Dr. Paul Israel

So here's how I like to describe the difference between Edison and Tesla.

Edison was somebody who was very good at understanding how to move new technology into a commercial phase, how to do the development work, not just the inventive work, but the development work.

to move it from the laboratory out into the real world and how to continue a process of innovation to make it work.

From the start, Edison is never really a lone inventor.

It's always collaborative, right?

So he has experimenters that he works with very closely.

They work closely with the machinists to design and improve the instruments to test them.

So it's basic applied research rather than basic scientific research designed to gain insights into nature, more to gain insights into the technology itself and the sciences around it, like electromagnetism, for example.

Tesla was more a kind of idealist inventor.

This actually comes out of the work of W. Bernard Carlson at the University of Virginia.

Bernie wrote a book about Tesla that was published in 2013, and he points to the way in which Tesla evolved.

was happy to reach a state where he could demonstrate that his idea could work in the laboratory, but was much less skilled at figuring out how to bring it out of the lab into the real world.

And so oftentimes,

The technologies that Tesla had, he spent years working on them, but they never reached a commercial phase.

The one technology where Tesla was successful was with his alternating current motors and then later the polyphase alternating current distribution system.

Alternating current worked on higher voltages than Edison's direct current.

You needed fewer stations.

You could distribute electricity over a much greater area with very high voltages and then step those voltages down so they'd be safe once they reached into buildings.

The reason that Tesla's work in this area succeeded

was because the Westinghouse company employed its own inventors and engineers who were able to take Tesla's ideas and figure out how to make them commercially viable.