Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison by Michael Daly

Author:Michael Daly [Daly, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography, History, Non-Fiction, Purchases - Ebookoid
ISBN: 9780802146052
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2014-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Another War Begins

Even as the torchlight parade down Broadway signaled the end of the war between Forepaugh and Barnum, the electric lights proliferating in the city and far beyond were marking the start of a struggle between two other would-be giants, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.

“The struggle for the control of the electric light and power business has never been exceeded in bitterness by any of the historical commercial controversies of a former day,” Westinghouse would later say.

What would come to be called the War of Currents was for supremacy in implementing the modern marvel that now blazed not only along the Great White Way and in the mansions and offices of tycoons, but in theaters and restaurants and department stores and arenas. The ultimate outcome would add a final twist to the story of the crooked-tailed elephant presently traveling with a circus that did not even bill itself as the greatest.

In this new war, Edison was already established as one of the indisputably greatest and seemed the prohibitive favorite to prevail. He may not have actually been the father of the electric light, but he had created the most commercially viable bulb, as well as the first central power plant and the first extensive lighting system. He seemed on the way to an all-but-certain monopoly.

But Edison insisted on using only direct current, or DC, rather than alternating current, or AC. The most fundamental difference between the two is that direct current travels in only one direction, whereas alternating current continually reverses direction. The practical difference is that DC cannot easily be transmitted much farther than the square mile eventually serviced by his first plant on Pearl Street. A city using DC would require a generating plant in every neighborhood. Rural folks would be generally out of luck unless they could afford their own private plant.

Alternating current has no such limitations and can be transmitted over considerable distances economically, but Edison had been using direct current in all his systems. Either he truly believed direct current was superior or he was not about to admit that the great Wizard had been wrong. He could have been the personification of direct current, seemingly incapable by his very nature to change direction. He resisted any suggestion that he even consider switching to alternating current. He dismissed out of hand the early efforts of a would-be competitor who recognized alternating current’s potential.

“None of his plans worry me in the least,” Edison declared in 1886.

Edison saw himself in a far grander struggle with the divine, as evidenced when a lightning storm swept past his headquarters, suddenly illuminating his office.

“That’s the opposition!” he exclaimed to Tate, his private secretary.

The merely mortal challenger was Westinghouse, who had started out as an inventor, creating the railroad air brake, without which circus train wrecks would have been even more numerous and severe. Westinghouse had gone on to become more of an entrepreneur and had a particular interest in electricity, no doubt stoked when he paid a visit to Edison’s laboratory with an eye toward having a lighting system installed in his mansion.

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