The Edison-Tesla rivalry in The Current Wars is a great story — but it’s a myth

The Current Wars, one of this summer’s most hyped blockbusters, told the tale of the great feud between Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla over the fate of electrical power. Edison promoted a system of direct current (DC) distribution, with a power station on every block, whilst Tesla pushed for his vision of alternating current (AC) distribution. Edison pulled no punches, electrocuting cats and dogs – and even elephants – to demonstrate the dangers of AC. It was a battle for the soul of science and technology between the stop at nothing corporate mogul and the free-thinking visionary. As Leonard Hofstadter explained to a puzzled Penny in an episode of the Big Bang Theory sitcom, “it’s the greatest scientific feud of all time. I mean, you can forget about Leibniz and Newton”. There’s just one problem with this story: it simply isn’t true.

There certainly was a “current war”, but Tesla had very little to do with it. By the beginning of the 1880s Edison and his companies dominated the growing electrical power industry in the United States. Edison had decided that the future lay in direct current transmission – a decision that made good commercial and technical sense at the time. Others, such as the engineer Sebastian di Ferranti in London, thought that alternating currents were a better prospect. Alternating current could be transmitted at far higher voltages, over greater distances, and with far less loss of energy along the way, than direct current.

Edison’s great rival in the United States was George Westinghouse, and Westinghouse was betting his shirt on alternating currents. There were clearly huge fortunes to be made from electricity. Electric lights and electric machinery were increasingly common. This was the stuff of the future and everyone wanted a piece of the action.

The current war between Edison and Westinghouse was brutal. Edison was convinced that to win he had to show the public just what a dangerous technology AC was. It was the current that kills. That was what lay behind the electrical experiments on animals carried out by Harold Brown. They were meant to show that alternating current was too dangerous to be allowed into the home.

It was also what lay behind Edison’s support for the use of electricity as a means of execution. Electricity offered a clean and scientific way of killing, he declared, as long as the current used was an alternating one – criminals would be “westinghoused”. The reality of electrocution was quite different, though. It took a couple of attempts to kill the first man to be executed, William Kemmler, on 6 August 1890, using one of Westinghouse’s own generators. Spectators invited to witness the supposedly scientific execution were “so horrified by the ghastly sight they could not take their eyes off it.”

Westinghouse and the growing AC industry (just) survived the current war in the end – and, in fact, Edison was himself a casualty, losing control of his company in 1892 as it merged with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. The next triumph for Westinghouse came in 1893 when his company was awarded the contract to supply generators for the hugely ambitious Niagara falls hydro-electric project. The project’s proposers hoped that electricity from the falls would power cities as far away as 150 miles from Niagara. Hard on the heels of this victory came the even greater one of winning the contract to provide electricity for the Chicago Columbian Exposition. This was a hugely symbolic affair. The Chicago World’s Fair was meant to show off the American future, so winning the contract to supply the electricity was almost like winning the contract to electrify the future. By the beginning of the twentieth century AC was dominant, in America and in Europe: even General Electrical had gone alternating.

So where was Tesla in all of this? He arrived in America to work for Edison in 1884 – he had been working for one of his companies in Paris already. He did not last long as an Edison employee. Tesla wanted to be his own man and soon set out to try and make it on his own. There followed four years of struggle before he eventually succeeded in persuading George Westinghouse to buy the patent for his polyphase motor. Tesla’s motor really was revolutionary. It was one of the first electric motors that worked directly from alternating current – and just what Westinghouse was looking for in his bid to make AC profitable. As well as buying his patent, Westinghouse gave Tesla a job preparing his motor for the market. Tesla lasted no longer with Westinghouse than he had with Edison though. Whilst the current war was at its bitter worst, Tesla was away trying to forge his own path to fame and fortune through electricity. Tesla’s motors certainly helped Westinghouse make the case for AC, but they were hardly decisive.

It was really in 1891 that Tesla made it as a public figure. In a series of three sensational performances in New York, London and Paris, he managed to take both the New and the Old World by storm and turn himself into a celebrity. In these three performances he used his newly invented oscillating transformer (what’s now called a Tesla coil) to show how electrical energy could be transmitted wirelessly. This was an amazing device that even allowed Tesla to pump massive voltages through his own body. He strode around the stage carrying glass tubes of electric light. He prophesied a future when electrical communication and electrical lighting would be wireless and effortless. His audiences were mesmerised, and Tesla worked hard to keep himself in the public eye. Newspapers were full of stories about his latest speculations for the electrical future and the feats he would be able to accomplish with the right kind of money to back him. Tesla – just like Edison – understood perfectly well just how important showmanship was to the business of invention.

For the next decade or so, Tesla was constantly in the public eye. He might not, in reality, have had much to do with the ambitious project to generate hydro-electric power at Niagara falls, for example, but he was often portrayed in newspapers as its progenitor. At Chicago’s huge Columbian Exposition, not only were there Tesla motors in the Westinghouse display, but he had a whole section of the exhibition dedicated to his own inventions. When news from Europe arrived about Guglielmo Marconi’s pioneering experiments on wireless telegraphy, Tesla was quick to promote his own vision as an alternative. Where Marconi’s apparatus sent feeble little trickles of power through the ether, Tesla would send torrents. His experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899 convinced him that his system was workable – and, more importantly, persuaded JP Morgan to put up the money. From his laboratory at Wardenclyffe with its iconic tower, Tesla hoped to be able to send huge volumes of energy through the earth, flooding the world with wireless power. The only problem was that his system didn’t – and couldn’t – work.

The reality was that as Tesla dreamed his fabulous electric dreams during the 1890s, Edison wasn’t really in the picture, any more than Tesla featured large in Edison’s visioneering. So why is this myth of feuding electrical inventors so powerful? Part of the answer lies with the two men themselves. Their paths might not have crossed very often after Tesla left his job with Edison in 1884, but they still competed in the public’s imagination. Tesla, in particular, was a master of hyperbole when it came to selling himself in the media. In reality he might have had little to do with electrifying America with alternating current, but the stories he told to the newspapers about his electrical exploits put him in the thick of it. Tesla succeed in crafting a very particular image of himself in the public eye – the dreamer, the outsider, the visionary whose visions had the capacity to remake the future. Edison, on the other hand, projected a very different image of the inventor.

In many ways, Tesla and Edison stand for different stories that might be told about America’s relationship with science and technology. That’s what gives the myth of feuding giants its power – they’re battling for the soul of invention. Edison represents the self-made, rugged individualist. The stories he told about himself focused on his native ingenuity and feel for practical knowledge. Edison turned invention into a business, with armies of young men (like Tesla) labouring behind the scenes at his Menlo Park laboratory to generate the stream of patents that kept his companies going. Tesla made himself the visionary dreamer who only wanted solitude to make the future real. The reality was that Tesla was just as committed as Edison to making his fortune through invention, and worked just as hard (if less successfully) at selling himself in the cut-throat world of late nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism.

So whilst Edison stands for an image of invention in hock to corporate America, Tesla stands for invention untainted by commerce. That’s what makes the myth so compelling. But both these images of the inventor have something important in common too. They both tell us that the future is made by individuals rather than communities. That means that in the end the myth of feuding innovators ends up endorsing the view of invention that both Edison and Tesla endorsed. They might have offered very different visions of the future, but they were unanimous that the future was going to be made by men like them.

The Current Wars reminds us of just how difficult it can be to come up with new stories about how the modern world was made. It reminds us too of how difficult it is to imagine new stories about how the future is going to be made. But as long as we still associate the future with the great men who are going to make it for us, we will still, ultimately, think of that future as belonging to them, rather than us.

The Current Wars, starring Michael Shannon, Benedict Cumberbatch and Nicholas Hoult, is out in cinemas now.