THE CURRENT WAR

   

     I admit that's an intentionally devious title.  It's "current" as in electrical current, not "current" as in going-on-right-now.  I'm trying to ease back into blogging after a year's absence, and I'm not nearly ready to talk about what's going on in the world, right now.  So instead I'm going to write about a war I've been reading about lately that took place toward the end of the 19th century.  No battlegrounds, no military maneuvers, no firearms, but it was a war all the same, and there were deaths that resulted from it.
     I just learned today, after I'd almost finished writing this post, that the Weinstein Company had shot a film called THE CURRENT WAR on this very same subject, and that it was supposed to have been released toward the end of 2017.  But once the movie industry began actually acknowledging in public what it seems everyone in Hollywood had known for decades about Weinstein but hadn't had the guts to do anything about, it was decided by studio honchos that time needed to pass for the Weinstein taint to dissipate.  So now THE CURRENT WAR isn't expected to be released until December 2018.  But you might not want to wait that long to learn about the topic, and besides, the movie reportedly isn't very good anyway despite its Benedict Cumberbach star power.  So I, who know very little about science, am going to try to explain things to you in the hopes that you know even less than I do and will find this subject as interesting as I do.
     As we all learned in school, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.  Except that he didn't.  Edison invented a light bulb - the first one that really worked without sooner or later heating itself up to the point at which it exploded.  But he wasn't the first person to tinker with the idea of lighting homes and businesses through the power of electricity.
     Joseph Swan, an Englishman, patented a light bulb made of a heated carbon rod enclosed in a vacuum tube in 1878.  When Edison tried to patent a light bulb with a carbonized cotton filament the following year, Swan sued him successfully for patent infringement, and Edison decided his best move would be to join forces with Swan.  The two went into business together for a short time, although Edison soon went out on his own.
     Edison had started his electrical career working with telegraph systems, which ran on direct current (DC) - current that ran from one terminal to another.  So DC current was Edison's natural choice when he began experimenting with electrical lighting.  This worked fine when the wiring was run over short distances, but not so fine when longer distances were required.  And that's where Edison's fatal flaw came in: he was so stubborn that he refused, then and for the rest of his life, to even consider the possibility that some other form of current might be able to do the job just as well and, in some regards, even better.  And that's why Edison - a man who loved winning at least as much as he loved inventing - ended up (SPOILER!!) losing the current war.
     In 1880 Edison installed the world's first electric lighting system.  It was done on a very small scale; the first beneficiary was a steamship.  Other gradually larger individual projects followed until in 1882 he chose Manhattan as the site of  his first electrical power station, and began wiring up the homes of wealthy New Yorkers.

     Meanwhile, a young Serbian who had studied the brand-new field of electrical engineering in Europe had found his way to a job with the Edison Company's Paris branch.  When he was offered a transfer to Edison's New York factory, Nikola Tesla was thrilled at the chance to work with The Great Man himself.  But what neither Edison nor anyone else employed by him in New York knew was that Tesla had already invented - in his head, but not in a tangible model - a motor that would run on alternating current (AC).

     Tesla was, by all accounts, somewhere on the autism spectrum.  He worked and thought alone; ideas came to him in sudden bursts of brilliance.  He expected to be compensated for them, but he had no real interest in acquiring money or power (and probably wouldn't have known how even if he had been interested).  Tesla's life was a story of rags to riches and then back to rags again.  He never married or had any intimate relationships.  He didn't last long with the Edison Company, but he stayed in New York for the rest of his life, living alone in a series of hotels.  For a while New York society found his particular combination of genius and lack of social skills to be adorable and he was wined and dined relentlessly, but it wasn't long before the novelty wore off.  The glitterati got bored and dropped him.  The man once celebrated as "The Wizard of Physics" and "Greater Even than Edison" died poor and alone in a hotel room, where his body was discovered by a maid.  But I'm getting ahead of my story.
     The difference between AC and DC was that inside an AC-powered motor the electrical field would rotate and the resulting current would constantly be reversing course every fraction of a second.  AC current produced higher voltages than DC; on the one hand, this meant that it could be transmitted over longer distances, but on the other hand, the high voltages caused many people (including Edison) to regard AC current as too dangerous to be of practical use.
     And here's where George Westinghouse, the third leg of this triangle, came in.  Westinghouse, an affluent inventor and businessman, was willing to take a risk on AC current, and he had the deep pockets to set Tesla's ideas into motion.  In fact, Westinghouse won the contract to illuminate the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and it therefore featured AC current sparked by huge generators and distributed throughout the fairgrounds via wires.  For a week, Tesla personally put on seemingly magical public demonstrations, including passing currents of enormous voltage through his own body with no ill effects.  The Electricity Pavilion was the undisputed showstopper at the Fair.

     But no sooner did Westinghouse enter the fray than Edison began a two-pronged attack against him: publishing pamphlets warning the public that AC current was deadly, while also suing him for patent infringement.  When those tactics didn't stop Westinghouse, Edison secretly teamed up with a self-educated electrical engineer named Harold Brown.  Brown's novel idea for proving that AC was deadly was to provide a series of public demonstrations in which he used AC current to kill animals by electrocution.  This enterprise was every bit as ghastly as it sounds but, of course, it caught the public's attention.  Most of the victims of the killings carried out in the name of the current war were harmless dogs, calves and horses.

      But Edison and Brown still weren't satisfied.  Electrocuting animals was for them only the means to an end: their real goal was killing off not animals, but the public demand for AC current once and for all.
     They saw their golden opportunity in 1888, when the New York legislature declared that from now on, capital punishment in that state would be applied via a very new invention: the electric chair.  And somehow (Edison had very powerful New York connections) it turned out that the only electrical mechanism that could be applied was AC current.
     William Kemmler had killed his wife with an axe, confessed, and displayed no remorse.  In May of 1889 he was the first person to be sentenced to death under New York's new Electrical Execution Act, and Kemmler was fine with that.  In his opinion, the sooner the better.  But he had to wait another year until the constitutionality of the Act worked its way up enough through the court system for the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that electrocution didn't qualify as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.  The execution was allowed to proceed.
     One morning in August of 1890 Kemmler was placed in a chair in the prison basement and electrodes were attached to his body.  The current was turned on, Kemmler's body became rigid, and the current was turned off again.  But while the chair's inventor was still congratulating himself to all those present on his wonderful new apparatus, spectators began to notice something: Kemmler wasn't dead.  He wasn't exactly alive either; he was in some horrible state between the two.  The current was hastily turned back on, and soon a terrible stench of burning filled the room.  Kemmler finally died on the second try, but no one could deny that he had endured agony during the two-step process.  Tesla later wrote that Kemmler had been "roasted alive."  The New York Times said in an article entitled "Far Worse Than Hanging:"  "Probably no convicted murderer of modern times has been made to suffer as Kemmler suffered."
     Finally the general public was nauseated enough by the spectacle of electrocuting living creatures to climb off the never-AC bandwagon; after all, AC current couldn't even properly kill someone when it tried.  Soon most electrical engineers acknowledged that DC and AC both offered their own advantages.  Anyway, by that point transformers and converters had become commonplace; voltage could effortlessly be stepped up or down, and AC converted to DC and vice versa.  The two systems worked best in tandem.  When Edison refused to accept this practical reality, the big money men of New York, principally J. P. Morgan, got together and ousted Edison from his own company, Edison General Electric.  They even removed his name from it, and the General Electric company was born.  Now, in 21st-century America, about 80% of our electrical power grid runs on AC.
     Edison nursed his wounds for a while, but he was by then a very wealthy man with an estate in West Orange, New Jersey (where I live!!) and a summer home in Florida.  He had a stableful of electrical engineers who, through Edison's methodical trial-and-error process, could eventually figure out how to do almost anything with electricity.  He got over losing the current war and moved on to the next big thing: motion pictures.

                                            Edison's "Black Maria" building, West Orange, N.J.