and power distribution.
This is a real history making story, well done, fascinating and fast moving.
Excerpts:
1888, Thomas Edison was no longer content to vent his rancor with secret attacks. Using the vehicle of the Edison Electric Light Company, he lashed out publicly, issuing what surely stands as Americ’s longest and most splenetic howl of corporate outrage. The eighty-four-page Edison diatribe, jacketed in angry scarlet and emblazoned with the title WARNING!, served as the official public salvo in one of the most unusual and caustic battles in American corporate history. Edison, with his DC system, was making his first open attack against Westinghouse and AC in the War of the Electric Currents.
Assumed that the electrical future was securely his, with all its glory and potential for riches, suddenly saw the famously tough, reckless, and industrially wealthy Westinghouse boldly swooping in from Pittsburgh to steal away his hard-earned prize. Edison would not sit back quietly and let what he saw as a dangerous system imperil not just his company, but the whole marvelous field of electricity.
Englishman H. G. Wells, science fiction writer turned social observer: These dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel pit into which one descends has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible forces in their sleep”. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket”. All these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that”. I fell into a daydream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used by them.”
Tesla and his helpers turned out all the necessary components for three complete AC systems, single-phase alternating current, two-phase, and three-phase. He designed and built copper and iron models for each system, a dynamo (without the commutator!)
Decades ahead of his time
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