The Sentinel, Tesla vs Edison 210328

      The picture below is Tesla as a young man.

      There was a harsh relationship between those two men. Edison did not like Tesla’s comments about improving on Edison’s ideas and production lines. The rift became permanent when Edison started his electricity network. Edison wanted and did run his electrical grid on DC current. There is a major fault with that. To power a large area (a city) there needed to be a substation every mile or less.

      The two men parted their ways. Tesla went to Westinghouse electric. Tesla started manufacturing his AC generators. Along came World’s Fair time in the US. Edison was given the first crack at generating electric power for just the city and couldn’t generate enough lighting for the evenings. The fair committee asked Tesla if he could do any better. Tesla’s answer was, “not only for the fair but all of the country as far as Ohio.” He got the contract. Edison was furious! He then went about discrediting Tesla’s AC electric system, even going so far as to hook up an elephant in New York and kill it by running a massive amount of Tesla’s available AC current and telling people it would also kill all of them too.

      Had Edison won his argument we would be in a world of trouble perhaps even today. Tesla went on after covering most of the country to his new project; sending electric service without using wiring. He wanted to supply the country and eventually the entire world with nearly free electricity. When Westinghouse heard about that Tesla was fired and the project was never completed. Decades later engineers set up a test using Tesla’s plans and discovered that it worked, but that never became reality. Perhaps there were just too many vested interests who did not want to lose business incomes?