Dr. Paul Israel

and then another station around 23rd, another station a little farther north of that in order to power the bottom half of Manhattan.

The AC system could build one larger station and distribute that power.

And this was especially important as you begin to get the electrification of the suburbs, which are growing at this period.

You don't want central stations if you live in a nice suburb because you have steam engines and the smoke from them and the noise.

And so AC had some real advantages.

And Edison never really recognized that those advantages would make his DC system less desirable for central stations.

It doesn't mean that DC disappeared.

In fact, DC was used for what were known as isolated plants for individual buildings.

In fact, more people in the 19th century experienced incandescent lighting from a building that had its own power station than from central stations.

It's really not until the 1920s that you really begin to get the emergence of what would later become the modern grid.

And a lot of those were DC stations.

And in fact, the last DC station decommissioned by Con Ed was decommissioned in 2007.

It was running motors that drove elevators up and down apartment buildings.

because those kind of motors work better as DC than they do AC.

And in fact, even today, right, DC is what powers all of our laptops and phones and other small electrical devices.

And now increasingly what they're discovering is high voltage DC is actually better for long distance distribution than high voltage AC.

So DC actually still has a place in our electrical system.

So what happens, because the Edison company resists—and it's really Edison, because there are people in the company saying, we need AC—

Edison resists that, and there's a second company, Thompson-Houston, that is also developing AC technology at this time.

And the two companies have had discussions about merging at various points, and in 1892, early in the year,