Questions about Tesla

[Acme]

One could argue that Tesla's alternating current placed us all at the mercy of utility companies we may or may not have control over. I've often wondered how our society would have developed if personal direct current power sources had been chosen instead. Would single home/neighborhood generators have led us more quickly to alternative energy sources like solar? Imagine thinking about your energy not in terms of a grid, but more as a system piece like your furnace, a major part of your house that needs occasional maintenance, perhaps replacement every decade or two.

Edison certainly pushed DC as something of a 'system piece like your furnace', but not for any altruistic or individual security motive. He simply wanted to be the supplier of the multitude of DC generators that would be required and so rake in the dough ray ME. Edison conspired in numerous public demonstrations wherein animals were electrocuted using AC in order to scare the public off Westinghouse and Tesla's AC system.

War of Currents

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The introduction of large scale outdoor arc lighting systems in the mid to late 1870s,[3][4] some of them powered by high-voltage alternating current, was followed in 1882 by Thomas Edison's low voltage DC electric distribution "utility" designed for indoor business and residential use as an alternative to gas and oil-based lighting. In 1886 George Westinghouse began building an alternating current system that used a transformer to step up voltage for long-distance transmission and then stepped it back down for indoor lighting, a more efficient and less expensive system that directly competed for the market the Edison system was designed to serve. As many other electric companies joined in and the use of AC spread rapidly, Edison's company made claims in early 1888 that alternating current was hazardous and inferior to 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 his company, aiding Brown in his public electrocution of animals with AC trying to a claim that AC was more dangerous than DC. Historians noted, and documents from the period seem to show, that there grew to be collusion between the Edison company and Brown in their parallel attempts to limit the use of AC: assisting Brown's attempt to push through legislation to control and severely limit AC installations and voltages (to the point of making it an ineffective power delivery system), providing technical assistance in Brown's tests to show AC would be the best current to power the new electric 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.

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