The $50,000 Wager
The story goes that when Thomas Edison’s Serbian-born employee Nikola Tesla told his boss that he could make several fixes to his direct current power generators, Edison offered him a healthy reward — $50,000 — if he was successful. In a few months, Tesla finished the project and asked for his payment. Apparently Edison laughed Tesla off and instead offered him a $10 a week raise. Tesla became indignant and immediately resigned, opting to dig ditches instead of continue working for Edison. And that’s about where the story of this feud between supercharged egos begins.
It’s ironic that many people regard Thomas Edison as the father of modern electricity, because in actuality he’s more like the father of archaic electricity whereas Tesla basically engineered electric power as we know and use it today.
Thomas Edison owned patents for the dominant model of electric power distribution in the United States, which used a direct current (DC). Another model, which used alternating currents (AC), had been developed in Europe, but it lacked the practicality of Edison’s system, especially where meters — used to determine consumption volume and price — were concerned. Eventually Tesla developed a model that surpassed Edison’s in terms of practicality. This was mainly because Tesla’s model allowed electricity to be distributed over long distances without as much transmission loss, making it possible for one central power generator to provide electricity to a broad surrounding area.
The Electric Elephant
Edison’s direct current patents were being used by General Electric, while Tesla’s AC model had been co-opted by Westinghouse Electric, owned by entrepreneur George Westinghouse. As the competing systems fought for contracts, Edison began a smear campaign designed to cause widespread public mistrust of the alternating current system. Edison staged a series of public executions of animals, including an elephant, using alternating current electricity. In reality, the risk of being shocked to death by alternating current power was no greater than with a direct current. Edison was merely looking out for his own bottom line.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a superior idea or product has lost out because of a marketing campaign, but Tesla was not destined to lose, at least not yet.
The beginning of the end for direct current electricity in the US came after the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company awarded a contract for conduction of its hydroelectric facility to Westinghouse Electric, which used alternating current electricity to harness the power from the falls. AC had beaten DC definitively, and the company Edison worked for, General Electric, developed its own AC patents despite Edison’s objections.
Direct Current Avenged
It should be noted that no small number of household devices actually run on DC electricity, and therefore must convert alternating current energy in order to function. You know that little box part of your laptop charger that gets boiling-lava-hot when it’s plugged in? The function of that mechanism is to convert power from the alternating current outlet into a direct current which charges your battery. And the heat comes from energy being lost in the conversion. It’s a hopelessly inefficient process that sometimes has to happen on a large scale, like at data centers housing numerous computer servers. The economic strain of that lost energy could contribute to a rise in DC electricity. But let’s not get carried away and act like this was Edison’s plan all along. If he could’ve found a way to make DC energy advantageous in his day, he would have.
Tesla may not have cared as much about money as Edison did, but both inventors possessed egos that simply wouldn’t tolerate the other’s. This clash of personalities may be at the root of every great creative rivalry in history — it certainly played a part in this one. Could Edison and Tesla have flourished as partners in another Universe, using Edison’s entrepreneurial wherewithal and Tesla’s unbridled creative genius? Probably not. It isn’t our place to take sides, and certainly both of these men have complicated legacies, but only one of them killed an elephant for the sake of propaganda.
Read More
Featured Gallery
Your Thoughts
- Do you or have you ever had a creative nemesis? Do you think that such rivalries can contribute to increased creativity, or is it damaging to spend time worrying about “topping” someone else?
- Do you think the world will ever fully embrace wind and solar power, etc., or make recycling a serious concern in our lives? Is our collective psychology such that we can’t value preservation of precious things — like even our own planet?
- Do you think great minds can work together to solve our great problems, or are the minds of visionaries like the bodies of athletes — always needing to compete more than complement?
