Because of his advocation for the use of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution, Thomas Edison developed a bitter rivalry with which other genius who advocated alternating current (AC)?
"enough to overwhelm the enormous technical and economic advantages of alternating current which eventually won out. The AC power system used today developed rapidly, backed by industrialists such as George Westinghouse with Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Galileo Ferraris, Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, Lucien Gaulard, John Dixon Gibbs, Carl Wilhelm Siemens, William Stanley, Jr., Nikola Tesla, and others contributed to this field. While high-voltage direct current (HVDC) is increasingly being used to transmit large quantities of electricity over long distances or to connect adjacent asynchronous power systems, the bulk of electricity generation, transmission, distribution and retailing takes place using alternating current. The business"
"be known as the War of Currents, a competition between Thomas Edison's direct current power system and George Westinghouse's alternating current based system. The two companies had been competing commercially since 1886 and a series of events had turned it into an all-out media war in 1888. The committee head, neurologist Frederick Peterson, enlisted the services of Harold P. Brown as a consultant. Brown had been on his own crusade against alternating current after the shoddy installation of pole-mounted AC arc lighting lines in New York City had caused several deaths in early 1888. Peterson had been an assistant at"
"the patented direct current system. In the spring of 1888, a media furor arose over a series of deaths caused by pole-mounted high-voltage AC lines in New York City and around the country, attributed to the greed and callousness of the local AC-based lighting companies. In June of that year a New York electrical engineer named Harold P. Brown came to prominence as an opponent of the use of alternating current, claiming the AC-based lighting companies were putting the public at risk using high-voltages and installing it in a slipshod manner. Brown's campaign immediately gained the assistance of Edison and"
"Electric Corporation"". The Westinghouse company installed 30 more AC-lighting systems within a year and by the end of 1887 it had 68 alternating current power stations to Edison's 121 DC-based stations. This competition with Edison led in the late 1880s to what has been called the ""War of Currents"" with Thomas Edison and his company joining in with a spreading public perception that the high voltages used in AC distribution were unsafe. Edison even suggested a Westinghouse AC generator be used in the State of New York's new electric chair. Westinghouse also had to deal with an AC rival, the"
"AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to make sure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse AC generator. Thomas Edison's staunch anti-AC tactics were not sitting well with his own stockholders. By the early 1890s, Edison's company was generating much smaller profits than its AC rivals, and the War of Currents would come to an end in 1892 with Edison forced out of controlling his own company. That year, the financier J.P. Morgan engineered a merger of Edison General Electric with Thomson-Houston that put the board of Thomson-Houston in charge of the new company called General Electric. General"
"He worked for Siemens Brothers at Charlton, London, and in 1882 he set up shop in London designing various electrical devices as the firm Ferranti, Thompson and Ince. In the late 1880s, there was a debate within the industry about the transmission of electrical power, known as the War of the Currents. Thomas Edison supported a direct current (DC) based system, largely due to his holding many key patents and having set up some power plants supplying DC power. The rival Westinghouse Electric Corporation supported an alternating current (AC) system. Ferranti bet on AC early on, and was one of"
"losing market share to Westinghouse, who had built 68 AC-based power stations to Edison's 121 DC-based stations. To make matters worse for Edison, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts (another AC-based competitor) built 22 power stations. Parallel to expanding competition between Edison and the AC companies was rising public furor over a series of deaths in the spring of 1888 caused by pole mounted high voltage alternating current lines. This turned into a media frenzy against high voltage alternating current and the seemingly greedy and callous lighting companies that used it. Edison took advantage of the public perception of"
"execution would become mixed up with the war of currents. As part of their fact-finding, the commission sent out surveys to hundreds of experts on law and medicine, seeking their opinions, as well as contacting electrical experts, including Elihu Thomson and Thomas Edison. In late 1887, when death penalty commission member Southwick contacted Edison, the inventor stated he was against capital punishment and wanted nothing to do with the matter. After further prompting, Edison hit out at his chief electric power competitor, George Westinghouse, in what may have been the opening salvo in the war of currents, stating in a"
"with the development of functional transformers that allowed the AC voltage to be ""stepped up"" to much higher transmission voltages and then dropped down to a lower end user voltage. With much cheaper transmission costs and the greater economies of scale of having large generating plants supply whole cities and regions, the use of AC spread rapidly. In the US the competition between direct current and alternating current took a personal turn in the late 1880s in the form of a ""War of Currents"" when Thomas Edison started attacking George Westinghouse and his development of the first US AC transformer"
"as the War of Currents. Brown/Edison's lobbying in state legislatures went nowhere and the Edison company continued to lose market share and profitability to the AC based companies. In 1892 the ""war"" ended with Thomas Edison losing any remaining control of his own company when it was merged with Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to form General Electric, creating a company that controlled three quarters of the US electrical business. Westinghouse's lead in AC development would allow them to win a contract in 1893 to build an AC based power station at the Niagara Falls but the"
"Buffalo, New York dentist Alfred Southwick which, after nine years of development and legislation, was ready for use. Kemmler's lawyers appealed, arguing that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment. The attempt to carry out Kemmler's execution was pulled into the AC/DC ""war of currents"" between George Westinghouse, the largest supplier of alternating current equipment, and Thomas Edison, whose company ran its equipment on direct current. The alternating current that powered the electric chair (a current standard adopted by a committee after a demonstration performed at Edison's laboratory by anti-AC activist Harold P. Brown showing AC's lethality) was supplied by a"
"War of the currents The war of the currents (sometimes called battle of the currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It included commercial competition, a debate over electrical safety, and a media/propaganda campaign that grew out of it, with the main players being the direct current (DC)–based Edison Electric Light Company and the alternating current (AC)–based Westinghouse Electric Company. It took place during the introduction and rapid expansion of the alternating current standard (already in use and advocated by several US and European companies)"
"apparatus. Patent lawsuits were still hampering both companies and bleeding off cash, so in 1896, J. P. Morgan engineered a patent sharing agreement between the two companies that remained in force for 11 years. In 1897 Edison sold his remaining stock in Edison Electric Illuminating of New York to finance his iron ore refining prototype plant. In 1908 Edison said to George Stanley, son of AC transformer inventor William Stanley, Jr., """"Tell your father I was wrong"""", probably admitting he had underestimated the developmental potential of alternating current. The International Electro-Technical Exhibition of 1891, in Frankfurt, Germany, featured the long"
"of what has been called the War of the currents between DC and AC. Westinghouse initially did not put in a bid to power the Fair but agreed to be the contractor for a local Chicago company that put in a low bid of US$510,000 to supply an alternating current based system. Edison General Electric, which at the time was merging with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric, put in a US$1,720,000 bid to power the Fair and its planned 93,000 incandescent lamps with direct current. After the Fair committee went over both proposals, Edison General Electric re-bid"
"direct current and alternating current arc lighting systems. This time period also saw the development of the first electric power utility designed for indoor use. The new system by inventor Thomas Edison was designed to function similar to gas lighting. For reasons of safety and simplicity it used direct current (DC) at a relatively low 110 volts to light incandescent light bulbs. Voltage in wires steadily declines as distance increases, and at this low voltage power plants needed to be within about of the lamps. This voltage drop problem made DC distribution relatively expensive and gas lighting retained widespread usage"
"transformer designs by Károly Zipernowsky, Ottó Bláthy and Miksa Déri (later called ZBD transformers), Lucien Gaulard, John Dixon Gibbs and William Stanley, Jr.. Practical AC motor designs including induction motors were independently invented by Galileo Ferraris and Nikola Tesla and further developed into a practical three-phase form by Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky and Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown. Charles Steinmetz and Oliver Heaviside contributed to the theoretical basis of alternating current engineering. The spread in the use of AC set off in the United States what has been called the ""War of Currents"" between a George Westinghouse backed AC system and a Thomas"
"door, but comes right into the house, and perhaps as you are closing a door or turning on the gas you are killed""."" Harold Brown's reputation was rehabilitated almost overnight with newspapers and magazines seeking his opinion and reporters following him around New York City where he measured how much current was leaking from AC power lines. At the peak of the war of currents, Edison himself joined the public debate for the first time, denounced AC current in a November 1889 article in the ""North American Review"" titled ""The Dangers of Electric Lighting"". Edison put forward the view that"
"AC as dangerous, and joined with self-styled New York anti-AC crusader Harold P. Brown in a propaganda campaign, aiding Brown in the public electrocution of animals with AC, and supported legislation to control and severely limit AC installations and voltages (to the point of making it an ineffective power delivery system) in what was now being referred to as a ""battle of currents"". The development of the electric chair was used in an attempt to portray AC as having a greater lethal potential than DC and smear Westinghouse at the same time via Edison colluding with Brown and Westinghouse's chief"
"Edison's DC system was designed to supply. The rapid spread of AC and haphazard instillation of power lines, especially in the city of New York, led to a series of deaths attributed to high voltage AC and an eventual media backlash against the current. Starting in 1888 the Edison company played up the dangers of AC power in their literature and assisted self-appointed anti-AC crusader Harold P. Brown in a parallel goal to limit, to the point of ineffectiveness, the voltages in AC power systems, a market then dominated by Westinghouse Electric. This series of events came to be known"
"of AC. Based on these results the Medico-Legal Society recommended the use of 1000-1500 volts of alternating current for executions and newspapers noted the AC used was half the voltage used in the power lines over the streets of American cities. Westinghouse criticized this test as a skewed self-serving demonstration by Brown, who was again accused of being in the employ of Edison. Brown refuted the claims and even challenged Westinghouse to an electrical ""duel,"" with Brown agreeing to be shocked by ever increasing amounts of DC power if Westinghouse would submit himself to the same amount of increasing AC"
"[AC] from spending a larger sum of money for the heavier copper wires which are required by the safe incandescent systems. That is, the public must submit to constant danger from sudden death, in order that a corporation may pay a little larger dividend. His crusade brought him to the attention of inventor Thomas Edison who was becoming engaged in a propaganda campaign against alternating current companies including Westinghouse Electric Company in what would come to be called the War of currents. Edison lent Brown the uses of his West Orange, New Jersey laboratory to prove his claims against alternating"
"to electric utilities starting to adopting alternating current, up till then used primarily in arc lighting systems, as a distribution standard for outdoor and indoor lighting (eventually replacing direct current for such purposes). In the US there was a rivalry, primarily between a Westinghouse AC and the Edison DC system known as the ""War of Currents"". ""By the mid-1890s the four ""Maxwell equations"" were recognized as the foundation of one of the strongest and most successful theories in all of physics; they had taken their place as companions, even rivals, to Newton's laws of mechanics. The equations were by then"
"Edison Electric Light treasurer Francis S. Hastings who came up with the idea of using Brown and several New York physicians to attack Westinghouse and the other AC companies in retaliation for what Hastings thought were unscrupulous bids by Westinghouse for lighting contracts in Denver and Minneapolis. Hasting brought Brown and Edison together and was in continual contact with Brown. Edison Electric seemed to be footing the bill for some of Brown's publications on the dangers of AC. In addition, Thomas Edison himself sent a letter to the city government of Scranton, Pennsylvania recommending Brown as an expert on the"
"controlling the company. By 1889 Edison's Electric's own subsidiaries were lobbying to add AC power transmission to their systems and in October 1890 Edison Machine Works began developing AC-based equipment. With Thomas Edison no longer involved with Edison General Electric, the war of currents came to a close with a financial merger. Edison president Henry Villard, who had engineered the merger that formed Edison General Electric, was continually working on the idea of merging that company with Thomson-Houston or Westinghouse. He saw a real opportunity in 1891. The market was in a general downturn causing cash shortages for all the"
"with Brooklyn riders choosing to use the new subway. The subway system began during the War of Currents when Thomas Edison and his opponent, George Westinghouse, struggled over acceptance of direct current or alternating current as the standard way to deliver electricity. Alternating current became the standard for non-railroad purposes, but New York City Subway adopted direct current as more suitable for urban railroad purposes. The companies built their own power stations to generate their DC. To this day, the New York City Transit Authority converts alternating current to 600V DC third rail to power the trains, as do most"
"companies that existed 5 years before had merged down to two; General Electric and Westinghouse. The war of currents came to an end and this merger of the Edison company, along with its lighting patents, and the Thomson-Houston, with its AC patents, created a company that controlled three quarters of the US electrical business. From this point on General Electric and Westinghouse were both marketing alternating current systems. Edison put on a brave face noting to the media how his stock had gained value in the deal but privately he was bitter that his company and all of his patents"
"survived shocks from AC at voltages up to 1000 volts and argued that DC was the more dangerous of the two. Brown, determined to prove alternating current was more dangerous than direct current, at some point contacted Thomas Edison to see if he could make use of equipment to conduct experiments. Edison immediately offered to assist Brown in his crusade against AC companies. Before long, Brown was loaned space and equipment at Edison's West Orange, New Jersey laboratory, as well as laboratory assistant Arthur Kennelly. Brown paid local children to collect stray dogs off the street for his experiments with"
"generators to supply the current, apparently with the help of the Edison company and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, Thomson-Houston. Thomson-Houston arranged to acquire three Westinghouse AC generators by replacing them with new Thomson-Houston AC generators and Edison Electric probably put up the money to acquire them for Brown. Thomson-Houston president Charles Coffin had at least two reasons for obtaining the Westinghouse generators; he did not want his company's equipment to be associated with the death penalty and he wanted to use one to prove a point, paying Brown to set up a public efficiency test to show that Westinghouse's sales"
"operate. Edison's direct current generation dominated the initial years of indoor commercial and residential electric lighting and electric power distribution. However, DC transmission was hampered by the difficulty in changing voltages between industrial generation and residential/commercial consumption and the low voltages used suffered from poor transmission efficiency. The mid 1880s saw the introduction of the transformer, allowing alternating current to be transmitted at high voltage long distances with greater efficiency and then ""stepped down"" to supply commercial and domestic indoor lighting, resulting in AC going from being the outdoor ""arc lighting current"" to taking over the domestic lighting utility market"
"chair, and colluding with Brown and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to make sure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse AC generator. This was a period of industrial consolidation and by 1890 over a dozen electric companies had merged down to three; Edison (now Edison General Electric), Thomson-Houston, and Westinghouse. By the early 1890s the latter two were generating profits far in advance of the DC-based Edison company. During this period Thomas Edison left the electric power business and the company he founded was beginning to add AC technology to its system. Edison Electric's"
"vs gas lighting to ""death by wire"" incidents, with each new report seeming to fan public resentment against high voltage AC and the dangerously tangled overhead electrical wires in the city. At this point an electrical engineer named Harold P. Brown, who at that time seemed to have no connection to the Edison company, sent a June 5, 1888 letter to the editor of the ""New York Post"" claiming the root of the problem was the alternating current (AC) system being used. Brown argued that the AC system was inherently dangerous and ""damnable"" and asked why the ""public must submit"
"end of a decade that saw the rapid expansion in the use of alternating current as a power transmission format. During this period Westinghouse was in stiff competition with other AC companies as well with Thomas Edison's direct current based Edison Electric Company. A propaganda campaign/""War of Currents"" had even broken out between Westinghouse and Edison. Westinghouse Electric looked on the Ames project as a great way to demonstrate the capability of the AC system they had been developing since they installed their first AC transformer based lighting systems in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in March 1886. The 1891 Ames Hydroelectric"
"and its eventual adoption over the direct current distribution system. Three aspects have been conflated into the ""war"": open competition involving large electric companies and a format war involving their developing systems, a general fear in the public's mind of death by accidental electrocution from high voltage AC leading to a debate over its safety and regulation, and the debate and behind-the-scene maneuvers associated with the introduction of the electric chair. The introduction of large scale outdoor arc lighting systems in the mid- to late-1870s, some of them powered by high-voltage alternating current, was followed in 1882 by Thomas Edison's"